Day 5 - YSU volleyball court and Hope Community High School

Today started with a return trip to Youth Support Uganda (YSU), to help build what will be a state of the art volleyball court (by local standards). Emmanuel, Robert and their team showed us how to mix mortar, and how to level bricks with an improvised African spirit level.

Kirk and Alpha, 3-year old sons of two of the women in the YSU dressmaking course, helped us enthusiastically, and kept us entertained with their relentless and joyful laughter.

The volleyball court will be used by YSU volleyball team, and will help bring more boys from the region to YSU, where Alan and his team will have an opportunity to minister into their lives, and provide them with the kind of positive social network that they would likely never know otherwise. 

Some of us questioned whether our 'help' was really help at all, given the proficiency of the local team, the time they took to teach us how to help, and the oversight that we required to get it right. But this was a reminder for me that a trip like this is not so much about what we do while we're here, but what we do next. Here we connect with and invest in the local community; they invest in us; we grow in empathy; and we learn first hand about how we can help people in places like Uganda in more tangible ways.

I'm reminded of a quote that Johann shared with us on the first night here: "What my eyes cannot see, my heart struggles to grieve over". On this trip we are seeing, and at times we are grieving. But the rubber hits the road when we get home: what will we do with what we have seen. We can only affect real change through sustained effort, courage, and faith.

In the afternoon, we had an opportunity to visit Hope Community High School. We learned that the schools in the district with adequate facilities to properly prepare students to excel in their final school exams, and therefore progress to higher education, cost more than the vast majority of families can afford. The fees for one student are generally more than most households' total income.

Hope Community High School gives hundreds of children the kind of education and opportunities that they would otherwise never have access to, because of these prohibitive costs. 35 of the current students there are from the Village of Hope and are funded by HopeBuilders.

After a game of volleyball against some students (the students won), we spent some time with the Village of Hope kids at the school and then walked back to Suubi House with them (as it is on the way back to the Village).

As we walked, I spoke with a boy who told me about his dreams to study at Harvard or Cambridge after he finished school. Regardless of whether he realises this dream or not, what a gift it is that he even has these kinds of dreams. Compared to what he might have otherwise hope for, had he grown up in the slum where he was born.

Steve