Children's Prison and Destiny Villages

"This is the school's first ever graduation ceremony," some one told me as the Seattle group plus one stowaway (yours truly) filed into a big Yesu Akwagala bus. Destination: Destiny School and Orphanage; occasion: student graduation.

Enough funding has been raised to send about five

out of thirty-six students on to University.

 

 

 

On Friday at Destiny we got to go through every classroom,

 listen to a welcome from the students, and distribute candy

Following the ceremony everyone enjoyed a huge Ugandan lunch, including chicken and matooke. Then came a really fun time of hand shakes and photo ops with the grads on stage.

 

The next morning, Friday, we returned to Destiny one more time to hand children rescued from prison gifts from their sponsor families. You should have seen the smile on the face of the little guy I was helping when he opened a picture and card from his sponsor family! 





With Friday afternoon came Children's Prison ministry. The majority of the kids there, so I'm told, haven't actually committed crimes. Rather, they were beggars and street children who were picked up by the police. Things used to be rough there, but apparently the conditions of the kids has bettered considerably since last year, ever since the facility came under new Christian management.  



 

 

It was a long dining hall lined with tables and benches on either side that I found myself in, seated among what appeared to be a crowd of a few hundred preteen boys. We introduced ourselves. We sang songs. The team let me give the string figures-through-the-Bible presentation I learned after being thrust in the kids ministry at the clinic. People preached. People gave testimonies. It was an experience I'm not about to forget!