Please be at Red Chilli reception by 09.45 to meet your guide from Girl Up Initiative Uganda (GUIU), the organisation you will be volunteering with for the day. Depart at 10.00 with your guide who will walk you to the GUIU office, which is only a 10-15 minute walk from Red Chilli. During your walk, the GUIU staff member will explain more about the local neighborhood and culture. You will pass by the Butabika Hospital- the mental health national referral hospital for the entire country’s estimated population of 36 million people. You will also walk through a growing urban slum area, where it is common for families of up to five people to live in one room with no running water and limited services. Feel free to ask your guide any questions along the way since he/she knows it intimately, since all staff live and work in this community.

Your guide will take you through the GUIU offices and explain why it is important that the office is located in this area. You will learn more about the various programs of Girl Up Initiative Uganda – the Adolescent Girls Programme, Boy Champions Project, Big Sisters Network, Mazuri Designs Hub, and Ni-Yetu Youth Program – and how this contributes to the organisation’s vision to create a gender equal world for girls to thrive and lead. After learning about the programmes, you will have the chance to ask any burning questions about the organisation and its work.

Leaving the GUIU office, you will walk up to the Mazuri Designs Hub Workshop (just up the hill!) where you will meet the Mazuri seamstresses for your training session. Mazuri Designs Hub is GUIU’s social enterprise that sells beautiful African clothing and accessories, while also offering vocational training in fashion, design, and tailoring and entrepreneurial and personal skills training for out-of-school vulnerable young women to build their confidence and create employment opportunities. This is where you will learn how to make reusable sanitary pads that will be donated to the girls in partner schools, as well as young women in the community.

Just outside of Mazuri Designs Hub, you will find a delicious home-cooked lunch prepared by Auntie Joyce’s Mobile Kitchen. Her Ugandan buffet is prepared fresh daily and usually includes the following traditional food, depending on what is in season: African beef and/or goat stew, steamed matoke, pilau, cassava, sweet potato, spinach and g-nut sauce. You will share your lunch with the whole GUIU team and have the chance to get to know them better!

After lunch, you will return to the Mazuri Designs Hub to continue producing sanitary pads and learn why pads are so important to keep girls in school and for menstrual health and hygiene. If you would like, you can also choose to learn how to make paperclip necklaces or bottle-cap earrings that use left-over fabric from the workshop. Use your hands and creativity to make lovely gifts, or you can also shop around Mazuri and buy unique gifts to bring back home.

Your time with Girl Up Initiative Uganda has come to an end! You can choose to be driven back in the GUIU van to Red Chilli or walk back along Kirombe-Butabika Road.