Megan Howard our Head Social Worker arrived from Australia and I am very excited that she has joined her team, Meg has spent the last 2 years volunteering in Uganda – working in schools, homes and coordinating the foster placements at Families For Children. Megan’s expertise is family placement, children in care and child protection and will be a real asset to our team.
This week Christine, our CFO, has been running around Kampala gathering documents to submit to the NGO Board. Before we do anything charitable, we need charity status here and the Board only meet once a month to decide on whether or not you get charitable status. The amount of paperwork and letter of recommendations fill an A4 file but I am beginning to realise Christine does possess some form of superpowers as she did it in a week!
So after a week of meetings with government ministers, our project has been very well received by the Government of Uganda because it seeks to prevent abandonment in the first place instead of the common practice of long term institutional care. I just hope we get the NGO status so we can kick off our prevention programme in the new year.
Merry Christmas folks and thank you for getting us here. 2010 is going to be a very exciting year for us.
