Photos from our last day visiting the children of Uganda…

On Tuesday we drove the four hours back to Jinja and stopped for lunch at a very cute cafe called The Source. They even had “chicken crispers” on the menu… and they tasted ALMOST like they do in America! What a treat:)

Our first stop after lunch was to a place called Sister Agnes’. (I think that was the name.) There are almost 50 orphaned children living and going to school here. They all seemed to be well dressed (better than we had seen anyway) and very well behaved, but almost in a solider-like way which was really sad to me. It seemed that “Agnes” was quite controlling and the kids weren’t allowed to be kids. They did perform a very cute skit though about the good samaritan that made us all laugh. The boy under the blanket is supposed to be a donkey.

The children spend many hours making these paper bead necklaces to sell to raise money for their needs. As soon as we arrived they ran to get them and laid them out for us to look at. We even were taught how to roll the paper to make a bead!

Our stop at Agnes was very quick, as we had promised the children of Rapha that we would stop back for a visit that afternoon. (We had been there on our first day also.) This is Arthur… the amazing, wonderful, tender man that runs Rapha orphanage and school. His wife Ruth founded the program, but sadly passed away in 2008 leaving him a single father to their children as well as all of the children Rapha serves.

There are over 50 orphaned children that live at Rapha Village, and they have a school for over 250 other children (Rapha Primary School) as well as pay for schooling (school in Uganda is NOT free like it is here, and most families cannot afford to send their children to school) for another 50 children.  Total, they provide education and food to over 350 children and that number just keeps growing. Most of the orphans that live at Rapha are sponsored by Brandi’s church in Florida, and now Rapha Village is being considered as a carepoint.  The beauty of the carepoint sponsorship model is that by providing these children with one meal a day and educational resources, it enables them to stay with family members. By having a carepoint that receives sponsorship money, the burden on the families is lightened and the family members are less likely to give up their children. They may even have resources left over to buy something “special” for their child since the neccesities are being covered.   It’s almost always preferable for children to stay with family immersed in their culture than to be placed in an institutional setting.

Funds from Brandi’s church enabled a new well to be dug for Rapha… their previous clean water source was a long 4 mile walk away.

On our trip, Brandi was able to give them money from donations to start building a new kitchen!

 

A sweet little girl carrying water (the walk to the well is still a little ways away and up quite a steep hill on the way back) … as I took this photo she put her arms up to balance the can on her head, but as she walked away she put her hands down and kept walking just balancing it on her head!

Some of the girls on our team made balloon animals for the children, which they of course thought was the BEST.THING.EVER!

How sweet is this little girl?

Tomorrow I will post about one of the most amazing people I have EVER met…stay tuned.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.