It was a return trip to Jolly Lux’s home country of Uganda in 2011 that caused her to start the Avon-based Non-profit, Guiding Light Orphans.
“I didn’t know that was going to be a day that would change my life completely,” said Lux, who moved to the United States in 2000 and lives in Burlington with her husband, Kurt Lux.
Lux was visiting her aunt, a politician in Uganda, when a chance encounter with a woman became the inspiration that started her non-profit.
“A young woman came out of the crowd and approached me,” Lux said. “She wanted to share something with me. I didn’t know this woman would change my life completely. I don’t even know her name.”
The woman proceeded to tell Lux that her husband had AIDS and died four years prior. She then shared that she too had AIDS. Her worry, though, was about who would take care of their 4-year-old son after she died.
Lux didn’t have an answer. She wanted to have an answer. The woman disappeared into the crowd and Lux never saw her again.
“I didn’t know how to answer that,” Lux said. “I was just blank. Usually I am the kind of person who is looking for creative ways to respond to things. But in that moment, I had nothing at all.”
When she returned home, she and her husband worked to start Guiding Light Orphans, a nonprofit that provides healthcare to the people of the Masindi district in Uganda.
Right now, the nonprofit holds medical camps twice a year, where it serves more than 4,000 people. It trains villagers who become part of their village health teams and become health ambassadors. It also participates in epilepsy intervention, because knowledge of epilepsy is scarce in Uganda and is feared.
“We try to provide them with the most knowledge as we can,” Lux said. “They are the ones bridging the gap between their neighbors, who are the patients, and the healthcare facilities.”
Lux has bigger plans that include using two rooms donated by a church in Nyantonzi, Uganda as a medical clinic that will serve 26 villages. A $20,000 grant, donated by the Cigna Foundation, has gone a long way in helping convert those rooms and a shipping container into the exam room, storage area, patient reception area, and laboratory it needs.
Judy Hartling, a civic affairs specialist with Cigna, said they decided to support Lux and Guiding Light Orphans because what she’s doing in terms of healthcare and empowering villagers with knowledge about healthcare is important and innovative.
“What Jolly is doing and in the way that she’s doing it is pretty groundbreaking,” Hartling said. “Community health workers are just starting to become popular in the United States and have been proven as a way to address a lack of healthcare. These workers go out and are effective. Seeing the way Jolly went about it, it made so much sense.”
The next step is buying equipment and medication to make that clinic functional. A dinner fundraiser is being held on June 17, at the Tower Ridge Country Club in Simsbury, to further assist the cause. Tickets can be purchased at glo-fest.com.
“They need basic healthcare,” Lux said. “That’s our main goal with this community because at the end of the day, that’s what they need. That’s what is going to sustain and hopefully empower this community.”
Lux said it’s the people in Uganda who are passionate about what she’s doing there that makes Guiding Light Orphans possible.
“It’s the resilience of the people,” Lux said. “We believe in their resilience and we see the potential. That keeps us going. If we see no potential in them, we’d get discouraged. They want it. They are willing to give what they have. Their potential drives us to want to do more.”
