Crowds waiting to see a doctor, at one of our pop-up medical clinics

Me, and a little guy at our pop-up medical clinic at Acholi Quarter. Excuse the wardrobe malfunction.

On Saturday October 13, Loving One by One Ministries will hold its 2nd Annual 5K Walk/Run at the South Coast Botanic Gardens in Palos Verdes. Along with a lot of other Loving One by One fans, I’ll be there with my running shoes on (and other attire as well), completing each one of those 5 K’s. We’re running or (let’s be honest) walking to have fun, and raise funds to further the efforts of the New Hope Medical Centre in Uganda.

New Hope Medical Centre (notice how it’s “centre” and not “center”) is the newest venture of Loving One by One Ministries, an organization I’ve been involved with since 2011. In addition to our work in Uganda with orphans and education, we have always been involved in helping people in Ugandan villages and slum areas with some of their basic medical needs. Well, years have passed, and Loving One by One has grown, and now in addition to some of the mobile, pop-up medical clinics we do in some slums and villages, we now have our own permanent medical facility on our land, near the town of Kiwenda about an hour north of Uganda’s capital of Kampala.

New Hope Medical Centre, just completed a few months ago, is a lifesaver for the people living in and around the small town of Kiwenda. Most don’t have access to any form of healthcare, so it’s common for small, insignificant medical issues to become life-threatening problems. Accidents, burns, and infections are serious when you are basically living in shacks with dirt floors, and malaria and typhoid are commonplace. Not to mention the types of cancer in Africa that I’ve never heard of here in the U.S.  But now with New Hope Medical Centre up and running, the LOBO staff will be able to more efficiently provide the care that is needed in our local community. LOBO’s goal for this 5K is to raise the funding needed to purchase a sonogram machine, and a CBC machine. A sonogram machine is familiar to us; a CBC, or Complete Blood Count Machine, will be used to perform necessary tests on a patient’s blood to come up with a diagnosis – quickly. Until now, we’ve had to put patients in our van and drive to the nearest medical facility that has these capabilities, and more often than not, the machines would be unavailable or not working.  Having our own CBC and sonogram machines will enable our clinic to function more efficiently, for the good of our local Kiwenda neighbors.

My goal is to raise $1000.00 toward this equipment. If you’d like to participate in this effort with me, here is the link for my Facebook Fundraising account. Just click on it, and you’ll have the opportunity to give whatever you’d like toward this project.

This is the link. Click it. Thank you.

Next summer, I hope to return to Uganda for the 5th time, and you’ll hear more about that in a few months. But for now, thanks so much for your willingness to help with this project!