SOS Gulu commemorates World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse

On 19th November 2008, SOS Gulu joined the rest of the world to commemo-rate the World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse, whose theme was “To raise visibility, mobilize participation and make prevention a global priority”. Prior to that day, SOS children had about two weeks of rehearsal on several different activities, which included mainly drawings, debating, poem and songs that depicted the rights of children.

On the D-Day, the Village Educator pinned all the children’s drawings to the movable two notice boards and placed them in strategic places for other people to see. These were drawings by very young children about the goods and bad things they see around them. And in the evening, when the children returned from school, they made their presentations of poems, debates and songs to fellow children and SOS staff. The motion of the debate was “The right to Freedom is more harmful to Ugandan children than good”. As each side tried to defend themselves, the audience could not help themselves from laughing. And at the end of day everyone had something to take back home.

SOS Staff and Mothers get trained on fire prevention

Although fire extinguishers were placed in strategic positions in the village, hardly anyone could use them to extinguish fire in case of any fire outbreak. Consequently, a one-day fire sensitisation session was organised and facilitated by a police officer from the Fire Emergency Department in charge of fire rescue outbreaks in Gulu.
All SOS staff and children participated in the training. They had an opportunity to learn how to use fire extinguishers among other fire fighting techniques the police officer taught them.
The training came at an opportune moment when the SOS families are about to relocate to the new village.

Skill Development in SOS Children’s Village Gulu

Children need to be exposed to as many skills as possible to enable them to realise their full potential. In SOS Children’s Village Gulu, our holiday programme is made in such a way that we do not only concentrate on academic work but also emphasise extracurricular activities. We take advantage of a diversity of skills our SOS mothers have, coupled with external support to help our children to learn a few things that might be of great benefit to them in future. Besides, such activities help us so much to deal with redundancy amongst them and to indirectly discourage bad behaviour.





Knitting is one such activity for which girls have developed a strong liking. During the second term holidays they made a variety of items ranging from sofa covers to door mats. We organised a small internal exhibition and we invited the fellow co-workers and the Canadian volunteer students to come and appreciate their work. Some ended up buying the items, which made the children feel good and valuable.