A Special Celebration

Youth Empowerment Conference

All the sponsored children who were in Secondary or Tertiary school were invited to Bushikori for the conference on Friday and slept over at the school that night in readiness for the Sending Off Ceremony the next day.

The students began arriving early with their mattresses and began setting up the chapel for the opening. The children were all registered and given a set of guidelines or rules for the weekend. Linus went through and explained each one carefully. Many students were still arriving late as they had to come from a long way away.

Three of the girls led us in a praise and worship time (one of them was Phebe our sponsored child)! What a thrill for us! Her mother was to be the guest speaker. The theme was “Be careful how you live/ walk” from Ephesians 5:15.

After the usual lunch of Matooke, rice, meat stew, greens we sauntered back to a presentation by a group called the Daughters of Zion. They performed a skit about smoking and drinking leading you away from God and those leading a Godly life and believing in Jesus going to Heaven. They also performed a dance and sang a song. The students then broke up into age groups for their workshops.

We were able to locate a few more students to take photos of and then went back to the office to download the pictures.

Sending Off Ceremony

The program for the Sending Off Ceremony was exactly timetabled from 7.00am to 2.50pm. We arrived at 10 when the Guest of Honour was also due to arrive, but when we got there we were the first of the guests that had arrived and they were still putting up the two marquees. Finally at about 12 we started (the guest of honour the LC5) had still not arrived. We had opening prayers, welcoming remarks interspersed with singing. John then spoke to the Graduates. This was followed by the official speeches from the BCC Child Care CoOrdinator, BCC Director, Australian Representative ( a fine speech by Rex), Probation and Welfare Officer of Mbale and the LC1. These were all translated into English or Liguisu (the local dialect). This was again interspersed with singing. It began to bucket down rain so umbrellas were bought out and the event continued. Finally the Guest of Honour arrived at about 3 pm so apologies were given because we had started proceedings without him (however no apologies from him as to why he was late). We were past being hungry by now! All the formal introductions were once again made and then the LC 5 gave his speech. All the graduates were then presented to the LC5 by Dan (Child care co-Ordinator who declared himself the Vice Chancellor and also wore a gown – he looked quite comical).

All the graduates looked very colourful in their different coloured gowns and with their mortars on. We were very proud of them even though we had only met a few. The other students sat patiently through all the proceedings. These were the first sponsored students from Bushikori who had made it through and had completed Vocational Training or Tertiary studies. As sponsors it was very inspiring to see how the life of a small orphan child, like the many we had seen on our travels through the villages, had been changed with the assistance from a kind heart all the way over in Australia. What a mighty God we have! We then had a formal cutting of the cake! All the graduates were then presented with gifts of blankets, mattresses, sheets and an item related to their profession like a sewing machine or bag of tools and a new Bible!

You can see what a great importance an occasion like this is in their culture. We finally had lunch at about 4, which was all set out in special “bain maries” (even the matooke), and were then free to leave after that, a little stiff and sore.

What a marvellous day!