rhondajwelch

Protected: The rains are coming!

Harria

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well”. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is the story is the story I posted on the Facebook page The Mandate Uganda. Or it can be found as @themandateinc if you would like to visit and like our page. I try to keep everyone updated on everything we do in Uganda. In only two weeks we’ve already had over 3,000 views! That is exciting!

❤️

This Valentines day please give a gift of love to help girls stay in school, build self-esteem and stay safe. Too many drop out of school, sell their bodies for pads or get married just to get the things they need to stay in school.

This week my goal is to raise $5000 so that we can get kits to 500 girls in our community this term of the new school year. 100% of the money given goes to the project. We have one of our girls graduating tailoring school and she will be sewing kits to earn her own sewing machine.

Many times we donate money to causes and never really know where it goes. All money that is donated to themandate.com is used for projects. By clicking on the link below your money will go directly to this project. You don’t have to donate the $10 for a kit, anything you can give helps.

When we bless others we get even greater blessings back. And I wish all that support us could see the girls faces when they receive the kits.

This year besides the kits and education we give about menstrual health we are adding a self defense class.

Please give the love that leads to hope for these girls! Click the heart below to give! And thank you so much for your love!

Sunday School Joy

School is back in session for a new year. The children go three terms starting in February so we always are sad to see many go back to boarding school. I miss them greatly on Sundays! My older class is smaller until holidays but we still have close to or a little over one hundred under five children every Sunday. Today was over one hundred! Loud but my heart fills with joy to see their happy little faces. I still had nineteen older kids in my class including Raelee! She has decided to start coming to the older class which I know has been a hard choice for her since she loves taking care of the little ones. I am very proud of her choice!

I met a couple in Jinja at the farmers market who were promoting their Christian homeschool curriculum that is geared toward African children. I was so excited to see this and be able to use it for Sunday School. It has been very challenging to find curriculum and lessons that can be changed so that the kids here can relate and understand. They don’t face the same things that American children face so it sometimes took me a lot of searching and adapting lessons. The book I got goes through the Bible in a year but it is made to do every day in homeschool so it will definitely take us longer to get through. I am happy about that! It comes with a book that has printer friendly activities and pictures that go with the lessons. Today we were able to make little books they can take home. It was an exciting morning getting to use glue sticks! I think this is really going to be a good book to work through.

Day Two

Thursday was the second day of the conference Christian is leading. When he was first approached about doing it there were to be about five different speakers/preachers. He was under the assumption there would be different speakers each day and didn’t know the conference started on Sunday. He was led to believe it didn’t start until Wednesday! So three different preachers had preached Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. That has left him now preaching three services each day. It is gone really well though with hundreds of people still coming, even in the morning/afternoon services with hundreds coming forward for salvation. Praise be to God!

Meanwhile a few hours away we are staying at the hotel close to my Dr. since I am having some medical issues. We have a very nice maid who has been checking on us and schooling is going as normal! Little Miss has brought her doll and I overheard her in her bedroom – “What do you want to wear? And we are not doing this eeny miney mo thing because that takes too long”! She is so funny!

Preaching The Word

Today was the first day of a three day Evangelical conference Christian went to in Northern Uganda. He said there were between 100-200 people for the morning services and 400-500 for evening services. He said there were hundreds that came forward to accept Jesus and some of the stories from people were heartbreaking. There was a couple with their little baby that wanted prayer for protection because their village witch doctor is trying to take the baby to raise him up to be a witch doctor and they don’t want this. He was the only speaker at all of them, another scheduled Preacher from Poland got very sick and had to cancel.

The hardest part for him going to the places he is to is he never gets all the info, clear ideas of what the program is – and there is definitely always a program whether it is consistently followed. But he is never told. For the first part of the morning he was pretty much just sitting in a room with a lot of people who spoke no English! Sometimes he is just put in a room for hours by himself with no idea of what’s to happen. But he always knows God has his back and leans on the knowledge God will guide him and give him the words to say. So please pray for him, he wasn’t expecting to be the only speaker and preaching more than once a day so after a full day he is in his room tonight praying for the extra messages he may have to give tomorrow.

Takia

(Above is Takia in her own design)

Meet Takia, one of the three girls we help support in their career paths. She is going to tailoring school after struggling through high school and finally dropping out. We were worried about what she would do going forward and she came one day to tell us goodbye. She was on her way to start tailoring school. The third week she came home and had made Christian, Raelee and me clothes, nicely sewn clothes that fit without having our measurements! We were so proud of her and happy she found something she is good at and can possibly have a better future with the skills she is learning. She also found she has some artistic creativity and with her own designs that will set her apart from the many, many seamstresses and tailors here. She can be a successsful designer if she keeps striving at it. Because we were so surprised and proud of her we told her we would give her support since she has to buy all the materials she uses in her classes.

About four weeks into school she brought me about fifteen little skirts and asked me to put them up as she was going to keep sewing until we had enough to give all the children that come to Sunday School. She has now been in school six months and should have graduated in December but because at least half her class could not pass the exam they extended everyone until March. Which is very unfair to the ones, including Takia, that passed. It is a hardship just to pay for schooling and training so they have to come up with more money because of the ones who didn’t pass. Over the past six months she has occasionally brought little piles of skirts and shorts for me to put up.

On the Sunday before Christmas I already had the boxes for the children and we had many children that don’t usually come. Takia had come home with yet another box of clothes. We decided to wait until the next Sunday to see if we could give them out. There were about ninety-seven children. We counted the clothing and she was short about seven but we had t-shirts that had been sent with the baby blankets from the great ladies in America so we also gave them out. I can’t even tell you how excited these children were at receiving new clothes. She had made dresses and skirts for the older girls. We did run short a few on shorts for the babies so they gave the baby boys skirts. Baby Christian, who is usually either naked or with just a shirt on as he was that day, got a skirt and he was so happy! Someone laughed about him wearing a skirt and I said when he was only a couple months old his mama had brought him over in a frilly yellow dress. Confused me to say the least! It doesn’t matter when they are little but it is hard to tell which are boys and which are girls!

Everyone was giving me and Christian the credit for the clothes and I told them all that we only helped supply her materials but Takia did all the work and did it because she loves her village and all the children that come to Sunday School. She is using the gifts and talents God has given her to bless others. She isn’t keeping that talent to only benefit herself. She said her schoolmates laughed at her and questioned why she would do that when she could be making clothes for herself and also sell clothing she makes. She told me that we have taught her to have a giving heart, she’s been helped so it makes her want to pass that on. I give her and her sisters my clothes and she knows how that feels, and wants others to feel the same way. We are just so proud of her accomplishments, I have to admit we were a little skeptical since she didn’t do so well in high school.

Please pray for Takia, as she has had her schooling extended. That she be an example to her classmates but also to the children she blessed so greatly. We plan on putting her to work on our Hope for Girls project so that she can earn her own sewing machine. I believe she will take full advantage of the opportunity given her, we have seen big changes in her personality already so I know she has a good future in front of her. And I am relieved that now I know what we can do next Christmas and take the pressure off of me trying to get 150-200 gifts for the children!

Baby Christian was thrilled with his new skirt! (he was pantless as usual!)

More Babies On The Way!

The past year we gave away over 50 receiving blankets to pregnant moms and were able to speak to them and pray over their blankets for them and their babies. Last week we gave the rest of the blankets to nineteen more pregnant ladies. I got to see the last of the first round of fifteen babies this week! So I will have nineteen more to look forward to this year! They loved getting the blankets that were under one condition – they had to bring their baby when it was born so that I could see him or her! I think they like that even more, to show off their babies. I just love getting to hold them all!

Thanks again to all the ladies that contributed the blankets!

Author: rhondajwelch