Warning: This video may be disturbing, but it’s worth watching to discover the reality that so many girls live with every day.

Just Like My Child Foundation has partnered with an amazing Ugandan woman named Nyiraguhabwa Monica, who is an expert in equipping young girls with life skills and counseling that will empower them for the rest of their lives.

We had an awesome workshop over the weekend with Monica at Namumira Primary School, which is the community where Just Like My Child Foundation is currently building a much needed classroom block, teachers housing and pit latrines.

Girls empowerment activities are absolutely necessary deep in the village where these girls are often placed in devastating situations and don’t otherwise have any counseling or support. The girls of Namumira ranging in ages 10 to 15 were incredibly engaged and open with Monica! You could see that they clearly looked to her as a guide and a role model. A few major issues came out in this particular training that Monica was able to address. Many of the girls come from a trading center near the school where truck drivers and construction workers are staying while the road is being repaired.

This factor in connection with the fact that there are several discos in the trading center where these men are drinking alcohol, raping and in one case killing a young girl has created a terrible set of circumstances. We learned through the workshop that most of the girls are already really effective decision makers and have managed so far not to be exploited or become victims of peer pressure.

Monica encouraged them to stay on that path and gave them strategies for avoiding risky situations and identifying people who wish to take advantage of them. She equipped them with skills that would allow them to display their confidence and demand respect in order to keep themselves safe.

This group was also struggling with menstruation, which prompted Monica to facilitate a comprehensive session on puberty and menstruation. Private counseling sessions are also given by Monica at the end of the sessions to ensure the girls have an opportunity to express any serious issues that they might be embarrassed to bring up in a group setting. Just Like My Child Foundation in partnership with Nyiraguhabwa Monica will be facilitating twelve similar workshops throughout the year in communities where vulnerable girls will become empowered for life!

15 year old Kiberu William, who is a top performing scholarship recipient of Just Like My Child Foundation was just given his first opportunity to travel outside of his home country of Uganda. William traveled through Kenya recently with several of his classmates and observed many interesting comparisons and contrasts to Uganda.

He was given the opportunity to meet and learn about the Masai people of Kenya and even got to see them perform their traditional dancing. The trip included a safari where William was able to see the wild animals of Africa in their natural habitat for the first time ever. He was beaming as he told us about how he saw a cheetah amongst other interesting wild life. He visited museums, swam in the hotel pool and got a tour of the airport; all experiences that are all too uncommon for the youth in Africa.

The highlight of the trip for William was experiencing the hustle and bustle of Nairobi for the first time. He described some of the vast differences he observed between Kampala and the capital city of Kenya such as the level of cleanliness and security. He expressed his desire to continue traveling the world and seeing other countries in East Africa with his very own eyes. William’s mother Nankinga Grace has expressed how extremely grateful she is for the opportunity to broaden his horizons.

Just Like My Child Foundation is so proud of William’s dedication to studying hard and utilizing his opportunities to the fullest. He truly is an absolute joy to be around and a definite super star!

A full School Management Committee has been recently elected to aid the head mistress in both policy implementation and planning as the school continues to grow. Budgeting, planning and projecting are the most common themes in the teams analysis process for the development of the school. Serious recruitment initiatives and intensive interviews have been done as part of the process for hiring competent and qualified teachers to join The Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart teaching team.

The Children's Academy for the Collective Heart

Some members of the School Management and Project Support Committees are shown here working on school development planning.

Akware Judith, the Headmistress of The Children's Academy of the Collective Heart is hard at work in her office

The Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart has constructed a temporary kitchen and hired a cook to prepare the students daily lunches. They have also taken the initiative to start a poultry project, plant fruit trees and begin growing a garden that they will utilize as both an agricultural educational tool as well as a supplemental source of food for the students.

This temporary kitchen was constructed by the school until a more permanent one can be built

Katikamu has started a school garden that will be used as an educational tool as well a source of food for school lunches

As for the students!! All of the things that we take for granted in the western world such as clean classrooms with seats for every child, balanced school lunches, learning materials and books, a station to wash hands and a playground to enjoy at recess are things that the students at Collective Heart are experiencing for the first time ever from their learning environment. The students are literally beaming with joy from all of the benefits they are gaining by studying and growing at a school that has their very best interest at heart.

First Graders and Kindergarteners combined

Look at those happy first graders!!

The children of Collective Heart are shown playing at recess with playground equipment provided by Just Like My Child Foundation and Collective Heart. A school playground is rare in Uganda! Not only has it provided joy to the children who study from the school, but has also served as an enrollment recruitment tool to children and families in the surrounding area that are not yet attending the academy

The values that The Children's Academy for the Collective Heart are dedicated to embracing and implementing include the necessity of friendship, generosity, responsibility and sharing! Ah!! Just look how cute they are!

The Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart has already shown so many incredible successes! They are living proof  of how far motivation, committment and global love can make such a huge impact on the whole wide world.

Official Opening Day for Collective Heart Academy - The School Looks Beautiful!

The official opening day of the Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart was one of the best days I have spent in Uganda so far.  It was so uplifting to see how the community and school committee members came together to prepare a really wonderful event.  I enjoyed spending the day with this caring and committed group of people, and I had almost as much fun hanging decorations with everyone, as I did attending and being part of the ceremony.    Everyone really pulled together to make it a great day and it made me feel really proud and excited to be part of this initiative. We are especially thankful to the following organizations for their support in building this school as well as our second school project at St. Joseph Magogo: The Collective Heart, The Unstoppable Foundation, and The Mark Victor Hansen Foundation — without these generous and loving organizations, the dream of education would never come true for hundreds of children.

Current students, looking spectacular in their uniforms, prepare for the celebration

The official ribbon cutting takes places!

And a Mango Tree is planted to grow as the school grows

Students give amazing performances, here great Buganda dancing, thanks to the coaching of Head Mistress, Judith and Senior Teacher, Eve

The winner of the first performance does a happy dance with Eve, the Senior Teacher

The students show off all they have learned in school during this performance

A skit by local performers on the importance of sending kids to school

Distinguished guests included Local Government Chairman who provided support and encouraged parents to enroll children in school

Here with hard working and wonderful school committee members of Collective Heart for cutting of the cake

Students are so happy and excited for the gifts as a reward for each of their strengths as students

250 people attending the opening ceremony which consisted mostly of parents and children

Happy girls play on the new playground - children love this new addition to the school

After the ceremony, it's time for some serious dancing and fun, we all had a blast!

A tiny pupil at St. Joseph Magogo. A future leader of Uganda?

“How am I going to pay school fees this term?” If there is one question I hear over and over again it is this one.  Like everywhere, quality education is a priority, and here parents feel the urgency of ensuring it all the more, because if children miss out, they will be trapped in the same cycle of poverty and social problems that too many others face.  For the majority of people, especially in rural areas, who are struggling just to feed their families and extended family members, the right of a child to obtain a quality education can seem completely out of reach.  Under a new policy in Uganda, primary education is supposed to be free to all, an excellent objective, but the resources are missing to implement it and schools are hopelessly overcrowded.  Only 1 teacher is provided for every 60 students, regardless of the grade they are in, and teachers lack the support and resources they need to do their job well.   Many of these schools are even missing the school building itself.  With these obstacles to education, one-third are left illiterate.  Just Like My Child has started its newest school building project to address some of these issues.

Ben and Beatrice, our wonderful community partners from our first school building project in Katikamu, are also professors at the local teachers’ college and monitor government schools in the region.  Some of the neediest schools in the area were identified with their help.  One of those schools was St. Joseph in the remote village of Magogo.   Magogo is an example of a community that would not give up trying and hoping for a good school.   Even the road to this farming village is difficult to find, but is hard to imagine that there are many other communities with as much heart and motivation as this one.    When I visited the school in August to see how they felt about partnering with Just Like My Child, at least 100 parents, educators and community members packed into the classroom.  They showed me that they had collected bricks and made more than 25 trips to collect sand and stone–almost enough to complete the entire project– in just one month!  They told me, “we are ready to begin construction today!”  There are more than 300 children in grades 1 to 7 attending St. Joseph School, even though there are only 2 usable classrooms.   The rest of the students study outside under the mango trees, or in two other half built classrooms, that the community built by itself, but was unable to roof or finish.  If it rains the majority of students have to go home, making for an impossible situation in the rainy seasons which lasts several months.  The school was given only 3 teachers for the 7 classes, so parents work hard each term to raise the funds to pay an additional 3 teachers.

This community elder worked hard to collect materials to build and comes every single day to monitor the progress, he wants to know, "will this school be beautiful?" He is committed to having a suitable learning environment for the children of his community.

This is the classroom block started by the community, with the new office, a veranda is built on the front so that it will match up with the two new classrooms

Our community partner, Beatrice, visits the school often to provides the teachers with the support and guidance to ensure quality education

While construction is going on students are still having class, at the end of the day the Head Teacher has an assembly to ask them to help carry bricks for their new school before they go home

And they are happy to help

Current classes, studying outside

Building the staff house which is already up to the roofing level also! This day instead of having the regular parent teacher meetings the community helps with construction.

Children in one of the two existing classrooms clap and cheer, they are so excited for the addition to their school

The girls are very happy and doing extremely well with school and in their studies (L to R) Claire, Veronica, Vivian, Nyangoma, Monica, Nalubombwe, Namata, Dena

I have already been working and living here in Uganda for a month and we are moving forward with many exciting projects with our community partners including Bishop Asili Hospital, School Committees at the Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart at Katikamu and St. Joseph School in Magogo (the newest school building project), the staff and patients of Bishop Asili Hospital, our wonderful sponsored children and their parents, and our adult education partners.

One major highlight during Vivian’s recent visit was our conversations with our scholarship students and their parents. During training, I was introduced to Monica Nyiraguhabwa, a young woman that Vivian met at the International Colloquium on Women’s Empowerment, Leadership, Development, International Peace and Security in Liberia. Monica currently works for an organization that mentors and trains young women on life skills and empowerment and has agreed to help us create a mentorship and empowerment training program for our sponsored students. This training is so important, as our students come from extremely vulnerable circumstances and can benefit from life skills coaching on topics such as knowing their rights and responsibilities, social survival skills, safety and security, health and hygiene and becoming leaders and role models to others in their community. Monica, along with her colleague Claire Tusingwire, who lives in the Luwero region, will conduct a weekend training course for the sponsored students during their winter school break. Monica and Claire came with us to the school to meet the girls.

Jenny Hamel interviews the girls at school

Monica and Claire provided mini-training during the visit and did an excellent job of interacting with the girls, we could see that they really responded and related to Claire and Monica as empowered young Ugandan women and positive role models

We visited William before he left for school, here with his mother Nankinga Grace, in their home. Nankinga Grace is a role model for other women and a community volunteer at Bishop Asili. William will also attend the Life Skills and Empowerment training over his winter break.

We also visited the guardians of three of the sponsored girls in their village of Kikoirro. The parents are so grateful for this opportunity for their children and shared their thoughts and opinions with us on the future of their girls. We will conduct a workshop on creating wills/planning for the future and legal rights/empowerment with the parents this fall.

Village children and community leader, Chatti, pose in front of the home of one of our scholarship students, Veronica. The people of the village of Kikoirro are extremely poor and vulnerable, making the opportunity for our scholarship girls that much more valuable.

A special thank you to the sponsors of our scholarship children who have made all of this possible as well as to Dr. Puja Shah, Jenny Hamel, Dr. David Smotrich and Lidia Domagalska for the recent visit and all of the wonderful contributions they made to the people here, more to follow on this and other projects in blogs in the coming weeks.

The Children’s Academy For the Collective Heart is open for transformation! Our first school in rural Uganda, built in partnership with Debbie Ford’s foundation, The Collective Heart and with support from Cynthia Kersey’s Unstoppable Foundation and the Mark Victor Hansen Foundation, opened in May and the finishing touches are still continuing.

I just received this photo this morning and it made me cry! I have been to dozens of “well established” schools in Uganda. Not one of them had a “No Tolerance Policy on Caning.” “Caning” is just a nice word for beating children in the classroom.

While caning is “illegal” in Uganda, there is seldom punity for this action because it’s so ingrained in the culture. Many times parents, who have been caned themselves, request that their child be “disciplined” in school.

Our counterparts on the ground in Katikamu, where our first school has been completed are educators who believe passionately in the Rights of Children, and with this school, they have the liberty to stand up and declare their beliefs! Thank you so much Ben and Beatrice for working to affect social change at the grass roots. I can’t over-emphasize what a HUGE step this is for the children of Uganda!

Beau Bressler Changes the World One Child at a Time

When Beau Bressler donated all of his Bar Mitzvah money to help build the first Children’s Academy for the Collective Heart in rural Uganda, he changed the lives of thousands of children in the U.S. who learned from his selfless act, and the lives of hundreds of children who will now receive the benefit of a GREAT education. Bless you, Beau! You represent the Globally Conscious future we all need.

The full view of the first Children's Academy of the Global Heart, 3 classrooms plus Headmistress' office

Children learn with Eve, one of the most progressive teachers in Uganda

A visioning exercise conducted with the administration of the school provides a breakthrough mission and vision for a rural Ugandan school. The protocol for the visioning exercise was provided by Debbie Ford's foundation: The Collective Heart. It was warmly embraced by the teachers who want to create a breakthrough school in their country

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