Hello!
I have officially been in Uganda for a few weeks now. One of our all-girl teams (Branded) and myself are in northern Uganda working with ChildVoice. ChildVoice was founded in 2006 and is an organization that’s restoring the voices of children silenced by war. We’re living in our tents at their Imvepi Settlement base camp and have been ministering to South Sudanese Refugees.
Currently, Uganda is trying to accommodate the influx of South Sudanese refugees who have poured over its northern border to escape their country’s tribal war. Originally, the war started in 2013, between the president and the vice president of South Sudan. The war has now extended to a large ethnic battle between two tribes, the Dinka and the Nuer.
Resources in northern Uganda’s refugee settlements are stretched to the limit, as nearly two million refugees tax the ability of local host communities to supply basic needs, such as, food, water, and healthcare. ChildVoices’ staffed compound in Imvepi settlement is bringing emotional healing, basic physical needs, and vocational skills to young South Sudanese girls and their children through counseling, hygiene classes, and life-skills training. Their desire is to reach out to the under-served population of adolescent girls with a message of hope and encouragement.
As part of their community-based efforts at Imvepi, ChildVoice has launched dozens of Empowerment Groups for adolescent girls who are suffering from the effects of war in South Sudan, so they can receive psychosocial counseling, learn valuable life skills, and have access to health and hygiene kits for themselves and their children. This support will equip them for a lifetime of self-empowerment.
While we’re here for the month, we’re able to help out in many different ways!
We’ve been going out into the settlement with the staff each morning to help with psychosocial counseling, hygiene classes, and life-skills training. The life-skills training can look like teaching them to make liquid soap, baking to learn to make donuts to sell, tailoring, agriculture, and they will soon be launching a hair salon training as well. The classes that they do can look like teaching the women about hygiene, music/dance/drama, business, marketing, suicide prevention, ebola prevention, or sex education. We have also had opportunities to go hut to hut to meet the refugees and to sit and share the Gospel with them, a word of encouragement from the Lord, and to pray with them.
We have been helping out in the office by entering data into their data base.
A few of the girls had the opportunity this past week to walk ten minutes down the road from the base camp, to the reception area, to play with the children. The gated reception area is where they receive every refugee that gets picked up from the border. There are children that have come to Uganda alone, with no family members. Some who have walked here with their families. Some mothers have come with only their children. The refugees are taken there to get registered and to receive health care. They are usually at the reception area for a few weeks, depending on how many refugees come in each day. Once they are finished at the reception area, the refugees are taken to the settlement and are given a plot of land to start their lives on. They are given some materials to build a tent/hut for their family and they receive food at the end of each month that lasts them the entire month. Each settlement has water stations that they walk to to fill up 5, 10, or 20L water cans, in order to have safe and clean drinking water.
We also have plenty of ministry opportunities right outside our tents each day. All of the staff live in tents around ours and every one speaks English (Praise the Lord)!!! The lady that cooks each meal for us, is a South Sudanese Refugee, who has graduated from the ChildVoice Lukome Center, which is another incredible and beautiful ministry. Since 2007, ChildVoice’s Lukome Center in northern Uganda has provided a therapeutic community for adolescent girls, including former child soldiers and sex slaves, war orphans, child mothers, and other highly vulnerable girls from Uganda and South Sudan. Their sanctuary village setting provides these girls and their children with a safe place in which to recover from the trauma of war and build a brighter future as they receive love, education, counseling, and vocational skills–all with the goal of having them reintegrate within their communities as self-sufficient leaders and valued income-earners. After they graduate and move back to their communities, they enter a three-year program of follow-up counseling, business-skills development, mentoring, and letter writing with their ChildVoice godparents.
It is extremely hard and also a big joy to be working with the South Sudanese Refugees. It’s hard to see some of the things we see while out doing ministry in the settlement. There are so many sick babies and kids who have malaria or some other illness/disease. If they want water, healthcare, or food, they have to walk for miles and miles in the heat or rain to get it. It’s hard to look at the babies and kids whose hair is turning orange because of malnutrition. A lot of the kids are wearing dirty clothes with holes in them, and for most of them, it’s the only clothes they have. It’s a really hard life for the refugees. But they have so much joy, it’s astonishing to witness. It’s beautiful and admirable, the joy that they live in. It’s the kind of joy, true joy, that isn’t easily swayed. No matter how far they have to walk just to get clean water, no matter how far they have to walk and carry their sick baby or child just to get to the health center, no matter how little food they have to eat, no matter how hard it is to literally just survive each day, they are filled with a true joy. A joy that radiates despite circumstances.
I have a lot to learn from these stunningly beautiful and incredibly strong humans this month.
With love,
Mads
One of my biggest prayer requests right now is fundraising! I have about $6,300 more to fundraise for this season of squad leading and my deadline to be fully funded is September 1. Will you please prayerfully consider donating? If you would like to donate, you can click the “Donate!” button at the top of the page to do so OR you can venmo me “@madisonthompson-‘. Thank you all so much for the support I’ve already received! And thank you for continuing to follow me on this journey. I appreciate each of you!
