Crossroads Foundation
FABBAs helps transform Ugandan slum school
16 year old Harriet lives in Uganda’s Kamwokya slum and has been the head of her household since she was only 10. She takes care of three younger brothers and sisters in a shanty hut amidst the 14,000 other people crammed into this part of Kamwokya, trying to survive each day. In a community rampant with child abuse, exploitation, disease and unemployment, Harriet was lucky to make it to her teens.
There’s one reason that Harriet can face the future, though: she attends the slum’s only school, catering for 2,000 pupils with an extraordinary program to lift slum children out of the destitution they face and educate them not just in academic subjects but in life skills, job training and children’s rights.
The school itself operates on a shoestring budget though, struggling to provide the basics for their students, so when they asked Crossroads for books, clothes, educational furniture and things like mattresses and blankets for the children of the slum, we were delighted to help by shipping 2 x 40’ containers of aid.
Today, the school library in Kamwokya is filled with text books donated from those containers; the boys’ soccer team wears uniforms selected from the boxes of clothing given by Crossroads; the students sit at beautiful new desks and chairs from our shipment, and some of the poorest students, who previously slept on the floor, now have soft new mattresses and warm blankets and a new zeal to attend school each day.
And it’s the FABBAs who made this possible. Funds raised by the FABBAs were used to ship one of the containers to this slum school, adding to the many shipments that the FABBAs and Crossroads have partnered on since we started working together.
When students from the Kamwokya school sat their final examinations at the end of last year, even local officials were impressed by the quality of the furniture they now had access to. “All the officials who were monitoring their exams were admiring and wondering… You have really made us VERY PROUD and I’ll never stop thanking you!” the school’s headmistress wrote.
Likewise, we’ll never stop thanking the FABBAs for their ongoing investment in the lives of people like Kamwokya’s slum children, all over the world.
Each year, as the FABBAs attendees lay aside their smartphones and laptops to focus on raising dollars for people in need, those efforts are, quite literally, saving lives in nations around the world. It’s a relationship of more than a decade that Crossroads Foundation treasures deeply.
