Richard Moore

( Linden Foods and Linergy Ltd)

In 2010 I got the chance to go to Uganda to see the work of a local charity called Fields of Life.

It started several years ago to promote agricultural education in Uganda to help people to help themselves, following near destruction of the country by the Idi Amin regime. It now supports wider education, with over 40,000 children going to school daily, in schools built by people from Northern Ireland in Uganda and neighbouring countries. It also promotes health education, micro-finance for rural women starting businesses and drills wells to supply clean drinking water to villages.

It has a strong Christian ethos, which I do not claim to share, but I was made welcome and realised that anyone can still do a lot to help. Not having a Christian faith was not a good enough excuse to duck out. I was constantly reminded of the old saying, "bad things happen when good people do nothing". I saw a lot of good people helping others to help themselves, and was very challenged to think why I would not at least try to help in some way.

This is not a country suffering famine or natural disasters. It has good soil and good climate but, shattered infrastructure. You can blame the regime, corruption, laziness or whatever but the kids aren't responsible for any of this. More of them die from diarrhoea than from HIV; this is really only the result of having to drink contaminated water. Hence the project.