Invisible Children

Next we headed over to the Invisible Children headquarters. Risa worked for IC right after college and one of her coworkers and former classmates is still working for IC and so we went into this office and got to hear from him all that IC is doing now. It was incredible to hear! They are doing school to school which pairs up a school in Northern Uganda with a school somewhere else in the world. The school discusses what its needs are and then they invest 5% of their money into the project. They sponsor about 600 kids in secondary school and about 100 kids at the university level. They have also started going into the communities to find women who are skilled at tailoring. Before the war Uganda's big cash crop was cotton (40%)! So they bring these women into a production facility and give them the materials, design, and training to make bags. The women are taught how to have a loan, savings, and interests. These bags are selling lot hot cakes in the US right now with high school and college kids. The newest program they have done is the teacher program. Teachers from the US have come over for about 6 months at a time and have team taught in a classroom here. And for the first time they just had a handful of Ugandans who were selected to go over to a US school and team teach in a classroom there. (They started this because they heard that Uganda's top schools used to be up in the north before the war. So in order to really build up these schools to the standard they used to be at they started these programs.)