Alice's story

Alice Kwekumya is a grandmother and sole guardian of her two daughters and six grandchildren. One of the daughters has been diagnosed HIV positive. Her husband, Alice's son-in-law, has died of an AIDS-related illness.

Alice is a member of a Village Savings and Loans group and has received food support (in her case quick maturing cassava cuttings and beans) through the Buliisa Orphans Project. When we met Alice in the autumn of 2009 she told us that the cassava had almost died in the heat of an unseasonably dry August but was now recovering.  She had also taken the risk of planting some of the beans she had been given and had been rewarded by a reasonably good harvest. 

She was very proud that despite her advanced age she was able to plant and weed her ¼ acre garden herself and insisted on showing us around her mixed-planted plot of maize, cassava, beans, ground nuts and pigeon peas. 

Alice told us: "I am very grateful both for the savings scheme, which has enabled me to pay school costs for my grandchildren, and for the seedlings.  In Buliisa beans are considered to be food for the rich, so it is a real pleasure to be able to grow them for my family.  They feel rich when they eat them."