Environment
While a healthy environment can support development the relationship is not always reciprocal. Long-term development can be achieved through sustainable management of various assets: financial, material, human, social and natural. Non-sustainable use of natural resources, including land, water, forest and fisheries, can threaten individual livelihoods as well as local, national and international economies.
Accomodation/Housing
Housing is the cornerstone of independent living, yet many explosive ordnance survivors now disabled live in homes that do not meet their requirements. If explosive ordnance survivors are to have choice and control over their lives, then urgent action is required to make sure that future housing supply is accessible for everyone. Decent housing is a basic human right that helps people to have independent, fulfilled lives.
Water Sanitation Hygiene (WASH)
Most explosive ordnance survivors and PWDs are constrained by barriers to access to facilities for the safe disposal of human waste (feces and urine). It is very difficult for explosive ordnance survivors to have the ability to maintain hygienic conditions, through services such as garbage collection, animal waste management, and a safe clean water.
Energy
Humans have been harnessing solar energy for thousands of years—to grow crops, stay warm, and dry foods. While renewable energy is often thought of as a new technology, harnessing nature’s power has long been used for heating, transportation, lighting, and more. Today, we use the sun’s rays in many ways—to heat homes and businesses, to warm water, or power devices.
So purposefully we will seek to identify possible funding sources and write a grant proposal to fund a program that will provide energy resources for explosive ordnance survivors.
“It is not up to me, but my appeal to our government is to consider lending survivors of explosive ordnances and landmines a helping hand to cope with the difficult past we have gone through. “
The twenty years of conflict in northern Uganda left devastated the infrastructure, economy, and psyche of the population. With the restoration of peace, most people returned to their homes, further supported by the Government of Uganda’s Peace, Recovery, and Development Plan (PRDP) – a comprehensive strategy to improve the welfare of the people in the north with consolidation of state authority, rebuilding and empowering of communities, revitalization of the economy and peace building and reconciliation. However, resettlement proved challenging due to a number of barriers to sustainable livelihoods in northern Uganda, contributing to a seventy percent unemployment rate among youth and this figure is much higher for female youth and those with disabilities.
We implemented a Landmine Survivors Returning Home Project funded by NORAD through Humanist Action for Human Rights (HAMU-Norway) 2007 to 2011. Landmine survivors identified as severely disadvantaged at the time were selected to benefit from the basic housing project. 22 houses were built in different communities where the final beneficiaries come from including 15 women and 7 men
The dream to study, qualify as a professional, work in government or private sector was taken away the fateful day he stepped on landmine on the footpath to his home.
Living over 40 km in rural setting with no routine psychosocial support, remorseful, bitter and almost suicidal deterred him from continuing with school.
When age came he found a wife and started a family. He has children and even grandchildren. He is a peasant fortunate to rely of ox-ploughing for enhanced crop production. He is so thankful that the prosthesis enables him to effectively plough his way with the bulls like other persons without disabilities.
Special tribute to government partnership with AVSI facilitating the production and replacement of prosthesis for amputees requiring periodic assistive device
“Trust me, prosthesis is not human limb even if it serves the purpose for our case. I always have to bear the pain of abrasion on my stub and entire left leg after ploughing with ox-plough. Do I have a choice? I do not?”
“I have a family and many mouths to feed. I do not have skills training to search for a job but farming is bread basket. As I continue to toil the earth, I expect government to meet us some where if we survivors will ever feel justice is being delivered.”
