What a Journey!Sieg Will – Oakville, ON
This year is a very special year for the Sleeping Children Around the World [SCAW] Ugandan distribution team. We travelled over 1,500 kilometres to distribute 6,000 bedkits in twelve different distribution centres across south central and south western Uganda. This was the largest number of bedkits ever distributed in Uganda. The journey took us to locations such as Fort Portal, Rukungiri, Kabale, Wakiso, Mpigi, to name a few. At every distribution centre anxious children watched the Canadian muzungus (white people) arrive to take their picture and give them a bedkit from a donor in North America. Over the course of our two weeks in Uganda, I asked members of the Inner Wheel of Kampala, our overseas volunteers, to share their experiences with me on how the bedkit distributions in Uganda had evolved since inception. I was told that during the first distribution in 1994 a total of two hundred bedkits were distributed. The SCAW and Inner Wheel teams travelled in a coach line bus with all the bedkits loaded on the back. Twenty to fifty bedkits were distributed each day.
Since then the annual Ugandan distribution has increased thirty times. The Inner Wheel of Kampala now rents storage facilities for the bedkit items and complete bedkits are transported the night before to each distribution centre. A greater emphasis has been placed on travelling to rural as opposed to urban centres because the need is much greater in the rural areas due to the recipients’ families reliance on farming. The many improvements that have been made to bedkit distributions over the past fifteen years are impressive. To date, over 60,000 bedkits have been distributed in Uganda and it was wonderful to see how proud the members of the Inner Wheel of Kampala is about the role they played in assisting SCAW achieve the million bedkit milestone this year.
The distribution of a million bedkits took thirty-nine years and the focus of the SCAW travelling volunteers is to spread the message about our 100% charity so that the next million bedkits can be reached in ten years. This journey has already begun and with your support we will be positively impacting children with the “gift of sleep.” Thank you for allowing me to distribute the bedkits on your behalf to help children in Uganda. |
