Day 14 – 07.10.14

Days 14 – 10 July 2014

Today we headed over to the Sole Hope offices and packed up and traveled with a team to the village of Mulumgami to do a jigger removal clinic. If you don’t know what jiggers are, they are a small bug that buries itself under the skin and lays eggs. Don’t Google it..trust me. Its a big problem in Uganda, and if untreated children can lose part of their feet. Sole Hope comes in and removes the jiggers, treats them and helps educate people. Sole Hope is founded by Drew and Asher Collie, an amazing couple doing such great things here.

We arrived at the school and the children were yelling and exited to see us, we had 2 vans and a car full of people. As soon as we got there one of the Sole Hope staff Dickson, gathered all the children and started playing games with them, while the rest of the team set up the stations.

There are 4 stations…check in, where we get the child’s name, age and who they live with and put that on a sheet of paper that they carry through the other stations, they also get a sticker and a sweetie (lollipop) then they go get their feet washed and scrubbed, after that they are carried to the jigger removal station where team members who are trained how to dig out the jigger and remove the egg sack. After that they are carried to the shoe station where they are given a new pair of shoes and information on jigger care. We served over 150 children in less then 3 hours.

It amazed me that most of the children didn’t cry or anything when they were being worked on, only some of the smaller ones cried. I loved watching how happy the kids were with their new shoes. About 75% of the children we saw had at least one or more jigger in their feet.

It was a good day working with Sole Hope!

Sula Bulunge!