Soft Power Education
Hospice Jinja
SNUPA
TUSC has has links with Hospice Jinja for the last two years. Hospice Jinja provides pain relief and other care (where resources allow) to people in the busoga District of Uganda who are suffering from cancer, HIV and other incurable diseases.
TUSC has helped to facilitate the transport of Hospice patients for healthcare to Mulago in Kampala, and to other healthcare facilities. Jinja Hospice have accepted referrals to their service from TUSC when we have identified people who are suffering from a terminal illness and require pain relief and advice on managing their condition or support for their carers. We have also at times transported their staff to their field work when they have struggled because of mechanical issues with their own vehicle and they have also highlighted patients to us who are not "palliative" but who need healthcare access.
The following link shows the areas that TUSC and Jinja Hospice work in and some of the challenges that are presented to the people of Uganda and the projects that work there. (Many thanks to Hospice Jinja for permission to share this video.)
SNUPA is the Source of the Nile Union of People with Albinism and we have a Memorandum of Understanding signed with them, with both organisations supporting the work of the other.
We are frequently called upon to transport people who are albino for healthcare. Their vulnerability to skin and eye disease because of the lack of pigment means that they are often in need of healthcare. SNUPA work to sensitise and motivate their clients to protect themselves from the harmful effects of the sun upon their skin, and also to act as advocates for Albino people as a whole.
Discrimination and poor understanding can make their life chances for work, education and socialisation weaker so enhancing their inherent health vulnerability.
TUSC has facilitated health and social workers from the organisation into the field and also transported many people for healthcare, both to local and national centres. We partner with SNUPA to promote health enhancing activities for this vulnerable group of people and make ‘prevention’ of health problems, respect and dignity of clients and team-work, the mainstay of our work with SNUPA.
Soft Power Education is a charity that supports activities to improve the education in schools in the Busoga region and as part of that they employ staff to provide for children with 'special needs'. For over two years now we have been partnering with Soft Power to improve the attendance at their physio sessions and this means that when we become aware of children with developmental delay we can enroll them into the program. We have been able to transport some of these children to Kampala for supporting aids when there has been funds and the carers have shown the motivation to use them and we hope that we can build on this so that there is maximum benefit from the sessions.
"Friday Friends" are a group of children who present with profound developmental delay and disability. Each Friday, in partnership with Soft Power Education, these children receive physiotherapy instead of sitting at home. Or, let us be honest, most of these children cannot sit independently and lie at home on the floor, which is where we found most of them. Getting to physio is so difficult for these children, as balancing a child with no muscle tone or who have regular convulsions on a boda (motorbike taxi) is dangerous and difficult, and the cost of transport is prohibitive to most. Yakub takes a morning and an afternoon group, collecting them from their homes and then returning them after the sessions. Some of the children are making real progress and the aim is to enable them to be able to develop some of the skills of daily living.