Friday, November 7, 2008

Uganda primary schools fund raising

Things are moving ahead with the preparations for our 2009 Uganda trip. Most of the students who were not on duty at the clinic were able to come to the house for a curry supper. This gave us all a chance to meet in a less formal setting than the vet college. One of our recipes comes from an old book that was given to us by house guest Dr. Elizabeth (Becky) Manning many years ago when she visited Saskatoon. The book, written by S.N.M. Khan in 1934 is called The Finest Indian Muslim Cooking and Becky found it in a used bookstore in her home town of Madsion, Wisconsin. The recipe, which is for mutton, can be seen here, but of course the paper is a bit faded, so you may need to enlarge the image. The other point is that we used venison, but that will come as no surprise to those who know us.

One of the main activities that is ongoing, and which we discussed, is a big fund-raising effort for support of the two primary schools we have supported in past years. One of them is located in the village of Kasenyi, on the shores of Lake George in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. The other is an AIDS orphanage located at the edge of the park. It is called Equator Highway Primary School. Her are a couple of pictures that show some of the efforts we have made in past years. At Kasenyi the children surprised and delighted us with a concert using the musical instruments that they had purchased with the funds we donated the previous year. There were drums, a large xylophone and several hand harps. At Equator the children were delighted with the teddy bears that had been knitted for us to take to Africa by our local Saskatoon charity Teddies for Tragedies as this photo by Tessa Leena shows.

The big news on this fund-raising is that we are able to go through the Canadian branch of Veterinarians Without Borders/ Vétérinaires Sans Frontiéres. This means that donors who need them will be able to get charitable receipts.

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