This year once again I have had an opportunity to visit Africa.   My trip was confined to Uganda and Kenya, this time.   In May one of our Trustees passed away – may he rest in peace.  We have been fortunate in engaging another Trustee, who at the time was working in Rwanda.   This time I insisted that if he was going to join us he should be aware of the conditions of the people he would be helping.   I took him to visit a prospective school project in central Uganda and to the slums in Nairobi.   We stayed with the Christian Brothers at their house in at South C and were well looked after by them.   Br Barry Callon  took us to the Ruben Centre in the Mukuru slum.   This centre is a joy to visit, as it projects so much hope.  Mukuru itself is another thing altogether.   Not for the faint hearted.   JOE, our new Trustee, turned a paler shade of green, even though he had some experience of poverty and deprivation while working in British Guiana and in Rwanda.   Even though I had visited Kibera previously, I still found Mukuru upsetting.
             You may wonder what we are doing in South Sudan at the moment.   We have given some support to the Disabled group in Yambio and a university scholarship to a man from Yambio.  He is in the third year of his degree course and will hopefully graduate in December 2010.   We have provisionally awarded a scholarship to another man from Yambio, but there are some problems with this at the moment, which we are trying to sort out.  We are also going to supply a grant to a school run by the Comboni Sisters in Juba for equipment and furniture for the school.   This is a new school near Juba and will have aabout 240 children.
        One other thing that we are considering at this time is to take a group of teenagers / young adults (say 16 to 20) to Kenya next year to mix with the older children from the CBs schools in and around Nairobi.   This is in the early stages of planning at the moment but the hope is that these young people will gain an insight into life in Africa, including the slums.   Hopefully, they will return with a greater appreciation of how other people live and what advantages they have living in England.  If we can get it to work then it is something we would like to repeat.   I will keep you informed.
   The overriding impression which we got from our visit wass one of Hope.   While still needing our help at times, people are doing more for themselves.   They are more upbeat about the future providing corruption does not rob the system of essentiaal funding for infrastructure project.   Young adults are pouring out of the universities there, though the competition for jobs is fierce.
   Yes there are large areas suffering from poverty and deprivation, but even here there is hope.