Cobras!

Abba Father's House and their neighbours are experiencing a cobra scare for the past five weeks. This was caused by the bush clearance works recently carried out by Busoga kingdom in preparation of their shrines for the inauguration occasion of the new king for Busoga. The process left the cobras homeless and they started seeking for shelter and food from the nearby homes including Abba Father's House.

Cobras are very poisonous and one bite can cause instant death. As most of you are aware the past 4 weeks have been critical for people who reside at the centre and the neighbours. It has been difficult for the children and staff to have sound sleep lately as five massive cobras were killed in just one week in our neighbouring village.

At AFH, the cobras attacked our chickens and turkeys and they killed three of our turkeys which were hatching eggs at the time within two weeks. They ate lots of eggs but our Security Guard managed to kill two of the mighty cobras.

The cobra believed to be biggest attacked the neighbouring school (our next door neighbours), ate four chickens and lots of eggs but they also managed to kill as it was too full to defend itself or escape.

At the moment, we are sprinkling used engine oil around the poultry house and the mushroom house for the past three weeks as we believe the cobras don’t like the smell of engine oil and it seems to have worked so far. We are also looking for moth balls as advised by some of our partners which we will send to Uganda to keep the cobras away.

Environmental Issues

As all the trees on the shrine hill were also cut, we now face an environmental problem as there are no trees around a part from a few eucalyptus trees planted further down by Jinja Central School. AFH is located on a hill and its quite windy most of the time and without trees, our house roofs gets shaken by the wind. Definitely the person who was in charge of the operation was very ignorant about environmental protection which is very upsetting.

We are grateful for the advice received from some of you and your prayers to God for the safety of the children, staff and neighbours.

We are also grateful to God for giving our Security Guard courage and wisdom to successfully attack and kill the cobras when no one else could dare touch them for fear of their own lives. Despite the loss of turkeys, we are very grateful to God for the children, staff and neighbour’s safety.

Please continue to include us in your prayers for God’s protection and also let us know what can be done to stop cobras access to our home.

Thank you