Beggar Children --What a Life!

While in Uganda I've had an opportunity to visit the Karimojong beggar children and their families living in the slums of Kitwe and Kisenyi, right in the heart of the capital city of Kampala. What a life these kids have! Forced out of their homeland by drought and starvation, they are now forced into tiny makeshift shelters, ten to fifteen families to a room! When it rains, their dirt floors flood and they are forced to stand throughout the night. They are looked down on by the majority Buganda population as well as other ethnic groups in the city. They are not welcome most places they go. I certainly don't condone sending children out on the street to beg, but you have to have some sympathy when you consider the problems they are facing. Even these patched together tents and homes made from pieces of junk picked from the dump are se t up on rented land. One group is about to be expelled because the developer has plans to build there; others have been warned they have only one year left before they will be expelled. This means even more severe overcrowding or simply sleeping on the street "wherever". Even the public toilets, such as they are, require an entry fee! And if the Karimojong return home, they face mass starvation. Conditions are so desperate there that children try to escape by clinging to the underside of trucks!

I am so glad that success does not depend on me and on my good ideas! My ideas are not even a drop in the ocean of need the Karimojong face. We serve a God who is unlimited in ideas and in resources--who designed the universe and keeps it running, who designed the intricacies of the cell and of DNA. We are committed to doing all we can to help these precious people. Please pray that God will show us the way and open up His resources to accomplish the task.

The Karimojong people desperately need a Gospel breakthrough. Please pray for that.
We would like to sponsor more children to school so that they can get jobs and fit into Ugandan society. Please pray for sponsorships.

It must feel to the Karimojong that God does not love them, but I know He does. Please pray for Recho, Merab and our other workers as they seek to demonstrate that love.

Human Potential the Easiest Resource to Waste

Those who know me realize I am very conservative in use of resources. I am always going through my house and asking over every item, "What is the highest use to which I could put this?" I'm concerned about stewardship, and I want to use what God entrusts to me well.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the waste of human potential amongst my beloved African children. It started when we printed out a batch of report cards scanned from our Uganda office of Every Child Ministries. They were the long anticipated FIRST report cards representing the first academic efforts of former Karimojong beggar children. Was it really possible to take kids who had never been to school off the street, kids who were just learning their first words of English other than "Give me," have them begin in third grade, and really expect that they could do well? We were not at all sure. Sometimes in similar cases we have seen children struggle for years. Some never can catch up. Yet the first report cards from the beggar kids shows that they must be very brilliant children. Brilliant, yet on the very bottom social level. Brilliant, yet despised and ridiculed by the majority. Brilliant, but just now getting their very first break in life, their very first opportunity.

I know they are loved and valued by God whether they are brilliant or not. We all are. Yet I am also utterly amazed that these kids have within them such immense human potential, potential that no one might have ever discovered. It seems like human potential is the easiest resource of all to waste. How I pray that we will find more people interested in child sponsorship, more people willing to invest in unmined human potential.