The Hospital by the River by Catherine Hamlin

Te-Kworo Foundation was set up by Alice Achan, who as a teenager spent five years on the run from the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army who terrorised Uganda for 20 years. That’s why local community-based organisation Te-Kworo is building a maternity hospital in a central location on a bus route about 11kms from Pader. “When you drive around here, there’s women and their children with hoes, sowing the seeds, and it’s very physical work with no equipment.”īecause 69 per cent of Ugandans are self-employed farmers, the income tax base of the country is very low, which results in a lack of infrastructure – “atrocious roads” and few and far between hospitals. Philippa Tyndale in the Kworo school with her book ‘The School of Restoration’, about Alice’s life and the start of the Te-Kworo Foundation.Įven when the family is solid, the fathers are often away working, so the women have to hoe their fields by hand, she adds. “What’s difficult, though, is you come here and you realise how affluent our life in Australia is – the fact that we have running water and electricity and we don’t get hungry and we have showers and we have fridges and washing machines.” “There’s a lot about the Ugandan people that we really admire – they’re easy people to love, and it’s an easy place to fall in love with,” says Julie, after just two weeks of living in the guest house in Pader. It’s a huge adventure for the couple, who have resigned from their jobs, rented out their house, said goodbye to their two daughters, aged 22 and 23, and swapped an affluent life with all the mod cons for a simple lifestyle, where power is intermittent and they shop daily in the local market. “There’s a lot about the Ugandan people that we really admire – they’re easy people to love.” – Julie Heap “Finally, there is an opportunity, so God doesn’t waste your time, but it’s not always the timing you expect,” says David, speaking to Eternity via Zoom from Pader, a tiny town in northern Uganda. Here they are overseeing the building of a new maternity hospital, which David helped to design and raise funds for. David and his wife Julie have just uprooted their lives in Sydney’s northern beaches to move to Uganda as volunteers. Now 38 years later, the Sydney architect is finally proving that missionary wrong.

The Hospital by the River by Catherine Hamlin