Compassionate about the poor    Bill  Mulcahy  (Brisbane)   July 13, 2012    This is the “reality” for them!

Bill's previous articles www.spiritofthebush.net www.amakagaspiritus.org

Update: A young 21 year old man, Moses, leads a catholic youth ministry in, Masaka, Uganda and is one of my contacts in the country. Moses and I have established the ALTERNATIVE INCOME PROGRAM "Empowering Families". We have established the program that specifically targets marginalised women, providing them with productive resources such as sewing machines for a tailoring business, milking/breeding animals, financial literacy workshops, enabling them to generate a sustainable source of income for their families. The attached photos show Sylvia (number 2 recipient) and Grace (number 3 recipient) with young Moses. God enables many great things to happen.
Nakandi Sylvia and Moses	Ms. Nandawula Grace	Ms. Nandawula Grace and Moses

This is the “reality” for them!

We started back at school this week and I emailed each staff member at school a picture to reflect upon. This is a classroom in Uganda, not uncommon amongst those out in the rural villages. I commented to our staff that I did not send the picture to shock them or to elicit any thoughts of empathy, but as a realisation exercise in that we are so quick to complain at times about the simplest of things, oversized classrooms, technology not working, not enough highlighters, you know what I mean. I posed the question: How would you cope?

I reflect back to September 2009 when I visited Ngugulo Primary School in Uganda on a goodwill visit. I decided I would take the year 2 class for Maths.
I walked into this mud brick classroom and felt so overwhelmed. In front of me were 72 children of varying ages, mostly about 8 years, 4 desks, dirt and partly concreted floor, no windows, no textbooks, no technology, a faded blackboard and no chalk. I thank God for pebbles, twigs and clumps of dirt that are as useful in teaching Maths as plastic counters or MAB blocks.

The aspect that I appreciated so much was that while there was so much that these 72 children didn’t have, every single one was glued to my every word, listening with a smiling face, happy, simply happy because they were at school, getting an education. This was a great learning curve for me. You cannot appreciate the effect that it has on you unless you have been there, live it, sense it, and act it. So back to the picture: You can see the conditions in this classroom, but it is an image, a real scenario, but still for us an image. We are removed from the characters within it; we cannot even imagine that such a classroom could exist. And while the image may cause some to want to do something about the situation, what I wanted our staff to gain was the resolution to be so very thankful for what we have. To ponder this image next time we wanted to gripe about something and determine whether it is worthy of complaining about.