Greg & Yasmin's Uganda Blog

Radio 1's Greg James and 1Xtra's Yasmin Evans went to Uganda for Comic Relief, supporting Operation Health. It was an ambitious mission to transform a dilapidated health clinic in Eastern Uganda thanks to the hard work of local people - and your support. Head here for information on donating.

With your help, the transformed Iyolwa Clinic is now open!

The run-down clinic in eastern Uganda has gone from a place where people were scared to set foot in, to a fully functioning healthcare facility that the staff and local community can be proud of. Every inch of the old clinic has changed beyond recognition.

The new Health Centre now has a well-equipped delivery suite, incubators, a sterilizer, segregated wards, staff offices, running water, solar panels and most importantly light switches!

Further money raised can help to improve healthcare for thousands more people in communities like this one. See the full transformation on the Comic Relief website.

FINALLY HOME! Here is the final Radio 1 Operation Health total - £551,405.

We could not have kept our focus without you lovely people. Hope you learnt some stuff and enjoyed the story. And well played for that large sum of money. Comic Relief will do so much good with it.

Thanks to the brilliant Radio 1 and 1Xtra team. Yasmin, Joce, Fifi, Chris Smith With The News and all the other helpers we had out here - Jed, Lou, Becky, Adam, Mike, Stephen, Chris, Vicky, Lucy and all the bods back in London at Comic Relief and Radio 1 doing this blog and sorting out the shows etc.

You all helped so much to raise this money and change a lot of stuff. Now all go and have a drink.

And if any of the people we met this week manage to see this blog - thank you for making us feel at home and making it the most memorable experience of our lives. We’ll be back!

Goodbye from Uganda! Gonna miss this place.

I'll stop now before this turns into a full on boring speech x

Early start this morning for me - 5am I was up and about and met some LADS from the building site and had breakfast with them before work. We chatted for ages about the differences between the UK and Uganda and it’s fascinating.

They couldn’t get their heads around the fact that most schools and hospitals in the UK are free, or the fact that we eat burgers. I couldn’t quite get over that a groom-to-be has to give the bride’s family about five cows before he can marry her. It’s called a ‘Bride Price’. I saw the obvious link and made a joke about using the cows we have for burgers and that my girlfriend would be worth at least 100 burgers...

It was then time to commute to work as the sun poked it’s head up over this strangely beautiful country and I set about building a wall with my teacher, Joseph.

Anyway...I can’t quite believe what has happened this week. The news today is that we hit £500,000 in donations from you lovely people and we are all stunned, as this tweet suggests:

A big thank you from everyone here - we obviously couldn’t have reached the total without you. But more than that, your tweets, texts and comments have kept the whole team going. And this isn’t a moan at all, but there were long and difficult days dealing with tragic stories, and you really helped us keep focused on the job in hand.

Obviously, the sadness felt by us isn’t comparable to the sadness of the people involved in some of the stories we have heard out here. The money you’ve raised genuinely changes lives - I’ve seen it with MY EYES!

Here’s a little treat for you from our old pal Emmanuel…

And here's another treat from Grimmy. Or should I say Crabby. Thank you to him and the team for this morning’s efforts. Incredible.

Don’t forget, there’s a Ugandan Newsbeat Special with Chris Smith With The News LIVE from here at 5:45pm. Have a listen, it’s a good one.

I'm not much of a blogger so I'm going to follow Greg's lead seeing as though he's been doing a great job of letting you all know what we've been up to.

So, we are currently on day four of the trip and I can't tell you how much of an amazing experience this has been so far. Everyone is great, the people are great and everyone working alongside us, and of course everyone back home supporting us!

Today we went back to Iyolwa and spent most of our time in the waiting area with new mothers and their gorgeous babies. Thursday is the day the children get weighed and await their vaccinations. I fell in love with one baby in particular, Faith, she continuously smiled and not one of them was crying or even seemed agitated considering the heat and the amount of time they had to wait.

I spoke to Odi, a health volunteer who had recently in the past year become a vaccinator at the clinic. He was very proud of his job and his smile when I revealed the recent total was priceless. He said that more recently they've been able to vaccinate more children at the clinic than ever before!

The fact that one vaccination can protect a child from five diseases was such an incentive to really tell you all how much your donations mean!

During our time there a young woman, aged just 17 gave birth to her first baby, a son named Joseph. It was so lovely to hear that she was able to give birth in a comfortable place with everything she needed in the current temporary maternity ward.

Yesterday we went to Tororo hospital and it was very difficult for myself and Greg to see such horrific conditions that children had to experience, in somewhere you would have thought would make them better. Greg explained it in his blog yesterday so scroll down for more on that.

To see first hand the difference between Tororo hospital and the current temporary clinic in Iyolwa meant the determination was much heavier for us both. It was so clear how much the donations really make a difference! Today I saw so many children leave the clinic having had their vaccinations - it was incredible.

We also took a visit to the school close by, and let me tell you I have never experienced a welcome like it!! Dancing, drums, singing, they even got Greg twerking!!

We demonstrated how to assembled mosquito nets and then helped the teachers distribute them. The Dr at the school said that 60% of the children at that school don't sleep with nets and today every child received one to take home to their parents!

How amazing is that?! It's so great to see that the children won't have to suffer and the right precautions are in place because of the help of others :)

Keep up to date with everything that's going on guys! These people are inspirational!

Yas xxx

Thank you so much to Grimmy and Alan Carr and the breakfast show listeners today - we set a target for day 3 of £80k by 7pm. It turns out you all reached that total by 10am. Ridiculous.

Bringing the grand total SO far to £266,740.

As the rain falls down here at base camp, I want to just reflect on whats been an incredibly sad afternoon.

I want to pose something to you. Imagine this was your local hospital:

It was like walking into Victorian times. But I saw it today, in 2015. And it shocked me.

I'm not going to sit here and mope and say 'woe is me' at all. That is not what this week is about. But what it is about is trying to change things. For example, there should not be mosquito nets that don't fit over the beds, there should not be smashed windows, urine on the floor, damp on the ceiling or mouldy mattresses on the beds.

And there certainly shouldn't be goats and chickens running around the grounds and corridors.

The scariest thing is that the nurses I spoke to didn't know any different. They work in these conditions and yet still have to try and save people. They didn't know that this isn't how a hospital should be.

It's about educating communities and health workers and that is exactly where your money will go. I just wanted to share that with you all and I hope that this makes you, as it does me, even more determined to help. I saw some little kids in there who shouldn't have fallen ill in the first place. Malaria for example is a completely preventable disease. The staff at these hospitals not only have to treat these people, but have to fight the conditions too, making their jobs so much harder. And that's not fair. Well I don't think it is anyway.

You have been amazing with your generosity so far. Please continue to support the wonderful people I have been meeting this week. Head here to find out how to donate.

An update from the news desk!

Hello! Chris here. While you've been hearing Greg and Yasmin on the radio, I've been beetling about behind the scenes getting some reports ready for Newsbeat which you can hear today, tomorrow and Friday.

I've jumped on a bike to cycle the 15 miles to Tororo Hospital - which is something many people have to do here when they need treatment. Even heavily pregnant mums sometimes have to get a lift on a bike. I've been sampling a bit of Ugandan street food - you can read all about that over on the Newsbeat homepage. And today I've been chatting to some young people from Iyolwa about their lives.

Although the whole thing turned into a bit of a Q&A about life in the UK... Yasmin and I struggled to explain fish and chips; there were gasps as I explained how going to uni costs 24 million Uganda shillings a year; and some of the young men seemed very interested in how they could get in touch with girls from UK.

But there were also questions about abortion, STIs, looking for work... all in all a really fascinating hour. You should be able to hear some of it on Friday's Newsbeat. Mostly Yas and I struggling to explain a pizza - needs to be heard to be believed: "It's kind of like a chapati - with tomatoes and cheese on top..."

Day 2 comes to an end. We are sweaty, dusty and smelly but very happy with how well it’s gone so far. Operation Health for Comic Relief is ON!

At 7:18pm local time (3 hours ahead of UK by the way), Scott Mills came up with the brilliant idea of trying to raise £50,000 in his show and if he did, Chris Stark would drop to his pants and climb aboard the Wheel of Liverpool (where they did their show from today).

Did you disappoint? Of COURSE not. Insane. £60,000 was raised in just TWO HOURS as Chris entered the pod. It happened.

We can’t quite believe we managed to raise that total. Thank you to all of you, thanks to Scott for the idea and lastly, thank you Stark for being such a good sport.

The total as I type is £148,347 in one and a bit days. This is WAY beyond what we were hoping for at this stage. Thank you all for showing such passion for this story we’re telling - you’re making such a difference.

Here’s me, Chris Smith and Yasmin Evans as we revealed they’d made the £50k target!

Dinner time. Delirious.

More tomorrow.

This is the Iyolwa clinic before work started. Head here to find out more about Comic Relief and Operation Health.

Lunchtime! Time to take stock of the last few days.

I have met some very interesting people along the way, and the stories are incredible. The money you are raising is making such an immediate difference to this area and the surrounding community.

I was particularly proud of Dev and all my regular listeners last night who took the time to be part of the #Magical5000 who decided THEY wanted to be the people to take us over the Day 1 target of £40,000. It gave us such a lift at the end of a hard day.

I can’t thank you enough for your generosity so far - beyond what we’d hoped to raise by this point. The looks on people’s faces when we pass on the news of the amount of money raised make the whole thing worthwhile.

The team are all doing well. It’s a hard slog but 100% worth it. Hope you’re enjoying all the coverage and learning lots about this fascinating part of the world. I know I am!

Personally, I’ve spent the last 10 minutes trying to get a chicken out of our broadcasting hut, served lunch for the workforce, danced with some kids to Katy Perry's Roar, and realised that I’ve only got one day of pants left. Balls.

We arrived on Saturday night at midnight and Saturday night at midnight in Kampala is lively. Very lively. Home to millions of people, it is a noisy, bustling capital city and the streets are full. A mixture of billboard advert for phone companies and beer, bright lights of some bars and clubs and some desperately poor looking slums.

As we zoomed through the various suburbs you could hear snippets of street parties going late on into the night - it was like someone going through the stations on a radio really quickly as the music varied from bar to bar. We arrived like zombies at our overnight stop at 3am, and were due to be up at 7am to continue the journey. Ah. Wash face. Wee. Mosquito spray. Sweat it off. Collapse.

With 100km to our destination today, I am sat typing as we hurtle through the countryside. Town after town bumps past; cattle, farmland, churches, small bars and swarms of people everywhere busy going about their Sunday morning. Washing, cleaning, herding, picking, delivering, cooking, churchgoing. It's all things I recognise but set against a backdrop I really don't. Except the herding. I've never herded before.

The journey mainly consists of dodging things. So far; three goats, one very thin cow, a cart with pineapples on it and a baboon nearly met their end. Yep baboons just chilling by the side of the road. Absolutely normal. Here's a rushed awful photo of one:

Worst pic ever of a baboon. Can you even see it?

So far we have been mainly travelling and I can't wait to actually meet some of the locals out here and learn more about this fascinating, beautiful but dangerous country.

Tororo is going to be our main base for the week and is about 20km from Iyolwa, the location of the medical centre (which I've heard is in a desperate state). That's why it will be our focus for the week. Giving the community around that area a brand new facility. I'm sure it's going to be an incredible week.

More soon...keep checking back here and the Radio 1 Instagram to follow the story.