Welcome to Friends of Kagando
Kagando is a Christian rural development centre based around a district general hospital 15 miles from the border of Uganda with the Democratic Republic of Congo. To the North West of the hospital lie the Ruwenzori Mountains, rising to a snow and glacier capped 17,000 feet. To the South lies the equator just 4 miles away, and the open expanses of the Great Rift Valley that drives a rift down through Africa from the Middle East. With the hospital is a network of community projects ranging from a nurses and midwives training school, community health programme, AIDS counselling and treatment centre, demonstration farm, grinding mill, micro-loan scheme, primary school (started as a nursery school for staff children, this has grown to serve 450 children, covering the full range of primary education), technical school, orphanage, and workshops that help to serve the project.
Until the mid 1960s Kagando was a government leprosy settlement, housing patients in Nissan huts. At that time missionaries working for Africa Inland Mission were invited to use the buildings to start a hospital because leprosy patients were being housed back into the local community. In 1980 a community health programme was set up as a result of a cholera epidemic, a plan for a new hospital was begun, along with an hydro electric scheme from the nearby river, and clean water was piped in from springs in the mountains.
Now the hospital is run by a board of governors under the Church of Uganda; all the doctors are Ugandan as are the matron, the principal of the nurses’ training school, the project director and the administrative staff. They are supported by missionaries from Africa Inland Mission (a physiotherapist) and Church Missionary Society (a children’s nurse). Central to the purpose of Kagando is to demonstrate God’s love in practical caring for the weak and suffering, and to preach the gospel of Christ to a needy world.
Friends of Kagando is a UK charity (Charity Number 1100302) that was set up two years ago and their aims are to support all those who live and work there by praying for them, stimulating interest and financial support, encouraging others to visit, organising teaching sessions by medical experts and sending what we can in the way of material goods.