A Day In Our Lives

Hi everyone, I'm Ahimbisibwe Raban from Uganda in Africa. I run an orphanage called Future Parents Of Uganda and we are a family with 28 children who are in urgent need of care, food and safety. As an orphan myself, I can't simply walk by children in need, but have decided to do as best as I can to pay back to the people who cared for me when I was a little child. I run my orphanage with a local woman who helps me to care for the girls while I care for the boys. 
Every day, we wake up at 6.30 am, to prepare porridge for all the children. Together, we prepare the breakfast which is usually porridge, and if we can afford it, a few potatoes too. It is very seldom that we have access to meat or poultry.

By 7 am all the children are awake and we prepare the ones who are due to go to school first
and give them their breakfast and what they need for the day.
The smaller kids get up, get dressed and brush their teeth before breakfast.
Recently, we began working on a vegetable garden at the orphanage, where we are trying to grown as much fresh fruits and vegetables as we possibly rather than having to buy, to extend the diets of the children as hunger is the biggest challenge we are facing on a daily basis.

​Through our garden, we are able to add more variety to the children's diets, and we have great fun watching the different fruits and vegetables grow and develop into delicious crop. But, since we are so many, we have to be careful with how much we use, as we never know which situation we will find ourselves in tomorrow and trying to settle 28 hungry children is a very stressful situation.
​I try to take jobs where I can find them, but it is very hard to find any during normal times, and now, during this last year of Covid 19, finding any jobs that I can carry out safely and make some money for us is next to impossible. 

Thankfully the sun shines daily and, as long as we can bring water to the garden, we should be able to sustain some kind of stable growth and harvest. The most time consuming and difficult task of our day is to fetch water. With so many kids needing to drink and be able to clean themselves, we need to fetch a lot of water each day, big as well as small, we all need to help. The closest water hole we have found is two kilometres away, and since every day here in Uganda is hot and the roads are dusty, it is a very tough job for all of us, but we do it together as one big family. The water is dirty and has a lot of germs in it, but we have no other choice but to use it as clean water costs money and we cannot afford it. 

Some of the children can get work at local farms and go there with our helpers until 1 pm, when they return for lunch and a bath. The little ones have a nap til 5 pm, then we have our supper, do home work, read, play and get ready for bed. 
This is a regular day in our large family and we hope you feel welcome in it. / Ahimbisibwe Raban and his team.