The New Life Academy and New Life Centre Church are operating in one of the most impoverished areas of Uganda. One in which most most people live via subsistence farming and cattle herding. This area is the "killing fields" of Uganda's civil war, and has never totally recovered ... and then came the AIDS devastation. So both the church and school basically working with no resources other than what God provides.
In Uganda, an ideal family (a father, mother, and their natural children) is the rare exception. Polygamy is accepted in Uganda. Because of promiscuous fathers, AIDS is pandemic in Uganda. Fathers who become HIV positive will pass it on to their wives. Often both parents die and their children must be cared for by grandparents, who barely have the means to support themselves.
Even when the father is alive, the situation can be difficult for the children. Polygamist fathers pay little attention to their children most of the time, so the children are the responsibility of their respective mothers. The most wretched children of all are those living with a father and a stepmother because their own mothers have died. Stepmothers here are notoriously wicked to their stepchildren. Because of the polygamy of their husbands and rampant jealousy as a result, some stepchildren are treated no better than animals. Some are even sold as sex slaves. These are children who should be placed in regular orphanages, but New Life Academy is not yet in a position to provide room and board to orphans. I don’t like seeing kids institutionalized for any reason but sometimes that can be the lesser of two evils.
In the meantime, we do our best to try to ease the tough lives of some of these kids. Our orphans live with their extended families, so we don’t incur any cost for their care. The kids do get one meal a day at school, usually porridge. Not much in the way of nutrition, but it does sustain life and fills the belly, and it is often the only food all these little guys get that day. If our medical clinic is reestablished, we can again give them free medical care. Also at times in the past, we’ve assisted with tragedies, helping as we could with burial costs for orphans or for a single remaining parent. (Often the father has died, leaving behind a sick mother. That’s why we classify children with one sick remaining parent as orphans.) Orphans are offered free education at NLA, while the parents of non-orphans must pay a school fee.
Once we had 2 little kids in the wicked stepmother situation, with an uncaring, drunken father. They were filthy and hungry every day, when they arrived at our school. In addition to the one meal served to all children, the teachers would sometimes bring them extras to eat. The teachers even bought clothes for them, but the stepmother would take them away and use them for their own children. They’d come back the next day wearing rags. When they sent bars of soap home with them, same thing happened, and they remained filthy. So the teachers began caring for them at school, bathing them and dressing them when they arrived, so they didn’t stand out from the other kids. Then they’d dress them back in their rags when they went home in the evenings. In that way, we helped these kids know they were loved and cared for by someone.
Next to the kids with wicked stepmothers, the ones having the toughest times are the kids living with an elderly grandparent. Many times all the adult children of a grandmother have died of AIDS and she raises all the grandkids. Pastor David’s own grandmother has 30 or so grandkids in a tiny 2 room mud hut. Eleven of her 13 adult children have died of AIDS. She drinks herself to sleep every night and is steeped in witchcraft. Some of her grandkids are now dying of AIDS as well. David has one of these kids living with him and attending boarding school now and has had others in the past. (The eldest of the 2 remaining children of the grandmother, David’s aunt, got gloriously saved and healed of severe, crippling arthritis last year, and the grandmother is showing signs of drawing near to salvation now too!)
Living in a 3rd world country teaches you why God repeatedly shows compassion to, and stands in defense of, the widows and orphans – clearly they are the most vulnerable of all His people.
These kinds of problems are the reason why missionaries often burn out and go home. As Americans we too often think we can fix everything. But the needs are so overwhelming, and many missionaries get overcommitted and spread too thin. In an average of 6 years most missionaries will leave the field, often burned out and bitter because nothing has changed. So my policy, which I’ve also taught to my medical students, is that while we cannot save the world -- we cannot even save all of Uganda -- we CAN brighten our own little corners. The trick is to stay focused and do what your hands find to do.
Margaret