Pre-Trip Preparation

Hey Everyone!

Welcome to my first blog post ever. These posts might be riddled with bad grammar errors, so please bear with me as I walk you through my GROW experience over the next couple of months!

On Thursday, I will be traveling to Gulu, Uganda, to work with out partner organization, Health Alert Uganda, for just about seven weeks with my friends and partners Julia Baker, Joshua Bradley, and Clara Williams. For those who don't know already, HAU is an organization that works with kids from ages zero to seventeen that are infected/affected by HIV/AIDS and is based in Gulu, the northern district of Uganda.

Our purpose for this trip is to build up their funding, functioning, and internal capacities. My project will be to make sure that they can fund themselves properly and independently, while cutting back on the costs of implementing other projects that we, along with other organizations like Save the Children, have already established down there. Needless to say, it's going be a lot of hard work. But I'm very excited nonetheless!

I'm most excited about the prospect of meeting the people that we have actually impacted through our fundraising and other efforts at UNC. Based on what past interns have said before, the act of meeting the mothers and their children who have benefitted from our Mama kits, which prevent transmission of HIV/AIDS from mother to child during birth, is one of the most inspiring experiences that anyone could ever have.

First, though, comes the packing (something that I haven't thought of at all). I'll start after I finish my last final at 8 AM and pack up my room at Morrison Tomorrow. Won't that be a hassle?

I'll try to keep everyone posted at least once every week!

Thanks for reading!

Zach