February 2014
With no leap year, February has
come and gone quickly! It is hard to believe that both January and February
have come and gone so quickly leaving me about halfway finished with my
internship with and my time here in Uganda. God has definitely blessed me with
wonderful people to surround me and help me in my time here.
The
first group of individuals that God blessed me with are the other Uganda
Studies Program students and staff that are here on the Uganda Christian
University campus. Not only do they help me with processing day to day life and
different educational trips that we take, the class that we all take on faith
in the Ugandan context pulls in large topics for us to question our worldviews,
culture, and faith to ascertain that we are placing God and not ourselves on
the throne of our lives.
To cement everything that we
learn in that course and over the last three years as social work students, I
attend my social work internship at Compassion International in Lugazi, Uganda
four to five days a week. At Compassion, I am working under a wonderful Supervisor
who guides me in the Child Survival Program. We work with around 40 children
ages 0-3 and their mothers making sure that they are surviving and thriving
physically, spiritually, socio-emotionally, and cognitively. On a practical
level this looks like visiting the homes of the mothers and doing short lessons
with them, doing monthly skills training, monthly discipleship, and other
activities ensuring that the mothers have the community and assets that they
need in order to help their family survive. The above picture shows one of our
mothers working on a chore chart with her three year old daughter helping to
teach responsibility.
We
celebrated the last week and a half of February by completing our rural
homestay with a host family in Kapchorwa, Uganda near the Kenyan border. I
learned so much more than just how to milk a cow from my host family and my
host village. This week not only taught me about the importance of humility as
I relearned seemingly simple tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and cutting
vegetables, but also taught me the importance of being present with a family. I
am amazed time after time how the family of Christ can be found all over the
world. Situated in a little village on top of a mountain, I found a community
that cared for each other as Christ cares for individuals and shares with each
other as Christ called the Church to do.
I want to encourage
us to do the same. In Philippians 2, God encourages us to be united with other
believers being “one in Spirit and purpose” (v.2). We do not have to be half
way around the world to serve Christ. He calls us first and foremost to be a
community as loving and humble as He was (see Philippians 2).
In
His Amazing Grace,
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