By Debbie Hall.  Debbie Hall is a "consulteer" — a former high-tech marketer and management consultant, now a consultant / volunteer to nonprofits. She serves on the board of Menlo Church, Village Enterprise, Edify, and The Gathering. She and her husband Russ live in Menlo Park, California. She enjoys golf, hiking, and music.

It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do — visit several church mission partners that address extreme poverty in a single trip.  This wouldn’t be the usual mission trip where you bring your hammer or your kids’ craft materials. Instead, it would be a look-listen-and-learn trip.

I first met Marylou after church. I described the trip to her, and she kept asking, “Yes, but what are we going to DO?!” My answer was that we would learn a great deal, pray with the staffs, and show our gratitude in person for what they do, not just in the checks they receive. Marylou said YES and brought her best friend with her (whose first reaction was: “but what will we DO?!). In all, we had seven people on the trip.

The trip begins: and what are we DOING?

Over two weeks, we met with five organizations in two countries, each of which plays a role in addressing the challenge of extreme poverty.  The visits were short but intense, ranging from half a day to two days. Despite this, we left each visit feeling like we’d been deeply immersed in their mission and work, while gaining great insights into their accomplishments and kindling new friendships with the staffs and those they serve.

Village Enterprise grant disbursement.

But the question of exactly we were DOING lingered. Upon arriving, we were greeted by each organization in a profoundly African way. At Village Enterprise, twenty-some staff met us at their Hoima, Uganda office with singing, dancing, and drumming. We heard a presentation on how they start small businesses with people living in extreme poverty to give them sustainable livelihoods, incomes, and savings.  Over the next two days we experienced every element — business training, mentoring, grant disbursements, and savings meetings, and met many future and current business owners. While the program sounds straight-forward, we learned that it’s a multi-layered onion with many complexities in navigating 40 languages, muddy roads, land rights, low literacy, tribal traditions, and high rates of alcoholism. We were showered with gifts of quilted bags made by one of the businesses, and we shared a feast of traditional dishes with the entire staff.  We prayed with and for the staff and business owners, offering our vision of hope and encouragement for them and their families.

At Compassion International, we were greeted at a Kampala Children’s Development Center (CDC) by a children’s band and choir — children skipping school that day to meet us. Their songs expressed their faith in Christ, their joys, their aspirations. Each one told us what they hoped to be: doctor, lawyer, pilot, teacher, or accountant. After morning tea, staff shared how CI’s Child Survival and Child Sponsorship programs work, then took us to the home of their newest student, 4-year-old Joseph. He was shy and embarrassed for us to see his home, a crowded 8’ x 8’ wooden shack for his family of five. They moved to Kampala from northern Uganda seeking a better life, but his dad, finding no regular job, searches each morning for day labor as a security guard. Crowding together in their home, we offered gifts of food staples and prayed for God’s love and provision of practical needs like work, food, and shelter. Back at the CDC, we joined the kids for lunch, more singing and dancing, praying, and sharing our favorite scriptures.

We arrived on a Friday morning for the weekly staff worship and prayer time with International Justice Mission. This office works on land rights, educating the police and court systems on the rights of widows to retain their land and representing select cases themselves in the courts. To the police and courts, they bring extra and welcomed training resources, knowledge and advice on collecting and organizing evidence. On this day, the first prayer on the list was heart-stopping: in Kenya, where IJM works to change practices of police brutality and extra-judicial killings, an IJM lawyer, his client, and their taxi driver had been abducted after leaving a court proceeding. Fervent prayers were offered that they be located quickly and would be safe. We had an inside view of the dangers of this work, and felt deep gratitude that in Uganda IJM has built such positive relationships with the police, compared to the challenges in Kenya of trying to reform corrupt and illegal practices. Tragically, the news the next day was that all three men in Kenya had been tortured to death. These men paid the ultimate price fighting for justice.

One week and three visits into the trip, we had learned a great deal but we felt some guilt over receiving so much and giving seemingly so little. They showered us with their gifts — singing, dancing, celebrating, and even actual presents. (We, too, brought small gifts of appreciation for the staffs — chocolates and cell phone rechargers.) We obviously consumed valuable staff time — even causing children to miss a school day! Is this what we came to do? One morning’s devotion gave an answer.

Bringing the Gift of “Visitation”

At Compassion International.

The devotion was on the Bible’s call to “visit” the needy, the widow, and the orphan. James 1:27 says: “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction…” The New Testament word for “visit” connotes “the idea of imparting life." God “visited” a barren Hannah and she conceived a child. Jesus “visited” a woman mourning her son’s death, laid hands on the coffin, and the son came to life. We gained new insight that “visiting” people in their distress or ministries in service to the poor is life-giving.

God revealed to us that our presence and prayers are a gift: people felt encouragement and God’s joy through our presence and prayers. The devotion reminded us that a visit “mustn’t be limited to providing them merely with commodities [indeed we had not done this]. We are to share our own lives, and invite them to taste of Christ’s life. We are to pray for fullness in the places where they are empty.” [Sharing God’s Heart for the Poor, pp. 18-19.]

The Trip Continues

After a weekend safari on the Masai Mara, the trip continued to two school projects in southwest Kenya, The Kilgoris Project (TKP) and Achungo Children’s Center.  TKP serves rural Masai communities, in partnership with a local church, building schools where the public alternatives are many miles away.  We saw their newest school — just 3 classes of preschoolers meeting in a church and under the trees. At the other extreme, their oldest school is fully built-out, preschool to 8th grade.  We were greeted (by now, we got the drill!) in song and dance. The elders bestowed new Masai names on us and dressed us in Masai wraps and jewelry.  

Achungo serves children who are orphaned, providing not only education but effectively becoming surrogate families. The staff imparts a strong sense of love, community, and spiritual support to help deal with the trauma of losing one or both parents.  They provide full room and board for the 7th and 8th graders to help them prepare for the exam in 8th grade that determines whether they will continue on to high school or not. Happily, both TKP and Achungo children are excelling on this test and moving ahead, and both schools outperform the public alternatives.

Satisfied in Knowing What We “Did”

In the end, we had no doubt about what we were “doing." We were being “visitors” and imparting life.

In giving in this way, we also received two big-picture perspectives that we would never have seen had we come on a work project. First, we saw how the BIG problem of extreme poverty is addressed separately and yet inter-relatedly across multiple organizations.

At a Kilgoris Project school.

For example, as IJM enables widows to keep their land, then widows in Village Enterprise's program will benefit from land to grow higher-profit cash crops. As Village Enterprise succeeds at providing livelihoods in rural areas, fewer families will move to crowded cities in search of the elusive “better life.” Then Compassion International won't face such a surge of new urban children needing sponsorships. As TKP and Achungo educate children, a generations-long cycle of poverty ends. Each group, working in its own way, holds the key to its piece of solving the big picture of poverty.

The second perspective we gained was a valuable glimpse into the long-term impact. At Village Enterprise, one business mentor is herself a former beneficiary and another is a second-generation beneficiary — her mother moved out of poverty through Village Enterprise. A savings group in its 5th year of saving together — four years beyond the Village Enterprise program — has $670 in savings per person. The members, who began when they lived on $1 a day, have abandoned mud huts for new brick homes and now operate multiple businesses.

At IJM, the changes they are making with the training they provide to the police and courts on widows’ land rights are systemic and long-lasting. At Compassion International, the four staff members we spent the day with were all sponsored children themselves! At TKP, Masai tribesman Shadrack Lemiso first set foot in a school to begin his primary education at age 16. Today he holds a master’s degree in education and serves as Principal of their oldest school.  At Achungo, founder Michael Nyangi left a successful banking career to educate orphans in his homeland and is launching a second school.

Will we see an end to extreme poverty in our life times? We just might.

Image credits: (1–3) Copyright © 2016 Judy Lee.  All Rights Reserved.  Use of these images without prior written permission from Judy Lee is prohibited.