Early this morning, our Uganda trip leader, Brandi McElheny, sent us another update on the progress of their trip. I wanted you to see this "behind the scenes" look at what's going on right now in the ministry...
In March of this year, you helped us raise thousands of dollars for the Rapha orphanage and school in Uganda. Brandi is there right now, and her update talks about many of the exciting initiatives that our launch in Uganda is funding.
From Brandi:
We were able to provide $2500 to Rapha. They are building a kitchen (mostly. . .just getting it enough done to make it workable and will have to finish it later) and buy supplies to be able to feed all of the children in the school!!!
We also worked with Rapha's director Arthur and this woman Rose (she works for an American family here and we are giving her a ride to Soroti). Rose had found 25 double orphans and brought them to an orphanage near Jinja. . .she is later seeing that the orphanage is not taking very good care of the children. . in fact, she is going to Soroti to check on a little girl who is now hospitalized there b/c the orphanage didn't take care of a wound she had that is now septic. So, she has been thinking that she will have to take these orphans in herself. . .now, she is talking to Arthur and Rapha will take some of these children in. When our church does a trip in September (hopefully) they will have to build another building so that Rapha can take in more of the children!!!! God is good all the time!
We also just finished purchasing 150 nets. 43 will go to Pastor John's Ministry that we visited yesterday as well as 8 mattresses. They had NO nets and 8 of their mattresses had been destroyed in a fire. We are also givine Rapha 7 nets for one that had gotten holes in them (we purchased them during our last trip in October). We also bought 100 nets to give away in Soroti as we see needs. We got a GREAT price of 4800 ugx which is only $2.25 per net!!!!!!! We will probably buy many more as well, as the girls on the trip are thinking they no longer need gifts to bring home or even to eat lunch if we can spend more money on the kids!
They are so overwhelmed that if the money we have for our ground fees is not spent we can either meet needs here or have it go back into the Uganda fund. That speaks volumes as to the integrity of HopeChest. Thanks again for being the kind of people and organization that I can brag about and promote without hesitation...and for being the kind of people who will love the fact that I just wrote you a super long update b/c I know you are each praying for us and wish you could be here. Know that your faithful work in the US is what is making this possible. It is eternal, even when it feels mundane!
It is eternal even when it feels mundane. That's a truth that we cling to every day. Thank you for being a part of the team that Brandi represents right now in Uganda. For those of you who have supported the launch, I'm so excited to see how it's turning out. Thank you so much!
