Stephanie in Uganda: Nabulagala children's clubs and outreach

On Monday we went to Family Believer’s Church in the Nabulagula slums to run an educational catch up class for the preschool children. The church is a wooden structure and it is obvious as you reach it that a lot of time and care has been put into constructing it.

As we walked up to the church, we were greeted by a flurry of children ecstatic to see the volunteers Innocent and Gabit who they know well as they run the children’s ministry there every week. These children live in homes where there is real suffering both physically and emotionally due to poverty but you wouldn’t know it from the smiles of the children and the hugs that they gave us despite just meeting us on the spot.

There were about fifteen children who joined in because this was the first programme since they stopped over the summer. We sang songs with them for example ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ and ‘Our God is a Great Big God’ and then recapped the alphabet through the ABCD... song.

On Thursday we returned to these slums for community outreach and had the opportunity to visit the homes of the children who came to the catch up class to meet their families. Before we came, we prayed in the morning about sharing God’s loves with the people we would meet through this, but I found that not only was I able to share with them about I learnt a lot about God through them too. Smile and the gap year teams over the years have built up good relationships with many of the families there and it was a real privilege to be invited into their homes. We split into two separate teams for this and I was with Kate and Innocent, who was able to translate for us. This was the biggest challenge I’ve encountered whilst working on the projects so far.

We visited the house of one lady and She was so willing and open to share her problems with us even though she had just met us because she believed in the power of prayer. Her husband has back problems so to provide for her family. She sells corn and the market f it isn’t going so well at the moment so she is finding it hard to provide for her children. I can only imagine how hard this must be for her to feel so helpless to do more for her family but thankfully several of her children are sponsored through the Smile sponsorship programme so they are able to go school.

For all of us, seeing the poverty in Nabulagala is going to be tough but we have been inspired by Mother Theresa's quote: ‘We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.’ I hope that by spending time talking to these families and building up genuine relationships and friendships, the Smile team can show that God has not abandoned them and that people really care about them.

We visited the slums again on Friday to run the children’s club in the church. I taught the children the song ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle?’ which reminded me a lot of Sunday school. At first when it rained we wondered how we were going to be able to run the club and do the Bible teaching because when the rain hits the tin roof, it’s almost impossible to hear anything. In the end, I think it was a blessing in disguise because we were able to spend some time playing with and hugging the children to get to know them more. I spent a lot of times trying to ask names but failed to hear or remember them correctly!! I will have to work on it over the next few weeks. It also resulted in much commotion when the children descended on Kate to play with her hair because she had left it down.