Street Ministry

As promised, here is a post on this week’s assignment of finding a family living in the slums, building a friendship with them, assessing their needs, and meeting those needs as best as we could.  It was a very emotionally draining week for all of us 360 students.  I encourage you to read the other internationals blog posts on their experiences in the slums as each group found a family with very different struggles and needs.

Tuesday: In the afternoon, each group was bussed out to different slums within the greater Kampala area.  My group was placed in Bwaise (spelling?) and had discussed prior to that we wanted to find a family with young children.  We headed down a street with many shop fronts trying to find a way into the slum behind.  Eventually we found a small path where we dodged trenches filled with murky stagnant water into the area.  Immediately, we see a four-year-old girl taking a bath outside her home shouting “MZUNGU MZUNGU!” (aka white person… meaning me).  My friend Rosemary goes up to the little girl and starts speaking to her in Luganda and finds her mother inside the home.  The mother, Harriet, invites us into her home and introduces us to her four daughters ages 13, 7, 4, and 2.  The doorway has a big cement block that we needed to step over to get into the house which is there to prevent the house from flooding when it rains.  The home was a million times hotter than outside and had a curtain to divide the living space from where the family sleeps.  In the living space, there were two couch chairs and a bookshelf.  My friends chat with Harriet in Luganda and translate the conversation over to me.  We find out that Harriet is a Christian woman and her husband and children are Muslim.  Her husband works at a meat packing plant and she sells cosmetics, Vaseline, and toothpaste on the street in the evenings.  She shared with us that she purchases her products in the city’s cheap market and only sells her products in the evenings so that tax-collectors won’t bother her.  Harriet was so welcoming and shared with us how her four year old daughter just loves mzungus, which was pretty easy to tell as she continued to stare at me with a big beautiful smile.

Wednesday:  Again we went back to Harriet’s home in the afternoon to first find her daughters there watching the television in which they wire the electricity from one of the shops in the area.  As soon as Harriet came home, she sent her oldest daughter to go get us guests some pop.  As we visit the family, some children from the area see me in their house and become quite curious.  The children squeeze into the already crowded home as Harriet shows us photos of the family and the girls when they were younger.  Being the teacher, I get Rosemary to ask Harriet about the girls’ schooling.  We find out the oldest is in primary 6 (gr.6), the seven year old is in primary 2 but a year behind because they were unable to pay the school fees one year, and the four year old in Kindergarten.  We find out that the school is not too far away from their home and Harriet, the girls and the mob of neighborhood children decide to take us there.  We walk past flooded abandoned homes on again narrow congested pathways until we reach a large wooden and worn building with a small office made of iron sheets.  A teacher greets us and shows us two of the classrooms in the school.  The school is one of the poorest in the area with grades K to primary 7 and the best mark on the primary 7 national exam ranking at a grade 2 level. 

Thursday:  During class time, our group developed a needs assessment based on our conversations with the family and our observations around their home.  We are assigned 50,000 Ugandan shillings (equivalent to about $23US) to budget and prioritize the needs of the family.  Once our shopping list was approved, we headed out to a large, congested market in the middle of Kampala.  We gave my backpack to one of the guys in our group to carry all our supplies, and our money was split and hidden between each of us.  My friend Lillian held my hand as we moved through the market.  It was the craziest thing I have ever seen with so many people shouting at me to buy things and big trucks trying to get past the herds of shoppers and pick-pockets.  My team bargained down the many vendors in Luganda as I checked off our items on our list.  We then moved to a different area to get some cheaper sandals for the family.  As we were debating whether or not the sandals were good quality, a woman quickly and sneakily tells us that she overheard some guys across the street targeting  to pickpocket us.  Praise the Lord for that woman! We immediately give our money to Emmanuel to head to another market to get the rest of our supplies as the rest of us turn around and head back to church with our bag.  Why were we a target?  I assume it is because of my backpack with the Canadian flag and because of my skin color.  As we were walking back, this huge bus gets in the way of our path and Rosemary and I lose Lillian and Hakim.  Needless to say, I held Rosemary’s hand for the majority of the way back to the church so that I wouldn’t lose her too.  Anyway, we all ended up safely back at the church sweaty and with all our gifts for our families.

Gifts for the family:

After conversations with Harriet, we discovered that the girls were soon to go back to school but the father has yet to give Harriet money to buy school supplies.  We felt like the most immediate need that we could help with was buying school supplies for the girls.  We also purchased new sandals for the four girls, some shoe polish, Vaseline, a brush, and some plastic plates.  Since we were so blessed to have Harriet show us her photos, we decided to get a photo album to put them all in.  We hope to purchase new mosquito nets, clothes for the girls, a bag of sugar and some sort of covering for their floor over the next five months.

Friday:  We gather up our materials and head out to visit our family.  When we get to their home, Harriet is washing clothes and chatting with her neighbor.  She tells us she was just talking about us and invites us inside to introduce us to her sister-in-law.   The little four-year-old greets me with a smile and proceeds to stand behind me and pet my hair as we chat with her mother.  We give Harriet the gifts and she expresses gratitude as she opens each of the bags.  She tells us how she was thankful to get this school supplies as she would have had to get it all the day before school started on Sunday. The oldest girl couldn’t help but smile and the younger ones had a difficult time expressing their emotions.  We prayed together all in a circle holding hands before we had to leave.

All in all, I am so thankful to get to be a part of this loving family for the next five months.  It was totally God’s doing to direct us to this particular home.  On another note for this week, I met my sponsor child!!  He was quite shy but was very warm to me as he showed me his cartwheels, singing, around his house, introduced me to his housemother and brothers and sisters, put his hand on my shoulder as we took funny pictures and played tag around the yard.  I would have never thought I would have had the chance to visit him let alone get to share life with him and his beautiful family for the next five months when I began sponsoring him.  Again this week has been a whirlwind of emotions!

Peace and love

Hard Times Come Again No More

Around 5am, I awake from the chanting from the mosque nearby.  I escape my mosquito-proof bed and begin to get ready for the new school day ahead.  At 8am, our bus driver arrives to pick us up for a new school-day.  We leave our gated and razor-wired guest house and enter the red dirt street filled with potholes, garbage, chickens, and goats.   We arrive at school at 8:30am and wait on the steps outside our classroom reading our Bibles and watching the Children’s choir rehearse before our classes start at 9am. 

For the past week, we have been in classes at Watoto Central on topics such as “Living in Community”, “Personality types” and “Loving Listening”.  We will mostly be in classes all of this month except for on Saturdays when we are at the Children’s village and on Sunday when we are serving at our district church.  Mine is Watoto Central with a team of ten other individuals. 

Now although this month’s focus is on classes, we have started our street ministry.  Each of the five district groups was assigned a different slum to go to and find a family living in it to adopt for the next five months.  Once we reached the slum we were assigned to, we split into our smaller assigned groups.  My group, Central A, is made of four Ugandans and myself.  We will be doing most ministry things in this group or in our larger district group.  This week we have an assignment to assess the needs of the family and then pool our resources together to meet these needs.  The rules are we are not allowed to ask directly what they need but rather build a relationship with the family and observe the needs as we visit them each time.  Each time we do ministry, we have to assign a team leader to write a report on each daily experience.  Since I was chosen to be team leader for the street ministry and we haven’t yet finished our assignment for the week, I really am not up to writing about everything just yet.  I will write a detailed post at the end of this week about our slum family and what we ended up providing for them.  That is a promise!

Hard times:

-          -  Holding a naked two year-old on your knee in a stuffy mud-floored hut in the slums of Kampala.

-          - Children banging on the side of your bus begging for money at an intersection.

-         -   A little girl telling you she wished she had your skin colour instead of her own.

-          - Visiting a slum primary school, made of wood and iron sheets.  The best score of the primary 7 (Grade 7) class tested to the equivalent of Grade 2 on the national exams.

There are more and bound to be even more hard times over the next five months, especially as we get more invested in different ministries throughout Kampala.   Uganda has come so far from what it once was and I am excited to say that the new Ugandan Declaration that the government put out is very promising and hopeful.  

Here is the song that I referenced in the title.  Hard Times - Eastmountainsouth

Peace and Love

Childcare Ministries

In this last week, the international students have been touring and learning about the various ministries that Watoto has to offer.  There is still a lot more that we haven’t even seen yet but it is so cool to see things I have heard about for so long.

 

Last week, we went to Baby Watoto Bulrushes which is a home to about 100 babies from pre-matures to I think 10 months.  Don’t quote me on that one!  Unfortunately, we were unable to touch the babies as they were under quarantine from a spread of hepatitis throughout the home.  We walked by crib after crib that held beautiful children, some on oxygen, some with physical deformities, and all with big beautiful eyes staring at us.  These children were mostly abandoned on streets, police stations, or hospitals.  Some of the babies’ mothers have passed away so Watoto is nurturing them until their fathers can take care of them.  I can’t even begin to tell you the amount of times I have been on the verge of tears this last week.  

On Saturday, we had our tour of the two children’s villages in Kampala.  First we traveled to Subi which is the larger of the two.  The village is up on a hill and is home to about 1400 people which include 1000 children, and the rest are mothers, teachers and other staff workers.  Each village includes a primary, secondary, and vocational school where the children from the village and some children from the neighboring community attend.  In Subi, the homes are arranged into clusters where each house is home to eight children, and one mother.  One of classmates invited us into her home and we saw a few of our new friends throughout the tour.  Bbira, the smaller village, is home to about 1000 people in houses arranged in circles and is located on a flat ground surrounded by a forest.  

  I can’t even describe how amazing the villages are! The more I see it with my own eyes the more I realize how God’s hand has played a major role in the development of this place.  I can’t believe how self-sustaining they are becoming.  They have a large metalwork and woodwork shop so that they can make their own bed frames, windows, doors, etc.  There are even hopes to start selling their products to the community.  Also, because baby formula is so expensive, Watoto researched that goat’s milk is the next best thing to formula, so in Subi, there is a goat farm to provide milk for the baby homes.  

So as some of you might know, I have a sponsor child with Watoto.  I have been told that I will get to meet him while I am here.  The program coordinators will find out the village and house number of this little seven year-old boy and arrange a formal meeting with him.  Anyway, as I toured through both the villages, I was praying that somehow in the midst of these hundreds and hundreds of children, I would get to meet him informally.  I mean that would be so cool right?!  Throughout the tour, many children would come up to us to wave, hold our hands, or give us hugs.  I could never get tired of that… EVER!!  Anyway, I came to the conclusion that I would just have to wait until my formal meeting with him.  As I walked down the path in Bbira, there was a little boy playing on the side of the path and he looked up at me.  I did the usual ‘hello, how are you?’ and asked him what his name was.  He informed me that his name was my sponsor kid's name….. My heart started to race.  “It’s so nice to meet you.  How old are you?”  He shyly told me he was seven.  MIND BLOWN!!  I asked him a few other questions while attempting to really study his face to see if I could recognize him from the one picture I have.  I wasn’t one hundred percent positive it was him until later the next day.  On Sunday, we were at Watoto’s annual Festival of Hope and there was a table set up from the child sponsor department.  I worked up the nerve to ask them if they could look up where my sponsor child was from and sure enough they easily located him with just the first name that I provided them.  He lived in Bbira and I totally met him!!!  I so easily could have walked right past him or have missed him entirely due to the hundreds and hundreds of children that live in the village.  Anyway, God is so good!  I cannot wait to meet this kid again and formally get a chance to introduce myself.  Every Saturday, we will be going to Subi or Bbira to put on Sports Days for the children.  So yes, I will get to see a lot more of my sponsor child!

Anyway, I am just so awestruck by how many people Watoto is reaching and developing.  Again, my description won’t do it justice.  You really need to see it for yourself!  This next week, we have a full week of classroom work to learn more about the Watoto mindset before we get into the outreach side of things.  

Subi Village homes

Woodwork shop in Subi

Classroom in Bbira

Secondary School in Subi

View from Subi

Goat farm

Peace and love

Orientation

The place that I am living now feels like home which has been particularly nice after long days out.  Over the past few days, we have been touring and learning more about Watoto Church and all of its ministries.   I am going to split this blog into two sections in order to not make them that lengthy.  I will begin with talking about the church and the Watoto 360 program.

On Thursday, we had our very first official day in Watoto 360.  Early in the morning, our driver, Abeh, drove us to Watoto Central Church.  It looks like the majority of our class sessions will be held at Watoto Central in a room right beside where the children’s choir rehearses.  OH MY GOSH!!!  They are sweet little treasures!  I was talking to some of my Ugandan classmates, and they said that when they were younger, they also participated in the choir.  The Watoto Children’s Choir travels all over the world with each choir consisting of different children from the Children’s villages.  What an amazing opportunity for kids to travel!

Watoto has five churches in Kampala, north, south, east, west, and central.  Watoto Central is where Gary Skinner, the founder of Watoto, preaches.  There are also churches located in each of the Children’s Villages.  Let me tell you that the Watoto church is alive!  Between all of the different campuses, they are 20,000 members strong.  A regular church service includes a five part-harmony, African version of Hillsong worship band, a hip-hop dance crew, smoke machine, rappers, lots of hugs, people dancing in and out of the pews, and… a DJ spinning beats as the congregation comes in.  Myself and the other internationals are asking our Ugandan friends to teach us to dance so we don’t look like complete idiots every church service.   Besides all of the flashiness, there is a real core to Watoto church.  I like how they use African cultural elements in their worship to reach to the African people.  As I said before there are many different campuses to the Watoto church.  Every week, the different campus pastors meet and write a communal sermon to be preached the next Sunday.  Even though the church is rather large, Watoto is a cell-based church, meaning that every individual church-goer is a part of a cell or small group.  The small groups consist of a maximum of 10 people that meet once a week to study the Bible.  The coolest thing that I have encountered at Watoto Church so far was at the youth and young adult conferences that have been going on this last week at Watoto Central.  We attended a few of the incredible sessions on both Thursday and Friday with the guest pastor, Earl McClellan from Shoreline Church in Dallas, Texas.  Every session we attended, whether it was in the morning or late at night, all the pastors from each of the Watoto campuses were there sitting in the front row and I mean all of the pastors, not just the youth ones!  

As Thursday was our first official day in Watoto 360, it was also the first day we got to meet the entire class.  There are 54 of us in all, 8 of which are internationals, 4 Ugandans who are connected with Watoto Church, and the other 42 are all from the Watoto Children’s Villages.  I will explain more about the villages in my next blog but to summarize, the villages contain children who were vulnerable and in need of some help, whether that mean they were orphans or their parents were unable to care for them.  Ya, powerful!  My fellow classmates are amazing human beings who have gone through a lot of hardships in their lives.  They also are the most welcoming and loving individuals I have ever met.  In the last three days of getting to know my Ugandan classmates, I have received many hugs, shared many laughs, and have conversed in some deep conversations.  I am so excited to learn from these incredible individuals that I am privileged to call classmates.  

As part of our orientation, we had Gary Skinner, the founder of Watoto, come to our class to speak to us about how Watoto began almost 30 years ago.  It was such a great honor to have him talk to us, especially since he doesn’t share the whole story of Watoto to that many people.  He described his life growing up, what lead him to Uganda, what Uganda was like when he first arrived, how he sometimes feels like quitting, and how he first established a church in Kampala.  The first church they founded, Watoto Central, actually used to be a building in control of the army.  What an amazing turn-around from a place of violence to now one of love and peace.  Gary shared with us how he really didn’t want to have anything to do with childcare ministries whatsoever.  All Gary wanted to do was preach and establish churches in Uganda.  He stated that God had a different plan in mind for him and flat out told him, “I did not bring you here to preach but to look after my children.”  It was then that Gary began the Childcare ministries and Watoto has been growing ever since.  There are two villages in Kampala, one in Gulu and they are beginning to establish a church in southern Sudan.  The cool thing about the whole time he shared with us was that it seemed like the whole story was still very fresh, raw and real to him.  He broke down and cried numerous times as he spoke.  At one point, he asked each group of us to stand up.  When it was turn for the forty-two Watoto graduates to stand up, he bawled.  The whole mission of Watoto Childcare and church is to raise up the next generation of African leaders and those forty-two people are living proof to that future promise.

So yes, I believe I will learn a lot from this amazing organization and all the people that are involved in it.  I am so thankful to be here.  Next blog will be about the children’s villages and other cool ministries of Watoto.