My Introduction to Ubumi Project Africa

On my first Sunday in Zambia, my homestay family and I went for a drive through Kitwe and made a quick stop in at the first organization that I would be working with while here. Ubumi is an organization that runs 3 operations: a community school with 387 kids in grades 1-7, a nutrition program with 30 malnourished children who are provided with food and come in once a week with their mothers for training and a cooked meal, and the Ubumi transit home. The office for the organization is in the transit home.

There are 9 children aged 5-16 housed at the transit home – all of them are orphans and they live here with a caretaker as well as a cook/cleaner that comes in during the day but does not stay overnight. The kids are placed here by the Social Welfare branch of the government and Ubumi works to try and find relatives of these children who will take them in. Most of the kids have been here for years and either have no relatives that Ubumi can find, or none that are willing to take them in.


me with Mapalo, John, Juliet, Dominic & Frank

When I first got out of the car the 9 most excited kids that I have ever seen surrounded me. Apparently they had been told weeks in advance that I would be coming and immediately were addressing me as “Uncle Jordan”! The kids were so happy to see a new face and immediately got to work trying to find out as much information about me as possible – that is until they saw I was carrying a camera. This turned into a daily routine where they would run up to me, greet me and then immediately start asking if they could take a picture with my camera (you’ll know these by the pics on facebook that have people’s heads cut off or that are focused on a random tree rather than the people in the picture!).


I’ll be doing a variety of finance related work including helping get the organization all caught up on their bookkeeping and recording of donations and expenses, helping them design financial reports that will be useful to them, and recommending some policies and procedures that will help make things run easier and more smoothly. I will also be helping out with the narrative reports that need to be sent to their donors, and will be on their organizing committee for a new fundraising effort – a golf tournament. In addition to all this, I get a few hours a day to spend with the kids.

The first week of work has gone really well – the project officer Veronica and me have gotten on really well and I think she enjoys having someone with her in the office during the day! She was gone a few days for some meetings, and this brought to me the new and terrifying reality of driving myself to work in Zambia! The roads are absolutely awful, I’m driving a right-hand drive vehicle, and the other drivers are ridiculous – it took me a few days to get over it, and now I am thoroughly enjoying the drives.

It’s been very humbling to see how little money the transit home can survive on – and how happy the 9 kids are that they have a safe place to live, three meals a day, and don’t have to worry about paying school fees or getting money for books and uniforms. I felt a lot like a parent when one day I got to drive all 9 to school and then went in with two of them to get their report cards and speak with their teachers about performance! One of our nine kids, in grade one, was ranked #1 in his class, which was pretty cool.

Just to give you an example of how desperate people are in some areas – yesterday Veronica and I went down to where the nutrition program takes place to see how things were going. Immediately upon our arrival, we could tell something wasn’t right and soon realized that they had run out of a key ingredient for the breakfast that is served to the malnourished kids. Unfortunately, due to lack of funding, there was no way to pay for it and these 30 kids and their moms were going to leave with no food. Just before we left, I asked if I could just pay for it and run to a store to pick it up. We walked through the community (called the Musonda compound) to a store and passed dozens of small, malnourished (a few with very swollen bellies) children on the way, which was tough. When we got to the store and I went to pay I was just shocked that 30 kids were going to go without breakfast for a day because they couldn’t come up with this money. How much was it going to cost to feed these kids you ask? Less than $3 (and no, this is not a typo)...