Orphan Justice Mission

I have arrived safely in Kampala! Thank you, Lord, for safety once again. Anytime I look out the window at 40,000 ft (or whatever we fly at), I appreciate His protection. Paul greeted me right on time and we made it right on schedule back to the house. We had a nice evening catching up and taking a late tea and I was even able to complete my Econ homework assignment using Paul's interent modem. This morning, I overslept by 45 minutes, but now we're in full swing.

I'm sitting in my living room with the evidence of last minute preparations strewn about. I just printed the last of the hard copy documents I think I'll need and I'm about to seal up my computer in my carry on. At 3:30pm I'll leave on my second trip to Uganda for 2010.

We are making a brief stop in Kyotera again, back from an early morning visit to the birthplace of the AIDS virus, a small fishing community on Lake Victoria called Kasensero (Kah-sin-say-ro). There is a potential partnership opportunity we were exploring there: a small church which is operating a school for several hundred children as well as running an aids clinic. As a fishing village, the community is mostly transient with very little health or educational infrastructure (the school we visited is one of two for the estimated 2,000 children in the village).

I'm in Kyotera right now. Don't really need to be, but here I am. Funny story, though. I get a call from Paul during the morning STS training (which is incredible and amazing and will be a powerful tool for Glory of Christ Church). The airline won't let him take John and Kelly's bags because we didn't give him an authorization letter to act on their behalf. Okay, a little bothersome but understandable.

The shrill laughter of about twenty kids has just died down as I start this post. After a long day of worship and meetings (my kind of day), we took tea back at the pastor’s house, then played with some of the local kids who kept peeking in the door. Kelly (of the John and Kelly Sanders duo) took the lead with about 10 minutes of copy cat. We then took it up a level and tried Uganda-fying Duck Duck Goose. We went for Chicken Chicken Cow (or “enkooko enkooko entay”).

Due to the snow in Washington, D.C., my flight to Dulles to meet up with John and Kelly has been cancelled. I've been rerouted to Amsterdam with a direct flight out of Detroit. This would be my normal path, but I was hoping to get some catch up and debrief time with John and Kelly. We should still have our Amsterdam to Entebbe flight together, as long as they can get out of Washington.

Here it is, 11:38 pm, and I'm making final preparations for my trip to Uganda tomorrow. This will be my first visit of 2010 as well as my first visit since going full-time with OJM. I'm excited to get back and see my friends, evaluate some of the projects we've been working on recently, move other projects forward and do some training.

We began OJM as an experimental attempt to undo a centuries-old model of orphan care. We distinguished the two models according to their distinct motives. The traditional paradigm is “refuge-based” while what we were proposing is “released-based”. The first is driven by the present need while the latter looks through the present to the future. A model that is focused on providing refuge has no necessary outcome other than orphans being loved and protected. What we wanted to pursue was outcome-based orphan care.

The Orphan's Cry is also available below for download as a PDF document.

As I think about the crushing weight of the increasing number of orphans (some put it as high as 150 million), I have been asking myself some hard questions: How shall we then live in this age of AIDS orphans and abandonment? What are we to do in the midst of the overwhelming need of the fatherless? How are we to make sense of the gross inequity of too much for a few and too little for the many? Is there something God wants from us?