What’s happening on the ground.

Here's what June looked like at the campus. Sixty-three kids finished the month at Hope Bridge Primary — 23 boys and 40 girls. Nine teachers, three non-teaching staff, and Simon's team on the ground running the whole thing. This is the headteacher's report.

What went well

English speaking got noticeably better. The teachers put a lot of weight on it this term and started organizing debates in class. Kids are showing up to talk. This matters more than it sounds — a kid who can read and write but can't speak English gets stuck when exams are in English.

Primary Five picked up tailoring. The school ran a skills training this month, and most of the class grabbed it fast. Kids in the region don't have many concrete post-school skills to fall back on if they don't finish. Picking up tailoring gives them something in their hands.

A handwriting and ethics training happened for teachers and students. Chalkboards were ruled for cleaner writing. Charts went up on the walls in Nursery and Primary — the kind of incidental learning where kids pick up letters and numbers from what's on the walls.

Assessments came back stronger. Reading and writing of simple words moved in both Nursery and Primary. Not dramatic, but the kind of quiet compounding progress that shows the teaching is working.

A PTA committee was formed. Parents at the table, sub-committees running, more shared ownership of how the school operates day to day.

Health held. No serious sickness across the school despite the Ebola outbreak in the country. The campus is running strict handwashing for every learner, teacher, and visitor. The nurse resigned mid-month to run off with a man she'd been seeing, and the school is looking for a replacement.

What's hard right now

Some parents aren't sending scholastic materials or paying school fees on time. This is the biggest ongoing drag on the school running smoothly, and it's why sponsorship and shirt sales matter — they fund the operation when the local household economy can't.

The Nursery classroom faces direct afternoon sun. Kids sitting through lessons with sunlight in their eyes. Real physical thing to fix — window treatment or a shade addition.

The school is short on readers and story books. Reading skills are moving but there aren't enough books to keep the momentum going. Specific thing money can fix.

Some teachers need more training on how to prepare teaching materials and handle their tools. Simon's team is planning capacity-building sessions.

What every shirt and every $25 month is buying right now

School meals for the kids eating from school. Salaries for the 9 teachers and 3 non-teaching staff. The teacher training that made this month's handwriting workshop happen. The nurse replacement search. Books, when we can order them. The physical school itself — a Nursery through Primary campus that ran through June with 63 kids showing up to learn something.

If you're already sponsoring one of these kids, this is what your $25 covered in June. If you bought a shirt and haven't sponsored yet, this is where a monthly would land — not into an account somewhere in the US, but into the meals, the salaries, the books, the teacher training. On the ground in Omoro.

Thanks for being part of it,

Kevin

One more thing

A lot of the kids' profiles just got refreshed — new details, sharper stories, better photos in places. If it's been a while since you clicked around, pull up a few kid pages and see what's new. We keep sharpening the site so this connection feels closer. My Campus at beanumber.org/me is the newest piece of that — a home base for exploring the campus, not just checking in on your kid.

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

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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.