Setting up our first Community ‘Dream’ Centre
This has been a great project to create a place for Community Groups to meet and people to plan and pray together in Kinawataka Slum. The centre is made from an old shipping container, wood and recycled materials and hosts health training, group meetings, discipleship groups and children’s work all week round. As the community uses the building more and more, we’re confident that things will now change at a faster pace in the slum and that people will be able to work towards their dream of a good life.
Training Community Health Champions
We want to make sure that local people are the change makers in their communities, and so Revelation Life has been training health workers from the slums to do home visits, assessments and alert us of malnourished children. We call these people ‘Health Champions’. This has been a huge confidence boost for mums who now have a role in seeing their neighbours saved from malnutrition and diseases such as typhoid, pneumonia and malaria.
Seeing changes at the Family Centre
Ten vulnerable families from the slums have been through our programme at the Family Centre this year. Their time on the site has seen them: acquiring new farming skills; learning how to relate better to family members; opening up during discipleship sessions and understanding how to keep their families healthy. It has been a real joy to see families come together, make plans for the future and begin to heal before they leave the slum.
Setting up a building course
With all of the challenges of poor housing in the slums, building skills can be a great way for people to make money and improve living conditions. We started a pilot project with ten community members for seven months, taking them through the basics of building. We’ll then move on to alternative building techniques that use local, low-cost materials such as old tyres, plastic bottles, oil drums, mud and old pallets.
Family life
The girls continue to thrive at school and are very much seeing Uganda as their home. They love having friends from all over the world and get stuck into all sorts of school activities. Sue still enjoys her role at the international school three days a week; balancing that with feeding in to Revelation Life discussions and a great women’s Bible study group. John has also really benefited this year from being part of a men’s group that meets each Thursday morning. As you can tell, we have moved into some exciting areas in the last 12 months, and there are great plans for the year ahead. We feel that God has good things planned for the slums that will see them no longer places of despair and disease, but places of health and hope.
Still interested? Take a look at a video about Revelation Life's work in Uganda - it explains a lot about what we do.
So, hopefully not so long until the next post ;)
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