Christine Bleakley's Uganda Diary: Day four - Santa's story
| 14:37 UK time, Wednesday, 11 March 2009
In January I travelled to Uganda with Comic Relief to report on the work that needs to be done to improve the lives of the people there. This is the fourth day of my diary.
Read all of my diary entries here.
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Watch all of the films I made for Comic Relief here.
Thursday 8th January 2009
I feel really inspired by what I saw yesterday. Oliva's living situation was much better than I'd expected. Beautiful views and wide open spaces. Today will be a very different experience in a village just outside the town of Jinja.
Uganda has been devastated by HIV and many women have been widowed with little or no means of supporting themselves or their children. Santa, the lady I'm about to meet, is one such woman.
Our arrival creates excitement amongst the children. These people are much worse off than Oliva. The children have few clothes and their little noses are running. Their smiles however would melt the stoniest of hearts and they couldn't be more welcoming.
Santa is here to greet us. She's in her late 30s. She's HIV+, a widow and mother of not just her four children but two of her relatives' children as well. They live in a tiny one room house. She is welcoming, kind and caring and wants nothing more than for her children to be fed and educated.
Santa tells me her story. She had literally nothing after losing her husband and family during the conflict. No land to grow food, no family to help and no money to send her children to school. There appeared to be no hope until she was thrown a life line in the form of the Jinja Women's association. Funded by Comic Relief, it offers small scale loans to help people like Santa get started in business.
It's called a micro credit scheme because the money involved is so small by our standards in the developed world. She borrowed the equivalent of £18. This was all she needed to start a bead-making business. She kept up her monthly repayments, paid back the loan and made a small profit selling her necklaces in the local markets. She then took out a series of larger loans to expand the business.
She managed to buy a sewing machine. A beautiful old Singer sewing machine now sits in pride of place in her little house.
Santa makes blankets and bags and makes her children's school uniform. This is important: education is free in many of the state schools but uniforms are compulsory, and since most families can't afford them, their children don't go.
Santa's life is far from anything I have known. She's adorned the walls of her house with ornately stitched pieces of fabric, and strings of beads hang from every corner. She is doing her very best to provide the best life possible for her family. She tells me how much better life is now thanks to Comic Relief.
ÌýI can't quite imagine what it must have been like before.
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Christine x
* Read all of Christine's diary entries here
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* See a gallery of pictures of Christine in Uganda
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* Info on how to donate to Comic Relief
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