Sorry for the tardiness of this post, but it couldn’t be helped. The computer battery ran out and the power was out for an extended period of time and we have not had any internet connections until we got home. I am disappointed because this was as important as any other work that we have done and I wanted to share it with you sooner. By the time this gets posted, we will either be travelling between Uganda and Portland or we will be home. While we are looking forward to being home, we hate to leave the beautiful people we have come to love in Uganda and are REALLY not looking forward to the travel. But enough of that, let’s get caught up a little bit.
ARM has a branch of it’s ministry called Mercy Net. This is a ministry that provides food to the neediest of the needy. ARM works with local churches and will work with the local church for three years to develop the program and enable the local church to actually be the ones who will sustain the program in the local area and reach their community. They partner with Children’s Hunger Fund to receive most if not all of their funding for this program.
We went into the slums of Kampala which was a very different experience for any of us who had not been there before. I had heard the team that went last year talk about the slums and have seen them on TV, but really had no concept of what a slum truly was. It is a very bad area in many ways and it was a shock walking into the middle of one for the first time. You can’t imagine the utter poverty until you sit in a “house” there. I say “house” (in quotes) because it is hard to use that term by any understanding we have of what a house is.
We started out the morning with an overview of the project at Word of Life Community Church. They described their program and introduced the people who work there. We then loaded the food to be distributed into bags for individual distribution and headed out. Each family was to receive 2 bags of corn meal, one bag of mixed beans and one bag of rice. They deliver this to the families supported by the church one time each month.
I was fortunate enough to be teamed up with Isaac and Ashley as well as Ruth, the Mercy Net program director for ARM, and two people from Word of Life church. The first house we visited, we were able to share the gospel with the woman who lived there and she accepted Christ. She was a single mother with 3 children under the age of 5. Her husband had abandoned her and her children. This, as we learned, is a very common thing in the slums. We learned that many of the women are either prostitutes to try and earn money, or the husbands are unable to support the family, so just leave. The rate of HIV/AIDS, malaria, cholera, typhoid and many other diseases is very high due to the horrible conditions that people there live in. We praise God that this woman was able to hear the gospel, be saved and that there is a local church to follow up with her.
As we went to the next house, we were feeling encouraged that God had been preparing the way. However good we were feeling, we were not prepared for the quality of life people have there. At house after house, we found similar stories of abandonment, hunger and poverty beyond what we can imagine, living in Canby, Oregon. A couple of days later, I can still picture the people and the way they live. We would arrest people in Oregon for keeping their animals living in such conditions. Here, it is just the way life is.
Ralph and Bryan delivered food to a woman whose home doubled as a “store”. It was described as “about the size of a twin bed”. There was barely any room to stand and the woman had 2 children living there with her. The children stayed under the counter. There was no floor and all of their earthly possessions were contained in that area. She had a couple of trays of vegetables – not horrible, but they said it is certainly nothing that they would buy in a store in Canby. She was trying the best she could to eke out a living and feed herself and her children. We thanked God for the people who deliver this food to them every month.
Many of the homes had barely room for a bed. When they invited us in, we would sit on the edge of the bed, barely able to move our feet because there was no room. The people were happy to welcome visitors and it was an honor to pray with the people there in their homes. I have been so blessed by the house I live in and have thought about it with a whole new perspective. We’ve seen a pastor raising 11 children in 500 square feet, grandmothers raising 5 or more children – how can we ever look at our homes the same way again?
One elderly woman that we visited was a grandmother caring for her 3 grandchildren and also two other children whose mother had abandoned them in the street (not streets like we’re used to them). Her back is injured and one of the children is sick. She has no income and no ability to provide for her children outside of what other people do to help and what Mercy Net does to provide some of their food and spiritual needs. Also, the church helps in other ways. The church in Uganda is a very important provider for helping the needy. She was a Christian, but we prayed for her back to be healed, her children to be healed and that God would care for her. We encouraged her by telling her that God had brought us to her home all the way from America (you think being anywhere we went was a coincidence?) and wanted to remind that He loves her and is with her. She was so happy that she just kept saying thank you, thank you, thank you, ameena (Amen), ameena, ameena. As we left, I told her that she was my hero – a woman taking care of all of these grandchildren and abandoned children in the conditions she lived in IS just plain heroic. I apologize for the fuzziness of the picture, but it was hard to focus with so little room to move around in her house, not to mention fighting to keep my composure.
Below are just a few more pictures of some more people we visited and provided food, encouragement and prayer to:
This woman was a Christian and was thankful for the food and encouragement. Her prayer was to be able to move into a house that didn’t fill with water when it rained and a job for her husband so he could provide and would not abandon them. What was particularly difficult for all of us was that we all heard similar stories about the houses flooding when it rains. After we left and were driving back to our house, it started to rain – hard! We watched the streets fill with water almost to the curb and running down the street like a river. All of us could imagine the people we had just visited sitting in wet houses with the water just flowing through and soaking everything on the ground (which was most of their belongings and beds).
The mother of these children asked that we pray for somebody to sponsor her children so they can get an education. Our escort from the church informed us that there are very few sponsored children here. The children were beautiful and caught our hearts. If we can even help one…and one more…and one more… One at a time is the way we can make a difference in Uganda. One at a time is the way we can make a difference for the needy in Canby. We just need to do it.
Isaac and Ashley provide a scale for you to see the size of this house. There was a woman and 3 children living here. It was impossible to get all of the visitors in this house.
Ken & Renee’s team met a woman who was raising 5 children on her own in the size of apartment to the one you see below. It is roughly 10’x12’ in size. Not only was she raising 5 children of her own, the single father who lived across from them had abandoned his 5 children. Seeing the need of the children, she took the additional 5 children in to her home and cared for them. She was than determined to do whatever she needed to provide for the children. She would sell fish, do laundry and any other work that she could find to support her family. Ken said that she is a “strong person living in sparse conditions, but she chose, rather than better her own life, she opted to take on the additional 5 children. She did it because it was the right thing to do”. As a Christian, the team was impressed with her sacrificial love for the children.
They also saw a woman sitting on a bench with a beautiful smile. They were terribly poor, her husband was crippled, but they were drawn to her smile. When they learned she was a Christian, it explained it, but was still hard for us to imagine the true joy that Jesus can bring to a person wholly committed to Him, even living in such circumstances. Listening to Ken describe the encounter reminds me about the trivial things (relativity again) that tend to discourage me or cause me to complain when I don’t get what I’d like to have – the nice car that I’d like, the bigger house, the property in the country. Not in and of themselves bad, but as the song says “I’m trading it all for the joy of the Lord”. Would I be able to make that trade?
This grandmother was caring for her grandchildren because their mother had died and the father had a leg amputated due to cancer. She also had an infant and absolutely no way to provide for them. We had seen utter poverty in the villages, and now we were seeing it here as well. There were different challenges that they faced, but all need God’s grace where they are. It is hard to imagine living like this every day of your life. The baby had the softest hair…and she was beautiful. God alone knows the future ahead for this sweet one.
Streams of water like the one shown above run through the area where the people live. There are also spots where rancid water gathers because it has nowhere to go. It is foul smelling and you would not want to be within 20 feet of it, let alone touch it. We saw children filling water buckets from these ponds. In Revelations 22, John talks about the River of life flowing from the throne of God. Pure water, full of life. It is going to be a great day indeed for the people who are used to this. It made us heartsick to think of people actually drinking or cooking with this “water”.
This house had the doorway built up almost 3 feet high to keep the flooding out. This family had 3 children and inside was a bed and a couch. The floor was covered with garbage. The children literally had to climb in and out of the house.
One of the other unique experiences we had was that as we were passing a particular house, one of our escorts informed us that it was the house of a witchdoctor. One of our escorts told us that she had once been a witch doctor - but she met Jesus through the work of people reaching out into the slums and sharing hope and truth. THE truth. Evil is prevalent in the slums and is very real. There is a spiritual battle and God has won. It is in the name of Jesus that we pray and believe – we have no other way to battle this evil.
But the news wasn’t all bad. In the midst of this horror, God is working. And we were blessed beyond belief to be part of His great work. In the picture above, our team had finished delivering all of our food and were starting to head back. A woman stopped to ask for prayer for a new house, but I felt God wanting me to direct her to Him. So, Ashley and I shared the good news of Jesus with her and she accepted Christ right there. She said that she had been to church a couple of times, but was open to hearing. She prayed with us and accepted Christ in the street. At the same time, an alcoholic man was walking by and Isaac stopped to talk with him. Isaac shared the gospel with him and then talked with him about the need for him to take some action on his own to break the hold of alcoholism. Isaac suggested that he just throw away the bottle in his front shirt pocket. It was amazing, but the man accepted Christ right then and there and THEN threw away the bottle into a pile of rocks. I couldn’t help but shout a very loud AMEN (Ameena down here) – it caught the attention of many.
None of us were prepared for what we did that morning, but God went ahead of us and did some great work in the lives of a few of the people. It made the difference between heaven and hell for them. There is a local church there to follow up with them and the church is also assisting in setting up home churches for people in the slums to meet and encourage one another. In what seemed to me to be a hopeless situation, God is doing some great things. He used us to do some of His work – we were so blessed! The hard work of ARM and reaching out to the local churches is making the day-to-day difference. The volunteers, the pastors and others working day in and day out serving God faithfully need our support and prayer as well.
Let me see if I can get this posted and convey our love and thanks to each of you for your prayers. We, and by extension you, made a difference in Uganda. Thank God for his grace and mercy.
See you all soon!
Dave
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