Support Jennifer’s 2009 Trip to Uganda
What I Will Be Doing
While I will travel out to these districts for a couple weeks at a time, I will be based out of the capital, Kampala, and will be working closely with the Ackers there. They have recently started a non-profit organization called Refuge and Hope International, and I look forward to helping them expand that operation (e.g. publications, recruiting donors, etc.). Finally, I expect to join the Ackers in ministering to groups of refugees, widows and children in Kampala and to help host volunteers and mission teams from the United States.
I am so excited about the good works God has prepared for me, and I look forward to having your support as I go!
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Overview of my Summer ’08 Travels
During the summer of 2008 I joined twelve other young people to travel to five countries – Romania, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nicaragua and Mexico – in a matter of seven weeks to see what is being done to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This special project was organized through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and was designed to be much more than a mission trip. It was envisioned based on the hope that thirteen people who come home to advocate for the things they’ve seen and the projects they’ve worked with will have an even greater impact on the MDGs – for the people they met – than they could in just a few days on a typical mission trip.
What did we see? What did we do?
In Romania we focused on the Roma (Gypsy) population and the ways that widespread discrimination keeps Roma people in poverty. Because many Roma children are excluded from the regular school system due to discrimination and other mistreatment, we spent most of our time working with a school for Roma children called the Ruth School.
Our time in Ethiopia was packed with many different projects, including visiting several homes for orphans and vulnerable children, health clinics and a fistula hospital. But the majority of our time was focused on working with a team from Water Is Life and seeing the incredible impact that access to safe, clean drinking water has had on rural communities. We joined the drilling team in digging a well and spent time in many communities where well had already been drilled, and the contrast among communities with wells compared to those that had no clean water source was amazing. We also visited vocational schools operated by Water Is Life’s partner, Selam Awassa Business Group where Ethiopians are learning valuable skills including carpentry, computers and electronics.
Uganda was, again, full of lots of different things. In Kampala we went into the slums with a Christian group doing food distribution and learned about the work that Cornerstone Development is doing with vulnerable youth. We spent a lot of time traveling to see primary schools. Uganda offers primary education for all children, but we heard from many people that other costs (uniforms, school supplies, etc.) keep many children from attending. We also visited a community for returning refugees in eastern Uganda – one of the places I will work when I return – which was a sobering experience, considering that people had lived there for two years and still had no access to clean water and other basic needs. The last leg of our time in Uganda was to an island on Lake Victoria to see how people on the margins, even by Ugandan standards, are solving their own problems through water purification systems and income-generating agriculture projects.
The Nicaragua leg of our journey was led by Witness for Peace, a faith-based U.S. organization that leads delegations like our own to learn how U.S. policies and corporate practices contribute to poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. We spent time visiting families who live and scavenge in Managua’s city dump, a government-run teaching hospital, and Casa Materna, a network of homes dedicated to reducing maternal and infant mortality rates by caring for women before and after giving birth. For me, though, the highlight of our time was the few days we spent living in the homes of small farmers living in a rural farming community. We were able to get a glimpse of the joys and difficulties of life as a subsistence farmer in Central America and to witness Campesino a Campesino’s projects to improve their farming techniques.
We rounded off the end of the journey with a trip to Mexico City to attend the 2008 International AIDS Conference. The tone of our journey significantly shifted as we went from staying in humble, rural homes to sitting in rather high-level meetings with thousands of people. For me, the most interesting part was a session on the impact that food security and nutrition have on people who have or may contract HIV/AIDS. It was a great honor to attend this annual conference and so interesting to hear many things we had seen and experienced related to AIDS on the rest of the trip talked about by experts and practitioners in this conference setting.
Links to other Organizations
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
Thank you Cedarway for the Website
