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Click here to read more about the work the girls are going to be involved in….

Sr Veronica (Ronnie) Rafferty is from Craigavole, Swatragh and has been living among the poor of the barrios of Buenos Aires for 40 years. In Latin America, the Dominican Sisters have opted to live among the people in simple houses, situated in areas that are economically and socially deprived, to be a caring presence there, detecting needs and raising the dignity of the people.

She and the other sisters have been improving the lives of these poor people in many ways. There are many different projects that they support on an on-going basis and there is always a greater need than supply of funding. They have decided to spend part of the Granaghan Outreach funds provided on finishing an extension for a medical centre in Victoria. There are thousands of patients at this clinic as there are no hospitals in the area. The poor have no NHS system or access to health care and are dependent on the Dominican sisters for funding for health services, dental services and provision of milk powder for the babies. There are always large queues of people waiting to be seen at this centre and the funds provided have allowed the sisters to finish the extension and put a roof on the structure you see below.

All of the sisters developments are small as they get piecemeal funding and can only carry out the works that are most urgent. They rely on local volunteers to provide the labour and then they use donations to pay for the materials.

This is the inside of the building now in early 2010 – nearing completion – Sr Matilde (in grey cardigan) is in the picture along with the other volunteers.
The remainder of the donation will be used for medical instruments and dressings and medicines for the health centres in Moreno. Moreno is the barrio in which Sr Ronnie lives. The Dominican Sisters have been able to raise funding for 6 health centres in this barrio which serve a population of 60,000. Without these funds the local communities would have no access to health care.

Sr Ronnie and Granaghan Outreach thank you for the wonderful support. You are making a difference to the lives of the poor and deprived of Argentina.

Three of the girls are volunteering for two weeks and the other three are extending their trip for an extra week. The team has been in regular contact with Fr. Martin Mulholland, a Slaughtneil native, who currently works in this area of Zambia. He has been of great assistance and has helped in the quest to find accommodation and confirm itinerary.

The team is planning to visit and provide support to several orphanages and centre’s including The Home Of Joy Orphanage, Little Assisi Orphanage, Umoyo Day Centre, St. Teresa’s Hospice and a school in a new parish, called St. Faustina.

Home Of Joy Orphanage
The Home Of Joy Orphanage which is directed by Sister Ruby, will provide the team’s accommodation.  It is an all girls orphanage, currently with about 50 children ranging from five to fifteen years.  With a constant increase in HIV/AIDS the tradition of staying with extended family cannot hold in many cases and the children have nobody to look after them because of dire poverty.

Many of the children who come to the orphanage suffer from malnutrition and require special food and care.  The orphanage is seen as a real answer to the present problems of so many orphans.  The girls come from nearby disadvantaged areas and many of them have endured physical, emotional or sexual abuse and hardship before coming to the orphanage. Many of their parents would have died because of AIDS or during childbirth.

Home of Joy gives the girls more than food and shelter. Their aim is to provide a home with a family atmosphere, educate the children and integrate them into society.  That is why they are sending all the children to local schools.  Moreover, the orphanage is structured so that the girls are housed in houses containing no more then 10 and each is run by a foster mother. This way the girls get used to living and interacting in a family setting.

The children are also trained in income generating projects such as chicken rearing, keeping rabbits, gardening, fish farming, rosary making, producing artwork and sewing so that they have the skills to be self-sufficient when the time comes for them, to leave Home of Joy.

Little Assisi
Little Assisi is a small Centre catering for orphan children.  Many of them are just very slow learners, not able to grasp the concept of numbers or letters.  Some of the children have hydrocephaly and microcephaly, autistic traits, Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy, and a number with severe learning disability. Some also have physical problems, such as weakness in their arms and hands, so that they find it difficult to hold and control a pencil.

Umoyo Day Centre
Umoyo Day Centre, care for 96 orphans aged 4-7 years.  Some of the children have a parent but are generally raised by extended family.  The families often cannot provide for the children so the offers education and two meals per day five days per week.

St. Teresa’s Hospice
St. Teresa’s Hospice, a hospice run by Mother Teresa Sisters, provides care to people with serious medical diagnoses.  It has been described as a vibrant, self-contained community of individuals working together in hope, dignity, and kindness as they face challenges almost unimaginable outside the complex wall.

St.Faustina
The school the team intend to assist, is a newly formed school in a very poor compound in the St.Faustina parish. The school is just starting and has a nursery class as well as classes Grade 1-4.  It was started by a priest, Fr.Brendan Mc Carron, native of Castlederg.

Below is a report from the sisters in the hospital.

Mother of Mercy hospital
Nuba Mountains
Feeding program project

Mother of Mercy hospital was open on March 18th 2008. It was an initiative of the Diocese of El Obeid to offer to the people of Nuba Health Services. This population had been neglected and abandoned during more than 20 years of war. They had lived in caves on the Mountains for many years. When CPA came they started to come down from the Mountains. The government had not done so far any work of development in the area as they are doing in the South. The works of development going on here were initiated by the Church.
Our Hospital has a capacity for 130 patients. We train the local staff as auxiliary nurses during the daily activities of the work within the hospital. Most have very limited education. Violence and war prevents many from attending school. The Mother of Mercy hospital is the only medical facility around so we receive patients from all over Nuba Mountains, an extensive catchment area. Last February one of the volunteer doctors came with the idea of opening a nutrition unit due to the high number of malnourished children admitted in the hospital. He gave us the formulas of preparing different feeds for different malnutrition conditions. Since February we had admitted around 100 children. Some of them are malnourished due to tuberculosis or other medical conditions. Malnutrition can also kill when it is in an advanced stage. Many children die from advanced Kwashiorkor. The causes of malnutrition is the lack of food, poor diet based on local foods (here the main food is sorghum), displaced children due to another pregnancy of the mother, other illness like TB, etc. Many children spend long periods in the hospital as their illnesses are advanced and healing is very slow.

As our nutrition unit is growing every month we see the need to train a local staff for following up this program me. These children need special care. We are feeding them every three hours from 8 am to 11 pm. We give health education to the mothers every morning; this health education consists in teaching them the importance of hygiene and balanced food for their children. There are also many other topics which help them to improve the care of the children.
The various food given to the children are milk, sugar, oil, tahania (local paste made of sem sem), soya flour. We monitor the weight of each child at least twice a week. Our facilities for preparing the meals are very simple; we have a kerosene stove for boiling the water. This takes a long time because we can’t boil much at once. Some of these children spend months with in the hospital especially those getting Tb drugs. These are our needs:
a. Our project includes on-going nutritional feeding programs for the severely malnourished children; their number increases due to the little food they got last year, and the scarce rain during the current one.
b. Secondly, we need funds to pay the salary of the local staff who is supervising and managing the ongoing programme. He is a young man with a good education grounding and is just back from Kenya. During his refugee days in Kenya, he attended school in the refugee camp. He studied up to secondary school level. He returned help and serve his people; back to the less fortunate ones he left behing when he fled to exile in another land. We value this and see it as important that we promote such young people who have the courage to come back to work here in spite of the uncertainties of the political situation.
c. We hope and plan to employ this young man and later send him for training. Hopefully, some day, he will take over the programme.

Thank so much for considering our project and thanks on behalf of our dear little ones who need just food to grow as normal children. God Bless. Management team of Mother of Mercy Hospital

On arrival at Nairobi airport the group was welcomed by the Moving Mountains team who were sure to keep them on the right path over the next fortnight. Their new friends consisted of Francis Kioni – the project supervisor, Jackton Otieno, more famously known as OT – the chauffeur and comedian, and 4 beneficiaries of the moving mountains charity, previously street children – who would be working alongside the team each day.

The 2009 project was the new build of a dormitory at the Kayieye School in Siaya, the same region of Western Kenya, visited in previous trips. Kayieye has a special needs class with 7 pupils at present. The class is specifically for deaf children from the area but it had been getting requests from all over Siaya District and further afield to take in children who need the care and education that only a specialist teacher and set up can provide. The school has a specialist teacher in place but because the children are from all over the Siaya District they have no means to travel to Kayieye on a daily basis. Therefore the construction of the dormitory was essential to ensure that the children who need it have continued access to the education they deserve. It was initially proposed that this would consist of 8 bedrooms, with each bedroom facilitating 6 children. However this was adjusted to 6 bedrooms which would hold a maximum of 36 children and included a dining/communal room which would also serve as a classroom during term time. The teams task was to help with the completion of the construction of the dormitory and the furniture would be provided by the local community, with the aim of the new dormitory being functional by the end of January 2010. The reason for the local community’s input was in keeping with the underlying belief that it is more beneficial to help the community to help itself and encourage it to sustain itself in the longer term as opposed to continually providing hand-outs.

The westernised team that travelled came from an assortment of backgrounds to include Accountancy, Nursing, Teaching, Plumbing and an Electrician however they soon realised that the majority of their specialities would remain untested as they gained an insight into hard manual labour African style. As they arrived bright and early on Monday morning the moving mountain “work mates” soon introduced them to the 20 “fundi” (local craftsmen) who were employed to work on the project. These gentlemen were very keen to show off their skills and quick to hand over their tools to see how the new “workers” would handle them. They also introduced them to a few choice Swahili words help them through the fortnight!

Prior to the teams arrival the fundi had made great progress with the building externally, however there was still to be a lot of work to be completed in what seemed like a short space of time. The walls on the inside had to be built up to ceiling level, the building had to be plastered inside and out, the floors had to be levelled out, windows and doors were to be fitted and the building was to be painted. All tasks were carried out using hands on physical labour with no machines in sight. The scaffolding was erected by tying tree branches and strapping planks together. The mortar was mixed by shovelling sand, cement and water together, the water was carried from a well at the other end of the school. The schoolchildren themselves would lend a hand by carrying buckets of water over to the site on their way back from their lunch break. The walls were tracked for the eventuality that the school may receive electricity using a small chisel and hammer. All materials were utilised as the windows and doors were sanded down for painting using the brown paper bags in which the cement arrived in.

After ten days of work in temperatures never experienced at home, the project was completed. To mark this special occasion the school and local community had organised an opening ceremony in which the schoolchildren treated the team to an array of singing, dancing and theatrical shows, which displayed not only their talents but their love and thanksgiving for life.

Granaghan Outreach is delighted to have learned that the new dormitory is now fully functional at Kayieye. We are especially pleased to discover that two of the deaf children – Goretta and Hillary – who previously resided at the Ulamba Moving Mountains Orphanage, have settled into the dormitory and are striving in their new environment with their peers.

In memory of Noreen Conway.