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UGANDA CHILDREN'S PROJECT FOLLOW OUR DECEMBER AND JUNE TRIPS TO UGANDA! You've probably heard a lot about Uganda lately. . . and the news isn't good. The war in Northern Uganda has produced attrocities that are almost beyond our worst nightmares: kidnaping, death squads, children soldiers. The most compelling stories cover children forced to walk miles each twilight into cities where they camp out wherever they find a place to keep from being taken by heartless soldiers who force the unlucky to commit horrible crimes. But that is only part of the story. . . In the rest of Uganda, AIDS and poverty are leaving millions of children with little hope for the future. Orphans are usually adobted into the homes of relatives, but few of these homes can afford to educate these children. So they have a place to live and a bit of food to eat, but they look forward to an illiterate live with no future prospects other than working on a tea or sugar planatation or combing the streets of larger cities looking for ways to earn tiny amounts of money. Other children have lost only one parent to AIDS and still others have parents with no education and so they live in horrible poverty. The government does little to help. . . Although the government has a few basic programs to help where it can, Uganda is a very poor nation. There is little help, and little hope that this situation will improve. The Uganda Children's Project Our efforts in Uganda began in sponsoring churches there in the middle 1980's. In 1991, a nurse from Uganda was visiting the United States to raise money for the small clinic she was running in a ghtetto in Kampala. While she was in the US, she learned that her brother-in-law had died, adding another boy to her household. With four children of her own and three children adopted from the streets, she simply couldn't afford to educate another child. She told this story to a group of people and a man volunteered to pay the school expenses for this boy. Lisa and I agreed to take care of getting the money to Uganda. When the nurse returned to Uganda, she sent back 14 photos and descriptions of children in desperate situations, along with a note: THESE KIDS NEED HELP, TOO. The officers of Brainerd Presbyterian Church agreed to sponsor these kids. A few weeks later, I received another package, this time containing 54 pictures and stories. When those children were all sponsored, we received 154! Today, the Uganda Children's Project sponsors 280 children in schools in Kampala and in remote villages in southern Uganda. The Session of Brainerd Presbyterian Church oversees the Project. Lisa and I find sponsors and handle administration. We have four employees in Uganda working through Kiwatule Presbyterian Church who find the needy children, then oversee their care once they are sponsored. HOW CAN YOU HELP? SPONSOR A CHILD | We have a HUGE waiting list! The cost to sponsor changes as a child progresses in school:
- Primary and Secondary School - Grades K - 13: $195 per year
- University - Please contact us. The price depends on the university and the program of study. $1,500 per year is a ball park figure.
- Special Children - The cost depends on the situation. These are usually orphans who have no place to live. The cost depends on the situation.
| MEDICAL SUPPORT There is no healthcare support system for these children. Parents and guadians cannot afford medical expenses so children typically are simply not treated. We maintain a pool to help with medical expenses for our sponsored children. The pool is presently empty! We will use your designated Medical Support gift for medical expenses for our sponsored children. The moey will be held here and sent to Uganda when medical expenses arise.
| SHOES AT CHRISTMAS Each Christmas, we buy shoes and socks for children in Uganda. We buy them locally because the cost of transporting from America is prohibitive. The cost is $15 per child. We first buy shoes for our sponsored children, but we don't stop there. Shoes represent hope for desperately poor children in Uganda because no one can go to school without them. There are other programs like ours for poor kids, and there is a government sponsored program that helps poor children, but all the schools require shoes. Parents and guardians who could afford fees at a subsidized school often cannot come up with the "large" lump sum for shoes, so owning shoes is the first step in getting into school. Also, students in school must always wear shoes with their reuqried uniforms. As children outgrow shoes, they will find themselves unable to return to school without new ones. To show how much shoes mean to a child in Uganda, we found a situation on one of our first trips where a mother scraped together enough money to send her 4th grade son back to school after her husband died. The school said the boy had to wear shoes, but the only shoes in hrer home were her own high-heeled shoes. The boy wore those shoes to school every day, even though the other children ridiculed him!
| UNDESIGNATED GIFTS Although we work very hard to control expenses, unexpected things happen with great regularity in Uganda! Undesignated gifts will be used to offset the unexpected.
COME WITH US TO UGANDA! We are currently planning trips at Christmas 2007 and in July 2008. They will be very different. At Christmas, we will focus on buying and distributing shoes to our sponsored kids as well as to hundreds of other desperately poor children in southern Uganda. We will see children in their homes and at church, but they will not be in school. We will also visit the small churches God is establishing in two remote villages. This is Ugandan summer, so it is hot, but the temperature rarely reaches the middle 90's. It usually rains a bit. For the visit in July, the kids will be in school and we will work very hard to visit with each and every sponsored child. We will visit many schools and few homes, and we will try to visit the new churches. It is winter so the temperature will be in the mid-70's. The rainy season should be over so there should be very little rain if any and fewer mosquitos!
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FOR MORE INFORMATION. . . Email us: Jim and Lisa Steele jimsteele@ugandachildrensproject.org Visit our Web site at http://ugandachildrensproject.org/default.aspx
This page was last modified on Sunday, February 24, 2008 09:35:37 PM |
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