A NEW Scot who has spent lockdown solving “seemingly impossible problems”, including coping with a 500% rise in demand for the food bank he manages, has turned his efforts to helping a flood-ravaged settlement in Uganda.

Mark Frankland, who runs the First Base Agency food bank covering Dumfries and Galloway, came to Scotland in the mid-90s from Blackburn, as the white half of a mixed-race couple with two mixed-race boys, after it became clear his hometown was no place to raise them.

The author, blogger and independence activist has been managing the food bank for 17 years, but when the lockdown started he saw its £4000 of food donations disappear.

However, First Base has now gone from 100 food parcels on a busy week to 550 because of what he called “unbelievable support” from the Scottish Government, Dumfries and Galloway Council, online donations and a “small army of brilliant volunteers”. He said: “Everything about the last couple of months has made me happier than ever about our decision to leave England behind and to become New Scots.

“What a relief it is to live in a country where track and tracing will be carried out by local health boards and councils rather than Serco or similar dodgy corporations who happen to have bunged a few quid to the Tory party.”

Frankland was involved in setting up a charity in Uganda called the Kupata Project, which distributes sanitary products to schoolgirls and on his last trip there he met a young man in his 20s called Rabson, who he described as “probably the most self-made man I have ever met”.

Writing on his blog, he said Rabson’s lockdown day made his look like a Sunday afternoon picnic, hence his latest cause: “Lockdown in Uganda meant the borders were closed. No more tourists. No more visitors. Nobody to take out on gorilla safaris. No income. No nothing.”

It meant millions of people went from having not very much to having nothing at all, so Rabson headed back to his hometown of Kasese to find a way of putting food on the family table.

Frankland said Mother Nature then intervened with the bottomless cruelty she often reserved for Africa with a vast deluge of rain that overwhelmed the land.

“Tides of mud crashed through the town destroying houses and lives,” he said. “Bridges were ripped away, the hospital was wrecked, people perished in a sea of cloying liquid mud … And with the whole country clamped into lockdown, there was absolutely nobody there to help.

“Not the government in Kampala. Not the UN. Not the Red Cross.”

Rabson, though, took on the challenge of stopping the countdown to starvation with his mobile phone and his wits.

He took to Facebook with the story of the 50 men, women and children in the makeshift camp to tourists he had previously taken to visit gorillas in his country and collected their donations through his phone. Then he went shopping for Posha – maize meal, 4kg of which can keep a person alive for a week. Frankland sent £100 to Peace, their volunteer in Kabale, asking her to get the cash to Rabson and find a way to get sanitary products to the women and girls in the camp.

The pair have managed to keep the camp afloat, but now Frankland said he wanted to help secure its future.

“Quite frankly, I am in awe. My food crisis has been nothing in comparison to Rabson’s … The Kupata Project is all about providing sanitary pads to schoolgirls, so we can’t use any of the funds we have raised so far to provide emergency food. But any funds we raise in the wake of this blog can be used for emergency food.”

The project’s fundraising page can be found at www.givey.com/kupata.