Kayoro Village is located just outside Tororo, Uganda.  It is in the eastern part of Uganda, very close to the Kenyan border.  In the local language, Kayoro means  “walking  together in the pursuit of knowledge” –  these  men, women and children of Kayoro truly are walking together to solve the challenges that they face daily. The majority of the households in Kayoro are headed by women whose husbands have died or left the area looking for work.  Most of the families subsist on less than a $1.00 a day (about $300 per year).  About 80% of the women in Kayoro cannot read or write and most of the men did not attend secondary school.

When Give Us Wings first started working in the Kayoro area in 1998, we reached out to an established community-based organization, The Kayoro Farmers Association.  The Kayoro Farmers Association was made up of 40 families.  We listened as they told the stories of their daily struggles and what measures they thought would best address the most urgent problems they faced.  They spoke of the HIV/AIDS crisis that had decimated their community.  They explained that when community members died they often left behind orphaned children who had no place to live and no food to eat.

107 families from the community had taken it upon themselves to serve as guardians for over 900 orphaned children, as well as providing for their own children. Despite their own fragile economic situations, they pooled their resources to provide homes for the orphans and they did their best to keep the kids in school.  They asked us to help them take care of these orphaned children.  Give Us Wings helped these families by assisting them in obtaining much needed health care and school fees for many of the children.

As time went on and our relationship with these groups developed, we learned of their other needs that were not being met.  There was no running water or electricity in Kayoro.  Most people lived in one or two room mud homes with thatched roofs and very few homes had latrines.  The problems seemed insurmountable, but over time our partnership with community-based groups has yielded many life-sustaining developments that have greatly improved the standard of living in Kayoro and brought the people opportunities for them to make a better future for themselves and their families.

Give Us Wings helped the community re-build 50 of the most dilapidated homes.  We also assisted the members of the Kayoro Farmers Association obtain organic farming training and helped them to purchase four oxen, two plows, other tools and implements and seeds.  The training the farmers received resulted in increased food production and enabled most of them to provide their families and the orphans they took care of with two meals a day.

The community also faced great difficulty accessing adequate medical services.  The nearest medical center was in Tororo.   People in Kayoro had to journey one to two hours to get to the clinic in Tororo and then one to two hours to return to Kayoro.  Not only was it extremely inconvenient, it was also very costly.  People had to pay between 50 – 75 cents to travel by bus (more than a half a day’s income). If they couldn’t afford the transportation cost, they had to walk for hours to get to the clinic.   Once they got to the clinic in Tororo it was not unusual for the clinic to be inadequately staffed or without the necessary medicines. The situation was unbearable.

In 2006, Give Us Wings held a health camp for the community. Over 1,000 people attended the camp. Many were desperately ill.  At one point there were 20 babies with fevers of over 104 degrees on IV drips.  They were suffering from malaria and its complications. Many people who were treated at the camp were amazed by the effectiveness of the medicines they received.  Many approached Give Us Wings volunteers, to thank them stating, “people were ‘cured’, and that there were ‘miracles’”.  The people had experienced, many for the first time, proper medical attention; patients consulted with medical personal, received appropriate medical testing, and were prescribed the correct medications.  It was clear to both the community members and to Give Us Wings that the serious lack of medical services was an urgent situation that had to be remedied.  Together, we determined that Kayoro needed a clinic.