THE WORLD SEEMS TO BE GETTING DARKER WITH EVERY PASSING DAY. SO HERE'S SOME LIGHT.

It's still pretty dark through the window. Dawn is arriving like a an old clanking, coal rain. Shades of lightening grey. Maybe it will turn into one of those Scottish autumn days when it never really gets light at all.

Maybe.

I have been knocking about on this planet for close on fifty eight years and I can't recall a time when things felt quite as dark as they do right now. At home, we are obsessed by Brexit and austerity and the historic ineptitude of the squabbling clowns in the so called 'Mother of all Parliaments'. I guess a Martian looking down on human mayhem Twenty First century style would barely notice our angst. Instead their focus would be the re-emergence of the so called 'Strong Men' after eighty years of us having evolved beyond choosing monsters to rule us. We seem to have entered a new era of puffed up idiotic tyrants and their inevitable death squads.

An era of radioactive poison and bone saws. Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world, seems set to elect a certifiable fascist maniac by a landslide. Jair Bolsanoro is an amalgam. He has the jumped up preening vanity of Trump and Idi Amin mixed in the cold killer eyes of Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein. On the stump, he boasts of the part he played in the military junta which ruled Brazil via thousands of torture cells until 1985. He makes no excuses for the part he played in torturing tens of thousands of Brazilians. He has but one regret. He screams it from the podium. He regrets his Junta didn't go further. They should have done more than merely torture leftists and homosexuals and trade unionists. They should have killed a whole lot more. At least 30,000 more says Jair Bolsanoro.

And 61% of his recently polled people agree with him.

As the world warms up and the wild weather hits ever harder, most scientists agree on the importance of the vast forests of the Amazon Basin – our lungs. Our CO2 sponge. Bolsanaro has no time for such wishy, washy whining. He is campaigning to chop the Amzon forest to the ground. All of it Right down to the last tree. He wants millions and millions more cattle. He wants to make his country great by selling beef to Texans.

And 61% of Brazilians are carrying him shoulder high.

The ghost words which Sir Edward Grey spoke almost to himself in the late summer of 1914 come to mind.

"The lights are going out all over Europe."

Delete 'Europe.' Insert 'World'. And when the lights go out, it gets dark.

So. Enough. The window shows a lighter grey. It is time to deliver some light.

Regular readers might recall a blog I wrote a few weeks ago to launch a new charity I am involved in – the Kupata Project. You can find the blog here if you are so minded.

MY BLOG ABOUT THE KUPATA PROJECT

The goal of the Kupata Project is as simple as simple gets. We do our best to raise cash here in Scotland and we spend it on buying sanitary pads for schoolgirls in Uganda. Right now schoolgirls in Uganda miss up 25% of their time in school due to a lack of sanitary pads. 

On a visit to Kabale Province last Novemeber, Carol and I bought six months worth of pads for the 250 girls of the Kamuganguzi Janan Luwum Memorial School. We have a pretty good video which tells the story better than words. It's here. Check it out.

So what happened next? Lots of good stuff. Some light in the dark. As the news of free sanitary pads quietly spread through the green hills, eighty new girls joined the school. Absenteeism has fallen to almost nothing. Incidences of infections have fallen to almost nothing.

More time in school will inevitably meen better educational achievements. And when you mix better educational achievements into a vibrant young country of forty million where the average age is a mere sixteen, all kinds of good stuff happens. Only 10% of young Ugandans have a job which pays a salary at the end of the week. The vast majority are basically self employed. Every morning they wake up with empty pockets. To get by, they hustle. They innovate. They improvise. They plug in and out of flowering micro economies by making their mobile phones do things we can only dream of. They are amazing. Inspirational.

They are the future and every sanitary pad is an investment in the future. Not just their future. Ours too. Scotland will be independent soon. It is coming. And when we finally get the chance to lower the Union Flag from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, we will be needing all of the friends we can get. Of course we will look first to our twenty seven EU neighbours. But then we will look to the long list of countries which were once upon a time coloured pink on the maps of the nineteenth century. Fellow ex colonies. Fellow travellers.

Like Uganda.

Of course the Kupata Project isn't about to provide sanitary pads to every school girl in Uganda. Right now, we have the wherewithal to help out one school for one year. But small acorns, right? Our online fundraising page has so far raised a little over £4000. It's a start. Enough for a ray of light in the thickening darkness.

We make sure the girls know the pads come from the people of Scotland. Fellow travellers. And in time they will grow up and they will remember. And one day we Scots will at last feel grown up enough to cut the London apron strings and assume control of our own destiny. One day we will join Uganda and fifty other countries in the Ex-Colony club.

A shared language and a shared history. Young and old. The bridges we build today can be a big part of our future. If we get it right, we can become the lighthouse in the gathering storm. A beacon. A place where the new fascism is thrown out of court. A wishy, washy pipedream? Maybe. But let's not forget the Enlightenment. Scotland has some pretty impressive previous when it comes to providing light in a dark world. The clue is in the name, right?

Anyway.

They say pictures are worth thousands of words. I guess this isn't the kind of idea a writer of pulp fiction should really be peddling. Maybe. A few days ago our two volunteers in Kabale - Peace and Ambrose – oversaw the delivery of another 6 months worth of sanitary pads to the girls of the Kamuganguzi Janan Luwum Memorial school. Every pad was paid for out of the £4000 you guys gave to our fundraising page.

Peace and Ambrose took a bunch of photos which winged their way through cyber space from the heart of Africa to my phone here in Dumfries. From an ex colony to the last colony. From young to old. From there to here.

And you know what? It's a good look. It brightens up a grey October morning. It is some light

And you know what's coming next. Course you do. The dreaded link. It's right here. And I can give you the same promise as I gave you last time. Every last penny you might be willing to give us will be spent of more of the same.

THE KUPATA PROJECT FUNDRAISING PAGE

More of this. More light. And right now we all need all the light we can get.