Dear Advocates & Friends,

At Far Away Friends, we pride ourselves in collaborating to prove what’s possible for communities in the most rural regions of Uganda. In our first quarter of 2021, just a year after COVID made everything seem impossible, we are proud to have already welcomed 116 students back to Global Leaders and are steadily returning stronger ever thanks to your support and Advocacy!

Because YOU showed up last December to support our #GivingTuesday campaign, together we sent over $36,000 at the beginning of this quarter to Namasale to start renovating, sanitizing and preparing Global Leaders to bring students back to school for the first time in nearly a year. We upgraded our classrooms for the first time since 2016 (shout out to Lauren & W.D. for your support!), installed hand washing corners and new pit latrines, and even broke ground on a brand new building on campus. Today, Global Leaders is truly a beacon of hope in the Namasale community — proving that when we work together across cultures, across borders and through even the darkest of times, anything is possible.

Check out what you’ve made possible this quarter:

Our New Addition to Campus: The GLP Clinic

***The GLP Clinic & new FAF Uganda Offices are underway!***

Thanks to your support during our #GivingTuesday campaign and through the first quarter of 2021 we’ve been able to break ground on our brand new school clinic and an additional attached office space for our staff. This building was positioned strategically at the front of the GLP campus so that children can be screened by our new nurse, “Mama Good News” (I mean, have you ever heard of a school nurse with a better name?!) as they come to school each day. Access to a small health clinic on site at school will be a huge resource for our students as well as our staff and their families, who can now have access to basic medication and first aid administered by a trained professional without having to travel miles into town to visit a government clinic.

Additionally, because our FAF Uganda team are literal wizards with funds, we were able to work with the construction company to add a second space to this building, which will be used as a Far Away Friends Uganda office space, giving our organization a permanent presence in the community. Our team is looking forward to greeting families in this new space and learning more about their visions for the future of their community.

Special Thanks to Sue Clasen, as well as Dr. Furuta & Dr. Atkins from the Children’s Hospital Gastrointestinal Eosinophilic Diseases Program Team for helping to make this project possible!

Our New Desks are Finally Here!

In December, Far Away Friends Clubs in high schools across the United States launched a month-long fundraiser collecting “Dollars for Desks” to fund brand new, individual desks for our Primary 6 & Primary 7 as an alternative to our current shared bench desks which didn’t allow for any social distancing within the classroom. We are proud to have worked with a small carpentry company in Lira, Uganda (north of Amolatar) to craft 50 brand new desks for our students!

44 Primary 7 Students Return (Our Biggest Class Yet!) & GLP Teachers Receive UNEB Training

1d2dfe4d-738e-4814-9bfd-6358d38d9825 2.jpg

After teaching solely through home visits, our teachers were thrilled to finally have our Primary 7 students back to school in person for the first time in over 8 months. What we didn’t expect, however, was the incredible number of students who returned to school! FOURTY-FOUR (*insert jaw drop here*) mask-clad Primary 7 students returned to Global Leaders in mid-February to prepare for taking their Primary Leaving Exams (PLE). The PLE is one of the most high pressure exams a Ugandan student will take in their lives (think SATs) that qualifies them for high school. Part of the reason Far Away Friends began working in Amolatar District (Namasale) was due to the low PLE pass rate in the region, which stunted thousands of kids at a seventh-grade level of education.

With 44 students to prepare for PLEs after so much time out of the classroom, our Teachers requested a special training to help gain the skills to equip their students for successful exam outcomes. Thanks to the support of our monthly Advocates, Far Away Friends was able to fund a group of trainers from the Uganda National Examinations Board in Kampala to travel to Namasale and provide our teachers with an in-depth training on supporting students post-COVID. Both GLP’s Teachers and students reported that the training helped them to feel more confident in the outcomes of their PLEs. Check out the video above to hear directly from GLP Teacher, Olee Denish, about his experience!

Thank you to our dedicated community of Advocates for your generous support that made this training possible!

We SOLD OUT The Market Day Fund for the FIRST TIME EVER!

Ahead of a new school year in Uganda, Far Away Friends launches The Market Day Fund, a fundraising initiative through which donors can choose specific items for Global Leaders that are purchased directly from local entrepreneurs in Namasale and surrounding communities, stimulating the local economy while equipping our students and teachers with all the tools they need for a successful school year. This year, after COVID nearly destroyed small businesses everywhere, ensuring our ability to support local shops in the communities where we work was more important than ever.

In just one month, the Far Away Friends community (YOU!) came together to fill your virtual shopping carts with anything from goats and chickens, to cabbages and classroom chalk, helping us to SELL OUT every item from our Market Day Fund for the first time ever, placing a collective $5,000 into the hands of local entrepreneurs across Amolatar (like the wonderful tailor who came TO our school to measure our new students for their uniforms!) This program is super special to us because THIS is collaboration for development IN ACTION! Thank you for being a part of it!

Special thanks to the O’Connor Family whose gift was the catalyst for this campaign’s success!

GLP Primary 7 Graduation Poem

The absolute (albeit bittersweet!) icing on the cake was seeing our Primary 7 students off at their Graduation Ceremony. Many of the students in this P& graduating class have been at Global Leaders since our opening in 2016, meaning we’ve had the tremendous privilege of watching them grow into talented and confident young global citizens for several years. As a sweet reminder of the impact that YOUR support has had on this school community, we wanted to share their 2021 Graduation Poem with you here!

Thank you for being a part of the Far Away Friends community and working alongside us to equip these limitless kids with the tools they need to break cycles of poverty forever.