What’s happening on the ground.

Got the quarterly report from Simon a couple weeks back. There's a lot in it I want to walk through, plus a couple of things I'm adding from this side. If you're reading this — sponsor, shirt buyer, or someone who landed on a kid's page — you should know in concrete terms what shirts and sponsorships have been buying this month.

Hope Bridge School

The school has 65 kids enrolled right now, from Nursery up through Primary Five. Most of them are from families where school had been a maybe, month to month, so having a place to show up consistently, with breakfast porridge in the morning and beans and posho at lunch and two cooks who know their names, is a bigger deal than it might sound from this side of the ocean. Enrollment kept climbing this term, so Simon brought on another teacher.

The thing I keep coming back to from the report is Teacher Susan's class. Not a single kid in her class could write when the term opened. By the time it closed every one of them could write on their own. Simon sent a photo of her at the chalkboard with the kids behind her in the plastic chairs you see in the YDO photos, and the whole arc of that term happened because three things stayed in place: fed kids walking in every morning, a teacher who knew her stuff at the front of the room, and chalk and notebooks that didn't run out before the term ended. None of those three is automatic; they exist because sponsors here kept their subscriptions going through the term.

The clinic

The medical clinic the YDO team built has been running since last year. It's the first medical facility this community has ever had. A nurse named Apobo Noureen runs it day to day. She saw over 700 patients there in 2025, and she's already past 200 this year, mostly malaria, plus a steady mix of respiratory infections, stomach illness, fevers in young kids, and minor injuries. I'll have a current number when YDO sends the next batch.

The honest update for May is that demand has run higher than I planned for, and Noureen is running thin on the basics: malaria medication, gloves, pain relievers, sanitation supplies. The boring truth of what every shirt and every $25 month is paying for right now is the next case of malaria pills she's about to need. I'm working on getting more sent in.

The shirts and the numbers

I'm working with Simon and the teachers to get richer profiles of the kids on the campus side: better photos, longer descriptions of who each child actually is, what they like, who they sit with at lunch, what's going on at home. The next time you check the page for your kid's number, it'll have more on it than it did before. It's worth looking. Some of that will start showing up on social too over the next few weeks.

Vocational training and the poultry farm

Three vocational programs are running out of the YDO training center right now, taught by three staff: sewing and tailoring, building and construction, and sweater knitting. The point of all three is the same: give a young person from a household with no margin a skill they can actually charge for.

We also started a small poultry farm this quarter as an experiment in YDO generating some of its own operating income instead of depending entirely on what we send from here. There are 300 broiler chicks in there now, about a month from being ready for market. If the math works, it becomes a real revenue line for the organization and a working agriculture site for trainees who want to try farming.

The Marshall trip

A small team from here in Marshall was supposed to be on campus this summer. Given the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak across the border in DRC and the two imported cases that have surfaced inside Uganda, I made the call to push the trip to December. There's no outbreak in Omoro and no local transmission anywhere in Uganda right now, but I'd rather move the trip than carry any risk in either direction. The campus team is reinforcing sanitation and hygiene routines in the meantime, the same kind of basic-but-rigorous public-health practice Uganda has built into its systems over more than twenty years of dealing with Ebola well. December is a better season for us to be there anyway.

The bigger build

The big push for the back half of the year is the dorm. The staff are renting in the village right now, which works in the short term, but the school is going to outgrow its current classroom space by 2027 if enrollment keeps moving the way it has. YDO has drawings done and a budget worked out at about $55,000 USD all in. I'll put up a separate post on how to support that build.

Thanks for being in this with me. More from the campus soon.

Kevin

Source material for this recap came from the May 2026 campus report prepared by Wilobo Simon Peter, Head of Office at YDO Uganda. Photos by the YDO team on the ground.