April 2012:

Great progress has been made in Uganda over the past month at all levels of baseball and softball. We will be hosting our annual Uganda Little League National tournaments this May. We will have 5 or 6 11-12 year old teams coming to play for the right to travel to Poland to play in the Middle East/Africa tournament which will be held during the middle of July. That will be followed by the 13-14 tournament. Both these will be preceded by the girls 11-12 program which we hope will have a competitive team traveling to their tournament in Italy. Getting visas to Italy will be a lot easier than getting the visas for Poland as the Italian Embassy is located in Kampala while the Polish Embassy is located in Kenya. For the first time, the boys program will have a team from Gulu and a chief umpire from Canada. Chuck has informed us that after his visit in January, he would like to return in May. He will now be a chief tournament umpire.

We really made history late in March. After our meeting with the Uganda Commissioner of Sports on one day followed by a meeting with the Uganda Country Director of the Peace Corps, a three way meeting was set for a Tuesday afternoon at the Commissioner's office. This is where I believe history was made. The mission of the Peace Corps in Uganda is to spread sport programs in the schools, which is exactly what the Commissioner's Sports School program intends to do, and a number of those schools will feature baseball and softball. What was agreed to at the meeting is that when the first 32 schools start in 2013, There will be six of those schools playing baseball and 4 playing softball. Each with at least a 4 team league playing a full schedule of games at the S1 and S2 level and slowly advancing to the S3 and S4 level and then to the S5 and S6 level over time. Starting in the April-May 2013 time period, each of these schools will come to the complex at government expense to play for the National Secondary School Championships. The Peace Corps will assign newly in country volunteers with a background in Physical Education training to these baseball/softball schools to teach the teachers to become coaches and oversee the programs at each school. The schools may also have as many as two Peace Corps volunteers to also assist in track, soccer, and basketball. The government will be supplying funds for these programs in terms of pay, equipment and facilities. The Peace Corps Volunteers will do their in country training at the Little League Complex in November.

In January, the schools will be sending the future baseball and softball teacher/coaches to the complex along with their designated Peace Corp Volunteers to be trained on playing, coaching and umpiring the game of baseball and softball. Between some of the other programs that want to join the Uganda Little League program, we expect that we will be housing about 100 future coaches for our two week January program. The Sports Commissioner's Secondary School program officially launches right after our two week training program, but working with him, we already have a softball school and a baseball school operating this year. When 2013 comes, those 32 schools will represent only 25% of the final number of Sport Schools. Thus, this will be a joint program of Little League Baseball, The Peace Corps and the Uganda Sports Commissioner to expand baseball and softball all over Uganda over the next couple of years.

Two other significant events happened in March. A College Baseball player from California came to Uganda in early March He is staying until late May in the Jinja area helping to train Little League Baseball and softball players in Jinja and Lugazi. In addition, a gentleman from Taiwan arrived about 2 weeks ago with the intention of staying for several years and using that time to develop baseball players. Working with the Commissioner, he will be working at one of the Sport Schools monitoring and training coaches and players on how to play baseball. Both of these travelers have come on their own at their own expense. We will do our best to make their time in Uganda a most rewarding experience. They will both be at the complex during our tournaments.
 

Medical:

Uganda Cancer Research Center has been formally registered in Uganda.  We have an agreement to establish the center to cure prostate cancer as soon as we can build the building and obtain the staff.  We already have the land with power and water at the site.  To do that, we are now searching for a grant of $1,000,000.  Once that grant is obtained, we expect the building to be finished in 6 months time.  The HIFU company will supply the instrument to cure the prostate cancer as soon as the building is ready.  Esaote will send the mammogram machine and the hand held ultra sound instrument that they have already donated.  If we get a grant for additional money, we will begin to do breast examinations and needle biopsies.  The Techniscan instruments are expected to be ready by early 2012.  In order to install them and set up the communications and computer network will take an additional 2.5 million in grant money.  That money would allow us to do the breast examinations and breast cancer treatments at no cost for the women for 5 years.  We now need the grant money.