Be Brave with Your Life

Thursday, March 14

The end of Day 4 

We arrived in Gulu around 1:30 pm and stopped first at Sankofa Cafe for pizza and cokes. (Have you ever had green apples and bacon on your pizza? It's actually delicious!) As we ate, some of the young people who are working with Restore arrived to join us. We met Beau Milliken who is helping with the construction of buildings at the school, and Quinn & Brittney Neely who are there building the soccer field. John Pfeil also met us at the cafe. John works for Restore at the school. He's been there for 2 years and just re-upped for 2 more.  John and I had an interesting connection we discovered when we first met: Bangla. He was so excited to learn that I grew up in Bangladesh and knew Bangla. John had interned for a year with IJM in Calcutta where they happen to speak Bangla. It was fun to chat together and laugh about our weak Bangla skills.

Lunch at Sankofa

After lunch John first took us to visit an NGO called Remnant. A beautiful young woman named Yvette started a ministry to Congolese refugee women. The story of this ministry is best summarized on her website:

Imagine you’re a woman taken from your home to a foreign country by your husband, a soldier from a foreign army. Your husband is all that you have – no identification papers, and no way to communicate because you speak another language. Upon arriving to this new place, you discover the man you married already has a family. The people you encounter shun you. You are alienated and treated as an outcast.  

An outcast with two children. Homeless. Without papers and without a job. 

Out of desperation to survive, you sell your body to provide food and shelter for your children. It is your only option. This is the reality of the lives of Congolese women in Uganda. 

Since 2010, Remnant International has been a source of hope for the Congolese women in Gulu, Uganda. Through our program, we provide four women with an alternative source of income through screen printing and sewing. Aside from vocational training, we also tend to the spiritual, physical, and emotional needs of the women through mentorships, financial training, health seminars, and many  other programs. 

Two of the Congolese women who work at Remnant.

Patrick works for Remnant.

We also visited another NGO that was started by a few young women from the United States. This for-profit company empowers Ugandan women by giving them a trade. 31 Bits has successfully built a global market in the fashion industry by making beads out of paper. It's really beautiful stuff but even better than the product they are putting out is the beautiful lives they are touching and reshaping through their hearts for ministry:

Our model is to empower people by selling their products in the fashion industry...but that's only the beginning. We believe true empowerment begins with caring for a person holistically and occurs when a person is completely self sustainable. Our model is based on a five-year program built to empower each beneficiary and her/his family while exposing them to the love of Christ. After five years in our program, a beneficiary is ready to graduate. She/he is educated, healthy, and confident while managing a business with a sustainable income. 

A sample of the beautiful beading that the women of 31 Bits create. (Photo taken from their Facebook page. We weren't allowed to photograph the jewelry we saw because it was part of their Spring line and hadn't been released yet.)

Posted at Remnant

After touring these two companies and meeting the women behind the stories, we were so impressed with this next generation of young adults who have caught the vision of loving others with their lives. They had left behind family and creature comforts to minister to the men and women of Uganda who had been through extreme hardships. These young people had taken the message of "Love Does" to heart and were living it out. We were honored to meet them and were inspired by their testimonies of love and faith.

We finally called it a day and checked in to our hotel. It had been a very long day. It seemed impossible that that morning had been our safari trip. We were worn out. After dinner and hot showers we crawled into bed eagerly anticipating the next day when we would finally visit Restore Leadership Academy.