Ex Norfolk content editor returns to Africa 

Former Network Norfolk content editor Eldred Willey has just visited Uganda with Christian development charity International Needs to support a safe drinking water project.

After more than three years serving on the website team, Eldred has reconnected with his passion for Africa. In June he travelled to Uganda to support a project to provide clean safe water to poor communities along the northern shore of Lake Victoria. He was working with a small Christian charity called International Needs which is drilling boreholes, creating covered springs, and installing tanks to collect rainwater from roofs.
 
“The poverty there is desperate,” said Eldred. “Off the tourist route I encountered ragged barefoot children on rutted dirt tracks, a secondary school with just gaps in the brickwork for doors and windows, a primary school classroom built from wattle and daub.
 
“The people are so destitute that they cannot even afford to lay proper foundations, and because the ground is sandy, any substantial building like a toilet block collapses in the wet season, exposing the people to waterborne diseases like dysentery and cholera.”
 
International Needs has been digging down three metres to lay solid foundations for its gender-segregated, disability-adapted and brightly painted toilet blocks, which it is giving to schools and communities.
 
It is also speaking up for justice. In nine of the fifteen villages where it has applied to drill boreholes, the government has refused permission. Instead, the government has erected what look like roadside petrol pumps, where piped water can be bought with a card payment. The most vulnerable people, however - like the elderly and single mothers – cannot afford to pay and continue to walk a kilometre with jerrycans to draw water from a swampy area. The government does not want competition from the charity’s boreholes, because the water there is free.
 
Eldred also met children with a disability who are being sponsored from the UK through International Needs. They are attending Bishop West Primary in Mukono, a mainstream Christian school which has integrated an extraordinary proportion of children with a disability, including deafness, Down’s Syndrome and autism.
 
The school’s pupils themselves proposed that everyone – both children and teachers – should learn signing, and the headteacher agreed, which means that the deaf children can now communicate with their friends and can approach any teacher, knowing that they will be understood. “I was so impressed,” said Eldred, “at the way the school was organising its life around its weakest members.
 
“In a culture where disability is too often seen as an omen or even a curse, the school was ticking all the boxes. The children with a disability, who had mostly been abandoned by their fathers and hidden away, are now in education, in clean uniforms, well fed, healthy and content, communicating well with their teachers and with each other, and using the sports equipment which the charity had provided.”
For more information or if you would like Eldred to come and speak about this work, you can contact him on eldred@ineeds.org.uk. You can also find out more on www.ineeds.org.uk
 
Pictured above is Eldred with Joab, WASH field officer for International Needs, at one of the charity’s boreholes.