A Cup Of Porridge With Love

By Joan Mugenzi
IT is 6.25am. Agnes Nakimuli is done. Her house and compound are clean. Meanwhile, a big saucepan of porridge is boiling away on a charcoal stove in the kitchen.
She arranges a table and two benches, then brings out a brown bucket filled with blue plastic cups. At 6.30am, two girls dressed in grey skirts and white blouses walk to this house in Kyaliwajjala, Namugongo, Wakiso District. In their company is a boy in a pair of khaki shorts and green shirt.
I ask them why they are here this morning. A girl broadly smiles back and says: “We have come to eat porridge.”
Nakimuli’s home has brought a smile to many a child’s face. During the school term, over 100 children converge here for a cup of porridge before they go to school.
Another woman, Milika Namusisi, has been preparing this breakfast since June 2000. She ensures that the porridge is ready by 5:30am because that is when some students begin coming to her home. She serves 126 children.
These children are orphans. Some have lost a parent while others have lost both. Geoffrey comes barefoot. Shamim has a torn uniform. Rucogoza has an evidently very old uniform. These children are not any different from the rest of the group.
The breakfast scheme is something that enables the children have what is a luxury. The Namugongo Fund for Special Children runs the project. The project started in 1986 as a centre catering for handicapped children.
In 2000, when there seemed to be a serious problem of orphans, especially as a result of HIV/AIDS, the brain behind the breakfast centres(US-based Rosette Sserwanga), decided that they specifically give HIV/AIDS orphans priority.
The project looks after 436 children, 300 of who lost both parents. Of these children, 101 are HIV positive. Uganda is estimated to have about 1.7 million orphans, a figure that HIV/AIDS has aggravated.
The main aspect of the Namugongo Fund is to meet the children’s nutritional needs. The project has three breakfast centres (Kyaliwajjala A, Kyaliwajjala B and Kira). At each centre is a woman who has set aside time to prepare the porridge.
When the children finish taking their porridge, they each get a tablet of multi-vitamin, to chew. The porridge is a blend of Soya and maize flour with sugar.
Ismail Kawuki, a 13-year-old boy in P.6 at Kyaliwajjala joined the breakfast scheme at Kyaliwajjala B last term. His parents died leaving behind four children. All the four are beneficiaries of the breakfast project.
“I used to leave home without breakfast,” says the boy, who lives with his aunt, a second-hand clothes dealer.
“I no longer go to school hungry. I concentrate better in class,” he says.
Daisy Nantongo has four orphaned grandchildren, one of whom, aged five, is HIV positive. Nantongo shows pictures of the boy before he began benefiting from the maize/soya porridge. He was so thin. He has now changed a great deal in a space of seven months.
“I prefer their porridge to grandma’s porridge,” says the boy. “Their porridge has soya.”
Nantongo says her grandson is given special consideration. Apart from the cup that children get, they give her more porridge in the flask, which the boy eats during the day.
Dr. Philippa Musoke, a paediatrician at Mulago Hospital, who has also done research in HIV/AIDS, says the breakfast project is a good concept.
“We have many children who leave home for school without anything to eat,” she says. “It is unfortunate we have no funding, breakfast in schools is very crucial.”
She says children concentrate better when they have breakfast. She is also happy about the fact that HIV positive children are given priority.
“HIV positive children have a lot of malnutrition, but also generally in Uganda children are malnourished,” says Musoke. “When it comes to children who are positive, they are even at a higher risk because either their parents died or are very sick and cannot fend for the family, so the children have to go hungry. For HIV positive children, HIV itself creates a negative balance in metabolism.”
Cissy Namuganga Mugezi, the project manager, observes that they settled for the breakfast project after realising it was affordable.
The women who give their time to prepare the porridge get a token of sh20,000 per month. Every fortnight the project provides them with a sack of flour, sugar and charcoal.
“When we implemented the project, the situation improved. At the beginning of each term we take the children’s weight and at the end of the term, we realised that some would have gained.”
When the children fall sick, the project has a clinic, Angels of Hope (also in Kyaliwajjala), where they get free treatment.
John Bosco Kayongo, the secretary for the youth, Kyaliwajjala, says: “The project has helped us a great deal with the orphans in the area. The project has just taken six months, but many children have benefited.” The project also benefits from services of volunteers from the USA, who come to work with the disadvantaged groups.
Recently four university students (Caitlin Matson, Abigail Bushman, Leslie Short and Christin Gray) from the USA came to work with the Namugongo project for two months.
It is the second time Gray is visiting this project. “I think Rosette has nice ideas. The community needs to come in and support her initiative by taking care of the other children’s needs like grooming and cleaning them every week. Seeing it from last year to this year, it is already improved. Multivitamins are now provided on a daily basis. When I left, they were just introducing them.”

But as these people continue with such efforts, they need more support to ensure that they offer a wonderful package for the children.
Louise Serunjogi, a nutritionist with the Makerere Medical School who looks at the project as meeting a humanitarian right for children (to have breakfast) says there is more that ought to be done.
“A child’s stomach is small, which means a child needs more food. A child should at least have five meals a day. They also need to get some animal proteins.”
She, however, says that the project may not be offering the best, but the efforts put in to provide something for the children to eat deserves applause. Such efforts need to be encouraged to further improve on the status of the children.
Among the selected UN millennium declaration goals and the effect of HIV/AIDS, nutrition is not spelt out, even though it talks about reducing infant and child mortality rate.
According to the UNDP policy paper-Implications for poverty reduction, one of the declaration goals is to improve child health; reduce under-five child mortality by two thirds of its current rates by 2015. However, nothing is said about nutrition. But the Namugongo Fund for Special Children offers this cup of love and hope for disadvantaged children.
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