WHEN PEOPLE IN SCOTLAND STEP UP TO FEED A THOUSAND STARVING PEOPLE IN UGANDA ... WELL, IT'S A PRETTY GOOD LOOK.

A couple of weeks ago I became involved with a food crisis in Africa. I know it sounds nuts, but the whole thing was pretty much an accident.

It went something like this.

Three years ago, Carol and I set up a small charity called the Kupata Project. We asked people in Scotland if they could help us provide sanitary pads to school girls in Uganda who were missing 25% of their time in school. Happily, lots of Scottish people were happy to chip in and the Kupata Project is now able to provide pads to 2000 school girls every year.

Over the last three years, we have been lucky enough to have been able to put together a small team of absolutely fantastic young Ugandan volunteers who make sure everything goes to plan on the ground.

Which brings me to a fortnight ago. My Facebook feed started to tell me the extraordinary story of one of these young volunteers: Rabson.

Endless days of record breaking rain had cascaded down onto the Mountains of the Moon. Climate change at its most brutal. The towering peaks gathered in the billions of gallons of water and threw it down onto the plains below. 

Roaring. Raging. Unstoppable.

One day there were houses. Homes. The next day there was this.

Lives were obliterated. Terrified survivors gathered up what they could and built makeshift camps on spare patches of high ground.

The town was Kasese. Rabson's home town. When the floods hit, the Covid 19 lockdown meant Rabson's work as a tour guide had dried up. He was back in his home village wondering how on earth he was going to feed his young family. He could have easily have allowed himself to sink into a pit of self pity.

He didn't. Instead he chose to take the fate of over 1000 flood refugees onto his young shoulders. His resources? A mobile phone, a Facebook page and the contacts of tourists he had guided over the years.

Carol and I heard his call and sent a donation of our own. It barely scratched the surface.

Should the Kupata Project try to help out? Of course it should.

So I wrote a blog and I did my best to tell Rabson's story. I asked if any readers might be minded to offer a helping hand to one remarkable young man trying to achieve the impossible.

Well. Yet again the people of Scotland came through in spades. Over the last two weeks £2500 has come into the Kupata coffers.

We have been in constant contact with Rabson and our head volunteer, Peace. Peace is a super smart young woman with an absolute motherload of common sense and wisdom. She constantly keeps us on the straight and narrow. At times we have been in danger of acting like typical sentimental westerners. Peace always slaps down any such nonsense. She keeps us focussed.

There is a full lockdown in place in Kabale Province and a tortuous five hour drive separated Peace from Rabson and the refugees. Not that Peace was ever about to be deterred. She nagged and lobbied and was soon in possession of an emergency travel permit.

She blagged a vehicle, rallied up two fellow volunteers and they headed north into the heart of the catastrophe.

We had a small difference of opinion as we did the sums. How far could £2500 stretch? What were the absolute necessities? Like typical sentimental Westerners, we insisted on every young child getting a lollipop. Peace rolled her eyes and gritted her teeth, but in the end she allowed it. It has to be said, she seemed to have a pretty wide smile on her face when she handed out the lollipops.

Just saying! Check it out.

The sums came up with the following solution.

200 families.

6 weeks

Enough available funds for a weekly ration of the following.

5kg Cassava Meal

1kg 'Posha' which is Maize meal.

'Brown porridge' for babies.

Half a bar of soap.

The absolute basics. Not enough to stop the hunger pangs. But enough to stave off starvation. We suggested a little less starch and some peas and beans for protein. Peace had a consultation with the elders and they roundly rejected our thinking. They wanted every penny spent on the maximum amount of food and no fancy nutritional thinking. We didn't argue. I have never known what starvation feels like and I hope I never do. These people know all about the desperate grinding reality of starvation. They have first hand expertise.

They know best.

Here is the team making the Kupata Project's first delivery. It's what it looks like when people in Scotland step up to help desperate families many, many thousands of miles away.

I suggest it is a pretty good look. If you are one of the many people who did their bit to help Rabson, I hope these pictures make you feel pretty good about yourself. So you should.

So. Where are we now? Well, like I said. We have enough for six weeks. Peace asked about and gave us a report. It didn't make for happy reading. There is little or no sign of the Ugandan Government intervening to help Rabson's refugees. They have been told there is no point in rebuilding their homes. Climate change means the historic floods of 2020 will now become yet another 'New Normal'. They need a new place to live and hopefully such a place will eventually be provided.

Until that day comes, they are marooned. 1000 refugees in a world where there are tens of millions. 200 families in a makeshift camp in the shadow of the Mountains of the Moon.

Rabson's people. Rabson's List. Will everything be better in six weeks time? Probably not.

Which means our starvation maths look likely to continue for a while.

200 families.

1000 souls

5kg cassava meal per family per week

1kg maize meal per week.

Brown porridge and half a bar of soap.

Lollipops? We'll see I guess. I'll have to build up my courage before putting the idea to Peace!

£400 a week.

£65 a day.

It isn't an impossible sum, surely? All we can do is to keep telling the story and Rabson and Peace and the fantastic young people down in Kabale Province who all have the hearts of lions.

Every last penny is going to count and you have my absolute promise that every single penny we manage to raise will be spent on food and nothing else.

If you are able to help out, you can find the Kupata Project online fundraising page via the link below.

THE KUPATA PROJECT ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

THE PURE, UNREFINED JOY OF SEEING A STATUE THROWN INTO A HARBOUR.

Oh those moments of pure, unrefined joy. They are few and far between. Sometimes they can be entirely predictable. Other times, well they come as a complete surprise.

Like an emotional league table I guess,

So. The utterly predictable moments. Birth of kids. No surprises there.

Then there are moments which you can see coming, but when they arrive they still take you by storm.

Midnight on a chilly spring night in Istanbul. 30,000 brain frazzed Scousers wait on one guy in the white shirt of AC Milan and one guy in the green goalie's shirt of Liverpool FC. Europe's finest striker versus a the son of a coal miner from Upper Silesia.

Andre Shevchenko versus Jerzy Dudek. Just a few yards between them. And when the coal miner's son saves the Ukrainian's penalty, an explosion of euphoria sweeps through the 30,000 travelling Scousers.

Including me. And my two sons. We had made our way to Istanbul hoping for something memorable. Instead we found a near miracle. A game for the ages. Sporting history. And who in their right mind could have predicted any of it?

Next up. A young me in India. 82. Maybe 83. Washed out and tropically ill. In a kind of daze as I threaded my way through the chaotic streets of Agra. As hot as a radiator. A threadbare Hippy Pied Piper with a rag tag entourage of street kids at my heels

In town to tick a box.

The Taj Mahal.

I can't pretend to have known much about the Taj Mahal. I was in Agra. A 50p a night mattress on a baking hot roof. But if you are in Agra, you tend to go and see the Taj Mahal.

Did I have great expectations? Not really. I've never been a buildings kind of guy.

I stepped out of the madness of the streets and through and arch and...

It was like being slapped. It stopped me dead in my tracks. And a wholy unexpected tide of joy washed through me. I had never before seen anything made by my fellow man which was so completely perfect. Flawless. Miraculous.

And I have never seen anything like it since.

Unexpected joy. Pure, unrefined joy straight out of a clear blue Indian sky.

Kerpow bang. Is that how you spell kerpow? I have'nae a clue.

Over the last few days I have had two similarly unexpected moments of sheer joy.

The first moment arrived care of the Mayor of Washington DC, Murial Bowser.

You know her. Here she is.

What a moment of absolute genius. To order the painting of a street with giant yellow letters right under the nose of the wannabe tyrant. With these vast, garish words she became Trump's very worst nightmare. A super smart black woman right there in his bloated face. Rubbing it in. Making him look smaller than small. Pushing hard in the back. Propelling him towards the exit door and a waiting prison cell. Americans with brains in their heads could easily enough understand the realities of the situation. The President might be the most powerful person in the world. He has the ability to destroy the whole of our planet in a single nuclear tantrum. But when it comes to what can or cannot be painted on a Washington street, he is every bit as powerless as you and I are.

Not that his racist cult followers will see it that way. They will stare dumbly at their TV's and wonder how can he possibly allow such a thing to happen. Surely their great hero will never stand for it. Surely he will sign one of his fabled executive orders to command a team of black prisoners in stripy uniforms to get out there in chains to scrub the giant letters into oblivion.

Imagine how they must feel to see the great leader so completely and utterly humiliated by a woman.

A black woman.

Oh yeah. Pure joy.

But that moment of pure joy was soon to be eclipsed.

Let me hit rewind for a moment. Racism has always disgusted me. In the street wars of 1970's Blackburn, I was never on the side of the road where Skinheads in their Doc Martins spat out their venom.

Then things moved to a whole different level when I became the white half of a mixed race family: a father to two brown boys. It got personal. Really personal. As personal as personal gets. And yes, I had that conversation with my sons. Never get lippy with the cops because you just never know. I thank my lucky stars the lads didn't have to grow up in 1970's Blackburn. Or the United States today.

There have been incidents when they have wound up in the cells for the crime of their skin colour. But they have never been beaten. They have never been killed. And when I watched the slow death of George Floyd, I could in a very small way feel the nightmare his family are living through.

Early nineties. A cheap and cheerful package holiday to the Gambia. A hired jeep which wouldn't have come within a country mile of passing one of our MOT tests.

Parked up by a river under the burning sun. A baked silence clamped down of the lush green. Dyonne and Courtney playing with a bunch of local kids by a sluggish river. Dyonne is eight. Courtney is two.

I squint and stare through the brightness to a small island in the middle of the river. Thick vegetation and no sign of human life. Well. Not quite. No sign of currant human life. Through the leaves and the twisting vines it is just about possible to make out the shape of a long collapsed building.

And then it hits me. Like a punch in the stomach.

It's a slave fort. An old British slave fort from way back when. And ice slides down my spine. Endless millions of unseen ghosts seem to be all around me. And as I watch my sons playing at the water's edge, I can almost hear the long lost voices of their ancestors. Maybe they had been held on this very island. In chains. In squalor. In utter degredation. In fear. In bottomless terror. Locked down and waiting on the next boat to Barbados.

Weeks and months of fetid air and dysentery and daily death. Then the market place to be sold like farm animals. Then the slow death of the sugar fields.

And somehow they made it through. Survived it. Lived to pass on their genes. Their legacy. Over centuries and oceans all the way to the veins and arteries of my two sons. A full circle. From Africa to Barbados to the UK and back to Africa.

A journey completed after 400 years.

The sensation stayed with me and when my God daughter Carmen turned 18, I did my best to commit my African riverbank feelings into a short story for her.

I called it Mpene. The story of a young African girl who made it through the Middle Passage and passed on her stubborn ferocity down the centuries. All the way to Carmen.

You can read it here if you like. It isn't long. 20 pages or so. I have made it into a free download instead of the usual 99p.

GET FREE COPY OF 'MPENE' ON AMAZON

My afternoon on the river bank left me with feelings of shame and cold rage. Shame at what my people had done. Rage at what my people had done. The deed. The lies. The manipulation of history. The 400 year whitewash.

A 400 year whitewash designed to airbrush the very existance of Dyonne and Courtney's ancestors from memory. From History.

For years I have been trying to find the right fiction. One day before I die I am determined to write a book about slavery. A book for those ancestors whose ghosts I so strongly sensed by an African river bank.

Here are a couple of facts for you to chew on which will one day find their way into the book I hope to write.

The Brits first claimed the island of Barbados in the early seventeenth century. Experiments were carried out and it was soon clear that growing sugar cane was going to be a goer. A money spinner. A game changer.

But there was a problem. Growing sugar cane needed a whole bunch of people to dig and cut and squeeze. Barbados was basically unpopulated, so the required people needed to be imported. And the new masters of the island had no interest in paying out any wages.

In 1650, the English and the Scots fought it out at the battle of Dunbar. The English won and 3000 Scottish prisoners were put on a forced march all the way to York. In chains. Once they arrived in the city, they were locked up in the cathedral and then sold as slaves and put on boats to Barbados to be worked to death in the sugar fields.

For decades the island's cane was hacked down by Scottish slaves. But problems soon emerged. Scottish slaves were OK in a European climate. In Barbados, they dropped like flies under the burning sun. Something better was required. Something more robust. Better adapted to the heat and the disease. And so it was the planation owners started buying African. And for years African slaves worked shoulder to shoulder with the sons and daughters of the Scottish slaves. The Africans liked to take the piss when the pale skin of their Scottish brothers and sisters burnt in the sun.

They awarded them with a nick name.

'Redlegs'. 

And the island is still home to a village of 'Redlegs'.

Fact two.

The live of expectancy of an African slave being sold in Bridgetown market in 1700 was less than the life expectancy of a Jew getting off the train at Auschwitz Birkenau in 1943. Yeah, you read it right.

LESS THAN

When it came down to sheer, off the scales brutality we actually outdid the Nazis.

My son's ancestors lived through that. Christ knows how.

So when a street mob in Bristol ripped down the stature of Edward Colston, I felt a tide of pure unrefined joy wash through me.

And when a street mob in Bristol dragged his bronze carcass through the streets, I felt a tide of unrefined joy was through me.

And when a crowd in Bristol threw his memory into the waters of the harbour, I feld a tide of pure unrefined joy wash through me.

Who knows. Maybe among the 80,000 human lives Colston traded were the lives of the ancestors of my sons. Figures on a ledger. A purchase. A sale. A profit made and booked. And stashed.

The most lucrative crime against humanity in the history of our species.

And after the joy came a moment of delusional hope. I hoped somehow, somewhere the ancestors of my sons were watching. Looking down as the ripples spread out and across the waters of the harbour. Looking down on a long belated payback. Looking down on a curtain being ripped open after 400 long years. Looking down as the fetid, poisonous truth of what we did was finally thrown out into the open.

400 years is a bloody long time. But their blood still runs through the arteries and veins of my two sons. And the bronze memory of Edward Colston is buried in the mud.

Where it belongs.

HUNGER GAMES HERE AND HUNGER GAMES FAR AWAY.

I've had a strange week. Really strange. I've been sitting here for a while wondering how to go about the task of committing the last seven days to paper. Smoking. Staring out at the June sunshine. Trying to find a way to make a start.

Well, I have concluded the best approach is to focus on cold, hard facts. So here they are.

This week, I have been involved in two food emergencies. One here in South West Scotland and one many thousand miles away in Kasese, Uganda. The common thread connecting the two is a whole bunch of people with not enough to eat.

But there the similarity stops.

Big time.

I'll take them one at a time. Scotland first.

Once again the foodbank I manage has been required to provide just over 500 people with emergency food over the last week. In normal times this number would have been about a 100. So believe me, 500 is a lot.

It is Saturday now and the task is complete. Every one of the 500 people who needed emergency food has received emergency food. Cupboards aren't exactly full, but they are no longer empty.

To achieve this I have been lucky enough to have been able to call on significant resources.

First Base has a base to work out of in Dumfries where three volunteers are dab hands at handling food in and food out.

Beyond this, we have six distribution centres across the region where a further 20 volunteers handle food in and food out.

A whole bunch more volunteers deliver the food to those who need it.

I move most of the food from A to B in my Arnold Clark transit van.

Providing enough for 500 hungry people of course requires lots of food. Like this much

500 pies

500 rolls

500 portions of homemade Scotch Broth

500 packets of biscuits

500 bags of cereal

500 bags of pasta

500 portions of pasta sauce

500 portions of mashed potato

500 tins of beans

500 tins of rice pudding

500 boxes of eggs

500 pints of milk.

Plus a variety of extras which we add in according to availability.

Some of this stuff is donated, though it's a whole lot less than it was a couple of months ago. Lockdown is pretty ruinous when it comes to getting in food donations.

So coming up with the food listed above needed lots of the most important resource of all.

Cash

Yeah, I know. Duh!

How much? About £3500. Some items were donated, but most had to be bought. All of a sudden First Base is burning through the thick end of £10,000 a month on buying food.

How long does each parcel last? 2 days. Maybe 3 days at a stretch.

Cost per person per day? Let's say £3.50.

Which in my book ain't half bad. You can't expect to help feed 500 people a week on fresh air.

Thankfully we have had the money to spend. We have received funding from the Scottish Government, the local Council, businesses and Trusts as well as overwhelming, jaw dropping generosity from the local community.

All of which means we are well set to help out 500 people again next week. And the week after that.

In the depths of next winter's recession, it might well be a different story. But next winter is quite some time away.

OK.

Food emergency number 2.

Maybe you read my last blog which told the story of a young guy called Rabson who is heroically trying to find a way to feed 1000 people who are hanging on in makeshift camps having seen their homes washed away in a sea of liquid mud.

Three years ago, Carol and I set up a small charity called the Kupata Project. We raise cash here in Scotland to provide sanitary pads to 2000 school girls in Kabale Province, Uganda.

We are lucky to have several brilliant young Ugandan volunteers who make things happen on the ground.

And Rabson is one of these volunteers. His day job is tour guide, but things all went west when Covid 19 came to town. The borders were closed and suddenly his living was gone.

So he went home to Kasase and within days a biblical deluge of rain wreaked havoc and wrecked lives.

The Kupata Project was never set up to be involved in emergency relief work, but we decided it was a case of needs must. If Rabson was willing to take on the mighty task of somehow feeding a thousand desperate people, then it would be quite unnacceptable for us not to try to help him.

So I wrote my blog, asked for donations and crossed my fingers. The response was heart warming. We hoped to raise £400. After a week we have in fact managed to raise £1800. One couple who I will not name gave us £1000. This isn't the first time they have helped First Base and the Kupata Project. They are truly, totally huge hearted people. As Colonel Kurtz said in Apocalypse Now "If I had 40,000 men like that, our problems here would be over very quickly....."

I contacted Peace, our lead volunteer. I asked her to get a handle on the cold hard facts of the situation in Kasese. Here they are.

Ok. 203 families with nothing to eat. How long for? How long until they can make their homes habitable again? Maybe a month?

Maths time.

£1800 to last for a month.

£450 a week. 1057 people. 42.5p per person per week. 7 pence per day.

7 pence.

Christ.

Peace tells me the normal way of sorting things is to distribute weekly to each family.

So started to do to the calculations over WhatsApp. And after a few goes, this was what we managed to come up with.

5 kg Cassava Flour

1 kg Maize Flour

'Brown porridge' for babies

Half a bar of soap.

It's what you get with 7 pence per person per day. It isn't enough. Not nearly enough. An NHS nutritionist would have duck fit, but what can you do?

And when I compare what we helping Rabson to provide in Kasese with what First Base is providing to those in need in Dumfries and Galloway....

Well. It's pretty hard.

It is worth touching on the logistics. When I run food around Dumfries and Galloway, I drive a spanking new hire van along quiet roads. Tarmac roads.

Rabson's task is a tad stiffer. The Cassava meal comes in 65kg sacks. By hook or by crook, he gets two sacks onto on the back of his old motorbike and then he somehow navigates dirt roads with pot holes filled with liquid mud. Not a task for the faint hearted. But nobody could ever say Rabson is faint hearted.

Anyway. Here's the long and short of it. Nobody in Dumfries and Galloway is going to starve to death in June 2020. And nobody in the makeshift camps of Kasese is going to starve to death in June 2020. And for that we should be thankful. And everyone who has helped Forst Base and the Kupata Project to make this happen should be proud of their generosity.

But there is a huge difference. Nobody needs go hungry in Dumfries and Galloway this June. There is enough food available for all. Good food. Nutritious. Plenty enough to maintain life and limb and then some.

Sadly, this isn't the case in Kasese. 7 pence a day is enough to keep them alive, but not enough to drive away the gnawing pain of hunger. 7 pence a day is only enough for starch. We can't afford any protein. Which sadly means the diet is far from healthy.

It is what it is. Can it be better? Well, I have no doubt you already know the answer. Of course it can. If we manage to raise more money, then we can provide more. 15 pence a day is enough for some protein.

I actually hate asking. We are all living through truly miserable times. I get that. But we would dearly love to able to bring the people Rabson is helping in Kasese just a little closer to the people we are helping here in Scotland.

You can find the Kupata Project's online fundraising page by following the link below.

THE KUPATA PROJECT ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

For all of you have given donations to help Rabson, I hope you feel some pride and satisfaction. Because of your generosity, nobody is going to starve. Without it, they might well have done.

And that's quite something, right?

ONE OLD GUY. ONE YOUNG GUY. TWO FOOD EMERGENCIES.

I'm the old guy in this story and my food emergency kicked off in earnest on 23 March. Lockdown day. The day the old world ended and the new world was born. The food bank I manage was presented with a set of seemingly impossible problems. With all churches and offices closed, our usual £4000 a month of food donations were a thing of the past. It was also clear that the days of our being able to spend £500 a week on delivered food from the supermarkets was also a thing of the past. And yet it was also clear that demand for emergency food was about to explode.

The problem seemed all but impossible to solve.

Thankfully as things turned out, my 23 March feeling of dread turned out to be unfounded.

Last week we provided food for 550 emergency food parcels. In the old normal, 100 parcels would have been seemed like a busy week. So. A 500% increase.

People ask me how on earth is First Base managing? How indeed? The answer is actually pretty straight forward. We are managing because we have had unbelievable support.

We have had backing from the Scottish Government and Dumfries and Galloway Council. We have had loads of donations on our online fundraising page. We have had amazing generosity from local food companies. We suddenly have a small army of brilliant volunteers which means more or less every one of the 550 food parcels we issued last week was individually delivered.

The whole thing has grown from the bottom up. In less than a month, a system to rival Amazon Prime has somehow morphed into place. Our local and National governments didn't try to interfere and micromanage. Instead they were wise enough to provide fast track funding. They oiled the wheels and left the community to solve the problem.

And I am pretty sure nobody has gone hungry in Dumfries and Galloway.

It has been a privilage to be a part of what has happened. Truly. My part has mainly been driving my shiny Arnold Clark transit van around the highways and the byways. Blue skies and long views. Referral emails land into the inbox on my phone and every few miles I pull into a lay by to redirect them out to our distribution centres for delivery. A mobile office in the midst of a sun drenched Scottish postcard.

I drive. I co-ordinate. And I spend money. Lots of it. £7000 a month and rising. I can spend the money because First Base has been given the money to spend. Our 500% increase hasn't lifted any of our basic overheads by so much as a single penny. Our monthly spreadsheets show no change for wages, rent, or utilities. The only increase is the cash we spend on bought in food.

With such widespread support, meeting the challenge of the New Normal has actually been surpsingly easy. It goes to show what can be achieved when a community comes together.

We should all be heartened. Proud. Glad to live in a well run country where the old values of community are very much alive and kicking. It is no accident that 82% of Scots approve of the way we are dealing with the Covid 19 crisis. The polls aim the approval at the Government in Edinburgh, but I think it is bigger than that. I think the 82% approval is for all of us and the way we have come together to make sure nobody has been left alone.

Too dewy eyed and wishy washy? Maybe. Everything about the last couple months has made me happier than ever about our decision to leave England behind and to become New Scots. What a relief it is to live in a country where track and tracing will be carried out by local health boards and councils rather than Serco or similar dodgy corporations who happen to have bunged a few quid to the Tory Party. 

Anyway. Enough already. In a nutshell, this has been my part in my food emergency. Challenging but ulitmately hugely satisfying.

Time to move onto the young guy in this story.

Rabson.

And his food emergency. 

And when you have heard about the last two months in Rabson's life, I think like me you will reach the same simple conclusion.

We really don't know we're born.

A little background.

We met Rabson on our last trip to Uganda. We were there to distribute sanitary pads to 2000 schoolgirls in Kabale Province. This is the work of the Kupata Project, a small charity we set up a couple of years ago. 

To get around the place, we hired a Toyota 4x4 from the hotel. The month before we arrived had seen record levels of rain. And believe me, when it rains down there, it really rains. At best, many of the roads are the equivalent of the roughest farm track you will ever find on a Scottish hill farm. If you add in a month's worth of Noah level rain, the roads become lethal.

It is about 10 miles from our hotel to Kabale. The road winds along Lake Bunyoni before heading up and over a mountain. The road snakes and winds up and over and you really don't want to spend too much time looking over the edge. Touch the brake and and you're pretty much sledging. I've done a bunch of driving over the years, but the road to Kabale was a country mile beyond my capabilities.

So it was break glass and ask for Rabson. He would chuckle, catch the keys and throw the Toyota over the hill like a rally driver. He made the impossible seem run of the mill. Had he been on an intensive 4x4 driving course? Of course he hadn't. Somehow he had managed to teach himself.

Rabson is probably the most self made man I have ever met. He has taught himself English as well as twenty local languages. He has self learned all about the animals of Africa. How to find them. Where to find them. How to observe them. And more than anything else, he has taught himself how to solve problems. 

Africa throws up constant problems to overcome. Every hour of every day. Physical problems like roads turned into quagmires. Human problems like bent cops looking for a reason to make your life a misery. Nothing is straightforward and if you're a green as grass Muzungu (White guy), then you need a Rabson to make things go right.

When it comes to sorting things out, Rabson is absolutely world class. Part Artful Dodger, part UN field worker, part PHD high flier.

When we were with him, his life was pretty precarious. Generating enough income to support his family was a constant battle, but he never seemed daunted. If there was a way, then he was confident of finding it.

Well. Rabson's lockdown day made my lockdown day look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.

Lockdown in Uganda meant the borders were closed. No more tourists. No more visitors. Nobody to take out on Gorilla safaris. No income. No nothing.

Lockdown meant millions of Rabsons went from having not a lot to having nothing at all. No furlough schemes. No help for the self employed. No Universal Credit. No nothing.

He headed back to his home town of Kasese and started to get his head around finding a way to put some food on the table for his family.

In Scotland, lockdown means anxiety and boredom and claustrophobia. In Uganda, lockdown means a clock ticking down the days to starvation.

And then Mother Nature decided to intervene with the bottomles cruelty she seems to always save for Africa. The skies turned dark and a vast deluge of rain was thrown down on Kasese. The land was slowly overwhelmed. And then the land slipped and broke. Tides of mud crashed through the town destroying houses and lives. Bridges were ripped away. The hospital was wrecked. People perished in a sea of cloying liquid mud.

Newly homeless and desperate families sought what dry ground they could find and erected makeshift camps. No light. No heat. No food. Minimal shelter. Real deprivation. Ticking clock deprivation.

And with the whole country clamped into lockdown, there was absolutely nobody there to help. Not the Government in Kamapala. Not the UN. Not the Red Cross.

Nobody. The countown to starvation was underway.

A problem. A problem beyond anything we can even start to get our heads around.

A picture paints a thousand words. Well here are many thousands of words. Here is the nightmare world Rabson suddenly found himself in.

Sorry but yes, that is a human leg you are looking at.

So. Here he is. A young guy in his twenties who has just lost his all livelihood, surrounded by a biblical tragedy. How easy it would have been to sink into a pit of despair. But despair isn't Rabson's style.

Instead he chose to take on the problem, just like he had taken on every other problem in his young life. Unlike me, he had virtually no support whatsoever. All he had was a mobile phone and his wits. So he took to Facebook and started to tell the story of fifty men, women and children in a makeshift camp in the midst of a nightmare. He sent the story to people he had taken to photograph the gorillas. People from all corners of the world. He coaxed and cajoled and collected donations through his phone. And with the donations, he went shopping for Posha. Posha is maizemeal and 4kg is enough to keep a person living and breathing for a week.

As I watched his efforts from a digital afar, I wished for the umpteenth time in my life that I had a bank balance like John Grisham. Managing a food bank and writing novels not many people read doesn't give you much of a bank balance. We sent £100 to Peace, our ever wonderful volunteer down in Kabale. We asked her to do her thing and get the cash to Rabson. We also asked her to find a way to get sanitary pads up to the women and girls in the camp.

Between them, Rabson and Peace made things happen. Our £100 was duly turned into a week's worth of Posha and Rabson managed to borrow a motor bike and make the long drive to Kabale to collect the pads.

By hook or by crook, Rabson has found a way to keep the families in the camp afloat. With food and sanitary pads and pots and pans and old clothes and blankets. He has so far been able to solve the problem through ingenuity, determination and sheer force of optimistic will.

Quite frankly, I am in awe. My food crisis has been nothing in comparison to Rabson's food crisis. I have been given so much support and so many resources whilst he has had virtually none.

We live in a world which seems to be slipping over the edge of a cliff into a nightmare. The problems are beyond anything we have seen since the darkest days of the second world war. And really, where do you even start? Billions of people are living through very personal nightmares.

I would like to cut through the enormity of everything and focus in on one remarkable young man who is doing remarkable things in a tiny, forgotten corner of the world.

Rabson.

It is going to take a month or two for the people in the camp to rebuild their homes and their lives. No cavalry are about to ride to the rescue. All they have is Rabson. And my god, they are lucky to have him.

We would like to see if we can help him to help them. The Kupata Project is all about providing sanitary pads to schoolgirls, so we can't use any of the funds we have raised so far to provide emergency food. But any funds we raise in the wake of this blog can be used for emergency food.

To provide 4kg of Posha per week for everyone in the camp for a month costs £400. A fiver each from eighty people.

All I can do is ask for your support because there is a young man out there in the very heart of Africa who is doing something truly remarkable.

I think he deserves our support.

I hope you agree.

Here is the link to the Kupata Project's online fundraising page.

THE KUPATA PROJECT ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

Thanks for taking the time.

HERE'S HOW OUR FOOD BANK IS FINDING ITS WAY IN THE EMERGING NEW NORMAL.

If somebody had asked me a couple of months ago how many food parcels First Base would hand out on a sunny day in May, I guess I would have shrugged. On a busy day, maybe thirty? Possibly forty? And a quiet day? Ten? Something like that.

A couple of months ago, a long stretch of dry sunny weather would have meant the food bank being quieter than normal. More sun means more warmth which means less cash required to feed the meter. And less cash in the meter means more cash for the supermarket. Not rocket science, right?

But that was a couple of months ago. And a couple of months ago meant the old normal. A couple of months ago was a completely different world.

In the emerging new normal of yesterday, the sun shone and 253 food parcels headed out of the door of First Base. And of course if anyone had told me this was going to happen a couple of months ago I would have chuckled at such craziness.

But this kind of craziness has now become our new normal.

Would I have thought First Base capable of sending 253 food parcels out of the door on a sunny day in May? No chance. No chance at all.

And yet we did send out 253 food parcels and amazingly enough, we pretty much did it without breaking sweat. Which is actually quite extraordinary.

So how on earth has everything changed so completely that 253 parcels in one day has become our own new normal?

It is probably worth breaking things down a bit.

I will start with the biggest number. 150 parcels headed 30 miles north up the A76 to the Miners Memorial Hall in Kirkconnel. So here's the first thing. I didn't drive 150 actual parcels up the road to Kirkconnel. Instead my white fan was filled with the ingredients needed to provide a base for 150 food parcels. Once the food was unloaded, it was bagged up and supplemented by whatever additional items were available.

Do I know where all the parcels were delivered? Not really. I know they were handed out to people in the three villages of Sanquhar, Kelloholm and Kirkconnel. People who are stuggling. Finding the ends hard to meet. Fuloughed people. Newly unemployed people. Shielded people. Locked down elderly people. All kinds of people struggling to get by in three small villages where coal mining once provided well paid jobs for all that wanted them.

How?

Well a bunch of local folk have come to together and created a system whereby those who need help get some help. They go street to street. Every street. Sometimes it means picking up a prescription. Sometimes it means a chat from the gate or over the phone. And of course sometimes it means delivering a bag of food. 150 food parcels per week to three villages in the Lowther Hills with a combined population of 6000.

How many volunteers? I can't give you an exact number. Forty, fifty, something like that. They have taken a grip of their local area and sorted it. Brilliant really. Inspiring. Simple and yet utterly effective. Nobody is getting left behind in the old coal mining villages of Upper Nithsdale.

Our role is actually pretty simple. Our role is to send a full van up the valley with enough food to provide a solid base for the volunteers to build on. A pie, a portion of broth, eggs, milk, bicuits, bread rolls, spuds, mash, beans, cereal. Basics, Simple fare, almost all of which is sourced locally. Our job is down to logistics. Secure funds. Secure food. Schedule deliveries. And then local people provide local solutions.

A few miles down the valley is the village of Thornhill where nobody has ever hacked a chunk of coal from the belly of the earth. Thornhill is a leafy kind of place of expensive houses and gently rolling hills. For years our food parcels have been available from the local library. And for years nobody much has needed them. We only deliver four at a time. And more than once the people in the library have called me up to tell me some of the food in the bags is running out of sell by date.

But that was the old normal. The new normal means the small library is closed for the duration. One of our volunteers, John, decided to take the local bull by the horns and he has created a new normal for Thornhill. John is an old Union man. You won't be surprised to hear he doesn't have a poster of Boris Johnson on his living room wall. But he is an old hand when it comes to the whole community organising thing. He fixed for a small community hall to be used as a local hub. He went onto Facebook to ask if anyone had a spare freezer. They did. And we duly filled him up with the core ingredients listed above. 

Next up he door stepped the local Spar and Co-op managers. Would they donate? Would they host a collection box? They would. They did.

Next up he once again talked to the village via Facebook to say he would open the doors of the community centre twice a week for anyone who either wanted to pick up food or to collect food. The first day saw six people with carrier bags filled with offerings. Others stumped up cash. The local Rotary Club pitched in.

Now when I make deliveries, the stuff we provide is in the minority. Tables are laden with packets and tins and homemade jam. John goes shopping for bread and other essentials.

And slowly but surely, a demand started to quietly emerge. Referrals from social workers and health visitors. Calls to First Base. Messages on our Facebook page. Five a week. Ten a week. A couple of large stuggling families.

But John still wasn't happy. In his bones, he could sense the fear of local stigma. Behind the well kept gardens and sturdy front doors were people running out of room on their credit cards. People who never in a million years would have ever imagined ever needing help with filling their food cupboards. Proud people. People suddenly feeling the sharp end of a brutal new normal.

So John worked Facebook and guaranteed complete anonymity to anyone needing help. And he did it again and again, much like he once harried and cajoled workers to sign on the dotted line for the Union.

And over a period of five days last week, he provided emergency food for 35 people. Young and old. Adult and child. In the leafy village of Thornhill. In the gentle sunshine of a Scottish spring.

There are a whole bunch of lessons we need to learn from what John has achieved. Fear of stigma is a cancerous thing. Too many people are terrified to ask for the help they need. They are terrified of the gleeful gossip at the counter of the local Spar shop. You'll never guess who is getting food parcels....... Who'd have thought it !!

John has worried away at the problem like a dog with a bone and seems he has managed to start to break though. Respect.

Anyway. 

Back to our 253 food parcels. 54 went to 12 families of Syrian refugees who have been settled in and around Dumfries. We were asked to help out by the social worker tasked with making sure they are OK. Every Thursday afternoon the deliveries are carried out by Lassaad. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the story of Lassaad and Hela and their four kids. We helped them out as they lived through years and years of the Hostile Environment. We were delighted to have played a part in the family being granted an indefinite leave to remain in Scotland. And now Lassaad is happily giving back. His help means we can deliver the food the refugees need in Arabic. Kevin, Our very own 'Mr Delivroo' could have probably have managed a Dumfries version of Asalaamuakeikum, but that would have been pretty much that! Lassaad is a serious upgrade.

Sorry, Kev.

Ingredients for another thirty parcels headed half a mile across town to the Summerhill Community Centre. This is very much a new normal 'barter trade' kind of deal. The volunteers of Summerhill knock out 500 portions of Scotch Broth a week for us which we freeze and distribute. In turn, we provide base ingredients for 30 food parcels which they add to and deliver out. Do we know where the parcels go? Nope. Are we bothered? Nope. We have known the people at Summerhill Community Centre for years and have absolunte confidence in their local knowledge and judgement. If Carlsberg did community centres.......

And the balance of the 253 parcels? Well these we either collected or delivered by Kev. Referrals from social workers and probation workers and welfare officers. All kinds of workers. Some were ring ins. Some were text ins. Some were Facebook ins. Some were names we have known for years. Some were first timers. In fact most were first timers.

The new normal.

253 people to feed on a sunny day in May. All done and dusted by a whole bunch of volunteers and a sixty year old blogger in a white van care of Arnold Clark. And by the way I best point out the generosity of the aforesaid Arnold Clark who extended our hire for a mere £100 for an extra month.

Without the amazing help of a huge number of people, there is no way we could have provided 253 people with the food they needed in the new normal. Not in a million years. The help we have received since the lockdown slammed home on 23 March has been astounding. 

Overwhelming. Humbling. Inspiring. Stunning.

Help from companies like the Little Bakery and Irvings and Arnold Clark and Brown Brothers and Rab Corder Bathrooms and Morrisons.

Help from everyone who has donated cash to our online fundraising page. Or by bank transfer. Or by cheque. Or in person. Too many to name. 

Help from everyone who has donated food. 

Help from the Scottish Government and Local Council who were decisive and fleet of foot. They managed to give up the beaurocratic habits of a lifetime to get cash to the front line in record time.

Help from what has become a small army of volunteers.

Help, help and more help. Enough help. Amazing help. Help to ensure 253 food parcels was no kind of impossibility. Help to ensure 253 was an achieved reality.

Which means a massive thank you is required to one and all. Required and delivered.

Thank you!

Each passing day sees more and more stuff on the news about spiralling levels of deprivation. America is starting to look increasingly desperate. Much of England is starting to look much the same. I am delighted to be able to report that Dumfries and Galloway seems to have things pretty much covered. And we are delighted to be playing our part. What is happening in real time shows the truly amazing things that can be achieved when National Government, Local Government and local communities find a way to come together. We are going to have to all do a whole lot more of this in the dire months and years which are lying in wait. The new normal will be brutal for millions.

Brutal but not impossible. If we all build on what we have started, then all kinds of solutions will be possible. Community is clearly alive and kicking. Long may it continue.

If you are minded to help us out with a small donation, then you can find our online funding page via the link below.

THE FIRST BASE ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE