Sending love and greetings from rainy Mbale. We hope that wherever you're reading this, that you are keeping safe and well!
We began these last three months on a strong note, with Scholastica completing the Wise Choices for Life training, and using their lessons to train over 100 young people in menstruation (see photo above) in partnership with a local organisation.
The Wise Choices course, approved by the Ugandan Ministry for Health, provides fantastic lesson plans on many different subjects and aims to empower people with knowledge about their reproductive health. It truly is amazing to see people learn more about how their body works and how this can help them make to make healthy decisions for their's and their family's lives.
Sadly though, the end of May and the beginning of June saw Uganda enter her second wave of the Corona virus infection. As a result, from the beginning of June, Uganda began a second lockdown. As a result of the lockdown measures, travel between districts and group gatherings were forbidden for around 7-8 weeks, which meant that trainings needed to be postponed. We are so thankful that the infection rate responded well to the restrictions, and so we have recently seen a slight relaxing in these rules.
Excitingly, this has meant that we have been able to once again begin trainings, with special permission, and smaller numbers of participants! Last week, after gaining permission to train groups of 10 and under, we began with two trainings in the office which was a lot of fun. The groups were so enthusiastic and it was so encouraging to see how excited they were to bring this new skill set to women and girls in their communities!
If that wasn't enough, this week and next week, Scholastica is travelling each afternoon to train groups of 10 with the Wise Choices menstrual health programme and in making sanitary pads in some of our rural communities. We hope that we can continue to do this on a regular basis in more rural areas during this lockdown, whilst schools remain closed, reaching more girls in our communities. When we hosted a training before the second lockdown, one of the local counsellors, Flora, joined us. She was so impressed by the training, instead of us having to reach out to ask for permission to hold these small trainings, Flora and her fellow local counsellors have been approaching us, asking us if we can most more training sessions in their communities because of the impact they are having!
So all that leaves us to say, is a big thank you for your continued interest in Every Girl, and to wish you a brilliant week. We can't wait to continue to update you on our progress!