Mpolyabigere

Mpolyabigere means "cooling off the feet" in Lusoga, and it refers to a big shade tree where travelers pause to rest or a village community sits to discuss its business. It was the name adopted by Cornelius Gulere Wambi for the Rural Community Recreation Information Communication Education Development (RC RICED) Centre that he set up in 1995 in Eastern Uganda, in what is now Namutumba District. The full name is a mouthful, so we at UgCLA just call it Mpolyabigere. Like URLCODA, Mpolyabigere has many member groups, the most active of which are involved in agriculture and in music, dance, and drama. It has also partnered with other national NGOs--especially Uganda Cares--to carry out HIV testing in the area, and in 2009 it arranged for more than 5000 people to be tested (for more information about the worldwide campaign of which this was a part see: http://www.testingmillions.org/). 

Mpolyabigere has close links with neighboring schools as well and carries out many youth activities, organizing games, showing films, and providing reading material. The center for all these activities is Mpolyabigere's library in the village of Nsinze. When I visited in January this year it had books, but only about 300 and they were mostly foreign donations. The library was furnished and well decorated with new posters, but the building was much too small for all the organization's activities; it was, besides, very shabby outside, and it had no functioning toilet.

Thanks to our partnerships with Pockets of Change and Hawk Children's Fund, UgCLA has helped Mpolyabigere to put some of these things right. The library submitted a proposal for the Pockets of Change Children's Book Project (see my post on this blog of May 5) and won a set of about eighty locally produced children's books. Its volunteers are giving children more opportunities to read and more incentive to do so by taking these books round to schools and organizing story-telling activities. Then we selected Mpolyabigere to participate in Hawk Children's Fund's Rural Solar Demonstration Project. In addition to providing the solar equipment for lighting, phone charging, and operating a DVD player, HCF paid for the library to be renovated and a new open shed to be built, where meetings could be held and DVDs shown; it also paid for the construction of a new long-drop toilet. The work was completed last week, just in time for the two US volunteers who will be arriving on June 22 to help the library develop its work in health and creative performance. 

Mpolyabigere is one of UgCLA's success stories, largely because of the devotion  and the talent of Gulere and others in his family--especially his brother, Enoch Magala, who is in charge of the library and works constantly with the young people of Nsinze. It provides inspiration and practical help to our other member libraries--for example, it recently provided URLCODA with DVDs on HIV-AIDS--and its experience will be enormously helpful in UgCLA's upcoming Libraries for Health project. Mpolyabigere clearly provides shade for its own village, but we hope that through UgCLA its influence will spread far beyond that!

The picture below shows one of the many activities organized at the Mpolyabigere Library to combat HIV-AIDS. The library itself, newly painted, is on the right. Behind it is the spanking new toilet, and a corner of the meeting shed can be seen on the left.