I'm writing on behalf of a good friend of mine in Uganda. Most of you reading this know his story and have already volunteered to help him out. There are some updates however and for those of you who don't know about Apollo, I'll give a quick summary.
I met Apollo in Uganda when I spent a couple of months there a couple of years ago. When he and I met, he was working for a great organization called CURE International at a pediatric neurosurgical hospital in Mbale as a peds physical therapist. In Uganda, the PT program, although its nearly equivalent to a four year physical therapy program in the States skills-wise, is a three year certificate program and not a bachelors degree. Apollo would like to get a Master's in public health but can't do that until he has an official BS or BA. Initially, we were working on getting him into a University in the States but it was simply too much money and didn't really make much sense for what he wants to do. I encouraged him to look for other opportunities in Uganda and he has been admitted to and enrolled in the Islamic University. He started on August 6th and is working towards a Bachelor's degree in Health Services Management on the weekends, a requirement by the Ministry of Health so that he can go on to obtain his MPH. If you want to know more about his story, please ask me or I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you directly. That fact that he is alive and has achieved what he has is pretty incredible given the fact that he grew up in Northern Uganda during the time of the Lord's Resistance Army. Most of his friends and family were murdered and Apollo has a heart to help those who have suffered in that area to be rehabilitated (physically and mentally) and currently works in the Gulu area, helping, among other things, to relocate families back to their land. He recently married and thus is supporting his new wife as well as his sister in school.
The breakdown of his expenses are as follows:
School fees, books etc. $2103
Travel (from Gulu to Mbale) for the semester: $760
Room to rent for the weekends: ?
If you'd like to help, let me know. My family started a non-profit called Kythoni, Inc in order to continue to do the work we've been doing in Haiti and elsewhere. I'll write more about that later but I'm mentioning now because this is who you can make checks out to for Apollo and send them to:
Kythoni, Inc
P.O. Box 12724
Wilmington, NC 28405
If you'd rather just transfer the funds to my PayPal account, you can do that to as I will be eventually transferring the funds to Apollo's account in Uganda.
