Miracle workers

Geraldine and Geoff

We've just finished our fortnight in Kabubbu. Along with our fellow volunteers (see photo below) we've taken part in a wonderful range of activities. While mornings have focussed mainly on hard work, sanding and painting a new dormitory for the Secondary School, we've also had chance to use any specialist skills to maximum effect.
So while John and I ran a journalism session for schoolchildren and helped encourage a community newsletter, fellow volunteer and thespian Judith Kinnison-Bourke has been holding history lessons about the Titanic, dressed in full Edwardian gown while playing the part of a 22-year-old survivor.

We've also handed out Christmas presents to all the children, and on Sunday we took part in the most lively church service I have been to in years. It was a cross between Mass, a keep-fit class and a nightclub.
The two of us even helped lead a craft session in the primary school. One small classroom, 60 schoolchildren, glue, scissors, paper and glitter, and with John and I in charge.  Bedlam, pure bedlam.

Behind all this organised mayhem, is the Quicken Trust (www.quickentrust.com), set up just over 10 years ago by Geoff and Geraldine Booker, a middle-aged couple from deepest Sussex. They were brought to Uganda by a friend to see some of the challenges faced in this country, known as the Pearl of Africa.
They stumbled on Kabbubu, "the forgotten village", a small collection of mostly mud homes only an hour from the capital Kampala, but which for all the world might as well have been 500 miles from anywhere. This community of about 6,000 people was ravaged by abject poverty, AIDS and many other problems.
Confronted by hundreds of desperate people standing in the dirt and begging for help, most of us would have run for the hills, overwhelmed by the scale of the task ahead.

But Geoff and Geraldine quietly went away and worked out how they could help. It wasn't very much to start with, but someone had to start somewhere. And although the village wanted help urgently, its wise elders asked specifically for education and health to be the top priorities, so that the next generation didn't face the same struggle they had.

So year after year since then, and backed by a growing number of supporters in Britain and elsewhere, Geoff and Geraldine, have begun a small miracle in Kabubbu.
There is now a top-notch health centre, as well as primary and secondary schools (both of which are so popular that people now want to move into the area). More than 120 houses have been built, nine waterholes sunk, and 500 children and 100 grandparents in Kabubbu have sponsors back in the UK.

Geoff and Geraldine, as well as Quicken Trust staff and volunteers, haven't saved the world. But through passion, resourcefulness, determination and faith, they have saved part of it.



Henry