Please donate before midnight on December 31 to receive a valuable 2011 tax deduction and to help sustain our vital work in 2012! We send these beautiful student to you today to say thank you for your support this year and to demonstrate the joy and promise in the face of this young girl. Because of your support of our work in two countries, her live is changing for the better. Make a Year-End Donation With your year –end gift, we will empower women to… Read More
Archives for 2011
A Volunteer Driver is Urgently Needed
Are you a safe, friendly driver keen to give back to your community? Do you want to volunteer for an organization that makes a difference to women’s lives? Hope Ofiriha is an independent small charity recognized for its innovation in empowering women and children living in rural communities to overcome social injustice, disease, illiteracy, and poverty. Our small-scale interventions enhance their social and economic well being and help them reach their potential. We are seeking a volunteer who is genuine about making a difference in women’s… Read More
What Is on Your Christmas Wish List?
Choose an item below and make a difference today! Your gift is tax-deductible through GlobalGiving this thanksgiving season. $20 Give a Village Drinking water in South Sudan. Clean water brings health, education, and the chance for a better tomorrow. Often, it means life itself. This holiday season, give the gift that saves lives and bring hope. <Give water!> $35 per Care Package Bless a poor mother and her child by providing newborn baby essentials. Send a baby care package thank includes socks, onesies, a bottle,… Read More
Magwi Office: Akello Susan, Field Coordinator
Akello Susan holds “O”&“A” – Level certificates of secondary education; three months Certificates in HIV/AIDS Counseling; Human rights and in project Management. Akello joined Hope Ofiriha in November 2011 to become the Field Coordinator for Magwi County as Staff member. As such, she is responsible for overall project management, capacity building, and representation. She has two years of experience in designing, implementing, and managing small scale projects in Bweyele Refugee Camp, Uganda. And she also has skills in a number of areas including HIV/AIDs Awareness,… Read More
Today is World AIDS Day
Dec. 1, is World AIDS Day. Theme: Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths. On World AIDS Day, organizations and world leaders hold events to commemorate and raise awareness around the struggles of people suffering from HIV/AIDS. Over the last month, world leaders have been speaking publicly in honor of the day, highlighting the need for not just medical interventions in treatment and prevention but education and awareness too. In her speech to the National Institute of Health, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary… Read More
Happy Thanksgiving from Hope Ofiriha
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the United States and around the world! Hope Ofiriha wants to send a most sincere thank you to all of our supporters, donors, child sponsors, partners, volunteers, and everyone else playing a role in our success. Together, we are making a huge difference in the lives of South Sudanese women and children struggling to build a better future for themselves, their families, and their community. Enjoy this special day of Thanksgiving and remember that we could not do this work without… Read More
A Land Rover Is Heading to Omilling
Omilling is about 62 kilometers from Torit’s state capital. Accessing either is virtually impossible for villagers because there are no paved roads or public transportation to get there. A volunteer worked 50 hours in the past two weeks to ensure that a donated Land Rover is prepared for its new role in south Sudan. The Land Rover is cleaned, passed EU traffic test, and painted Green. It has left the Sweden port of Wallham on November 19 by EUKOR Car Carriers Inc, and is expected… Read More
Omilling Mairo School Building Update
Astrid Wang and Lunde Arneberg’s second trip to Omilling has been postponed/rearranged. Their schedules are tight in November. Between now and December 15, they are to deliver their thesis. They are also redesigning the school’s structures. If they return in November, they will only spend two weeks, but in January they can stay for four weeks. The New Year is better because it is more time. Returning in January, Astrid and Lunde will build more classrooms, and train villagers in red soil block production skills. With our small-scale projects, we are continually… Read More
We’ve Reached $50,000 in GlobalGiving Donations
I’ve got great news to share! Today, thanks to our generous donors, we reached $50,000 in GlobalGiving donations, more than $32,000 of it this year. GlobalGiving has given us an invaluable boost at a time when many of our regular donors are cutting back due to the global recession. Thank you Global Giving! Thank you Hope Ofiriha supporters! Thank you donors! As you may recall, last July GlobalGiving’s participated in (or turbo charged) our rally to throw a baby shower for our Onura clinic in South… Read More
Impoverished South Sudanese Children in Uganda
Impoverished South Sudanese children in Uganda often become slaves to their new “families.” Some, especially the girls, are sexually or physically abused, and all of them are expected to work hard. Polly’s story is unique. In fact, it is common for South Sudanese refugees to live as squatters in slums in the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda, often homeless. More than 1,000 children, most of them girls, have become “impoverished children” or “independent orphan children.” Their parents, too poor to feed, and educate their children, send them to live with… Read More
Combating Poverty through Education
Omilling’s former child-soldier problem is a complicated one! Astrid Wang and Lunde Arneberg from the Oslo School of Architecture & Design are returning to Omilling to construct Mario primary school in November. The plan A – is to build one classroom, girl-pit latrine, and a teacher’s house. They are busy re-designing the school’s structure to match village’s standard. Fighting against decades of marginalization and intense state of poverty that spawn the practice, it is sometimes hard to imagine there is a way to help. Funding… Read More
Meeting in Omilling, South Sudan
Work on the Mairo Primary School is at a new stage! Last August, Astrid Rohde Wang and Lunde Arneberg from the Oslo School of Architecture & Design, and I visited Omilling to meet with the villagers. The Traditional Authority has approved the building plan and the community has already taken the ownership of the project. The two volunteers visited the donated plot and measured the site where the school will be built. The villagers gave a helping hand, and also assisted in searching for the red soil discovered… Read More
GlobalGiving’s ‘Baby Shower’ One-Day Miracle
UPDATE: Due to the overwhelming support of GlobalGiving’s donors, we’ve raised our funding goal to $14,074 to save even more mothers and babies. I am over joyed to report that GlobalGiving’s participation in our rally to throw a baby shower for our Onura clinic in South Sudan has raised nearly $4,000 so far in less than a day. Our Onura Maternal Survival Project has gone from being one of our least supported projects on GlobalGiving to being fully funded (between May 2010 and yesterday, donors had only given… Read More
Welcome to the World, South Sudan
On July 9, 2011, planet Earth welcomed its newest country. Having declared independence after a decades-long civil war, South Sudan is a newborn nation full of promise. South Sudan is the 193rd player in the United Nations playground, its 6-year old government is learning to run, and its even starting to tweet from @RepSouthSudan! Up until now, moms in Onura village have been dying in childbirth because the midwives delivering babies lacked simple sterile supplies. What better way to celebrate the birth of a nation… Read More
Lee Ben Ibo Has Found a Sponsor!
Lee Ben, the child of South Sudanese refugees, lives in Uganda with his grandmother. When his father disappeared in 2008, his mother began working three jobs to support her two children—as a night watchman at an industrial area, boda-boda (bicycle taxi driver), and gardener. She is currently attending a training program away from home to become a tailor. When she is done, she plans to open a tailor shop, so she can better support her children… Read More
Help Educate & Feed a Malnourished Child
Brian Lobene is the fifth in a family of five children. His refugee parents are too poor to pay for nutritious food for their five children, let alone school fees. Brian’s hungry stomach is bloated, the telltale sign of malnutrition in children. His parents move from place to place around Kampala begging for employment, but it is nearly impossible for uneducated refugees to find a good one. Please sponsor him, so he can go to boarding school, have regular nutritious meals, and escape a lifetime of poverty… Read More
Christine Anyero Has Found a Sponsor!
Christine’s parents are South Sudanese refugees who fled to Uganda in 1997 to escape the civil war. The family settled in Nakawa Acholi, a slum in the outskirts of Kampala. Although, Christine, and her six siblings have been living with their parents, it was their aunt who was the family breadwinner until her death in May 2011. As largely uneducated refugees, both of her parents have had a hard time finding descent work. Right now, her elderly and frail father… Read More
South Sudan Gains Independence on July 9!
Five days after the United States celebrates its independence, South Sudan will become the world’s youngest nation. Decades of brutal fighting have decimated South Sudan’s already fragile infrastructure. Little more than 120 doctors and fewer than 100 registered nurses care for 8 million people. The result: the people of South Sudan are suffering. With one of the world’s worst maternal mortality rates, women face a 1 in 7 risk of dying during pregnancy. A young girl in South Sudan is 3 times more likely to die… Read More
Provide Hope to a Hungry & Homeless Child
When Annet’s father died in a LRA attacked in 2002, her mother supported her 10 children selling local breweries and bananas from land a kind Ugandan let them use. This good Samaritan died last year, however, and the family could no longer harvest and sell bananas. On March 30, they were evicted from the home they had been living in since 1997 because they had not paid rent in several months. Annet and her siblings are no longer attending school because… Read More
Polly Amitto Has Found a Sponsor!
After both of her parents died, Polly and her two younger brothers and three younger sisters went to live in the Kakira slum outside of Kampala, Uganda. No family or friends stepped forward to care for the children. The children started a hair salon to generate income for school fees, house rent, and food. They didn’t have enough resources and training, however, to compete with other salons, so their business went under and they ended up homeless and hungry… Read More
Saterina Lakang Has Found a Sponsor!
After Saterina was orphaned, she moved to Kampala, Uganda, to live with her grandmother. When her grandmother died a few years later, she moved in with a Sudanese family headed by a single mother, mama Martha Ayaa. Mama Martha is barely able to support Saterina and her own seven children selling local breweries. Her hand-to-mouth enterprise doesn’t cover her household’s basic needs, and her own seven children do not go to school… Read More
Celebrating Norway’s Constitution: Happy May 17!
Each year on May 17 Norwegians fill the streets with cheers and flags in celebration of Norway’s constitution, adopted in 1814. It sometimes happens that foreigners inadvertently walk out of Oslo’s main railway station and stumble into the capital city’s May 17 parade. Either they then join in, or they run for cover and exit the country muttering about total chauvinistic madness. There may well be an element of madness about Norway’s May 17th celebrations, everything being relative. The event commemorates the Norwegian Constitution, signed… Read More
No Flowers or Jewelry, Just Water without a Walk
Like hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you will wake this morning and twist a knob, granting you access to a stream of warm water. You might then proceed to make a call to your favorite flower shop and/or gift store and ask them to prepare something fit for a queen for your mother on Mother’s Day. You would like your mother to feel every bit of a queen today. If she is not that far from you, you may opt to take… Read More
No Tribe is Superior & No Tribe is Inferior
I’m deeply saddened that more than 1,000 people are dead after clashes between South Sudan’s army and militias. The unrest reminds me of the speech Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia gave in 1963 before the United Nations. Here’s the English translation, which was popularized in a song called War by Bob Marley: “That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a… Read More
Reproductive Health, Sexual Rights & South Sudan
Reproductive health problems remain the leading causes of death for women of childbearing age worldwide. The impact is far worse in developing countries, which also have high fertility rates. Besides terrible reproductive health outcomes, these counters score poorly in poverty and education outcomes. South Sudan is no exception to this picture. The long civil war between the North and the South made reproductive health a crisis for South Sudan’s women, many of whom are widows and girls who had their sexual and reproductive rights abused… Read More
New Volunteers to Redesign Mairo Primary School
Work on the Mario Primary School—which will give hope to war orphans, former child soldiers, and other vulnerable children in Omilling village—is racing along! I recently met with Astrid Rohde Wang and Olav Lunde Arneberg, two students from The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, who have volunteered to redesign the school’s structure at village Standard. For several months nothing was happening on the project, keeping the door closed for hundreds of vulnerable children to ever receive an education. Behind the scenes, the Hope Ofiriha team was busy working to find out… Read More
University of Zambia Donates Soil Block Machine
The Technology Development and Advisory Unit at the University of Zambia has donated a hand-press interlocking soil block machine to Hope Ofiriha to build the Mario Primary School. The donation—which ultimately will help educate hundreds of war orphans, former child soldiers, and other vulnerable children—is wonderful in so many ways! Production of interlocking soil-compressed blocks is environmentally friendly because very little water and cement and no firewood are used to make them. It is also much cheaper than buying and transporting manufactured ones because they are produced locally with local soil and… Read More
Distant Relatives: St. Patrick’s Day & South Sudan
Today, all eyes and thoughts are on Europe’s third largest Island best known for potatoes, Shamrocks, and the reason for the season: St. Patrick’s Day. It has, however, not always been all bliss for the country that produced the Saint of the day, St. Patrick, as mass starvation, disease, and emigration during the Potato famine coupled with decades of violence between Catholics and Protestants brought much civil unrest. Though St. Patrick’s Day is not that popular in Africa—save for Catholics attending Lent Mass, who take… Read More
100 Women Become Beekeepers in Onura
Hope Ofiriha’s Onura Beekeeping Project has raised $3,328 on GlobalGiving, and the results are just terrific. The project is running very well under the guidance of the village’s woman project manager and her team at the Onura Women’s Beekeeping Association. Women’s businesses are growing steadily larger and the local economy is also expanding noticeably in Onura sub village where the project is running. The beekeeping project will provide local women with the opportunity to learn a sustainable agricultural skill and earn an income to support their… Read More
Hope Ofiriha Named a GlobalGiving ‘SUPERSTAR’
I have exciting news. Thanks to our generous donors, Hope Ofiriha is listed as a SUPERSTAR on GlobalGiving’s new Partner Rewards Program. This is the highest level that an organization can reach on GlobalGiving! As you may remember, we only became a permanent member of the GlobalGiving community just over a year ago. During the December 2009 Global Open Challenge we raised $4,093 from 51 unique donors for our Omilling HIV-AIDS Project , just getting us over the required $4,000 in donations and 50 unique donors threshold. Since then, we have raised… Read More
