This isn't working

by Bucky Rogers

Founder of Benjamin House Ministries

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One of our teams has been in a rural village this week working in the school, partnering with the church to reach out to the border villages, and building a home for a group of 4 orphaned children. The village cares for them, but the hut they were in was literally disintegrating. This group of kids would normally end up being brought to an orphanage and institutionalized, separated from their extended relatives and the village and tribe they’ve grown up in. This isn’t working. Institutions don’t change kid’s lives. Families do.
As we drove through the city, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of children. There were kids everywhere, in tattered clothes, dirty, and with no caretaker in sight. Contrast this to the kids we saw in the schools we visited. They were well dressed in their uniforms, clean, and cared for. The reality is that if a child’s family can’t afford school, they’re either relegated to a life without education or they end up being given up by their families in order to attend a school at a children’s home.
I could literally see Benjamin House in my mind today. In fact, at one point one of the recording artists we are traveling with came up to me and said, “You’re dreaming of bigger things aren’t you?” I confess I was, and it was a beautiful place. A place where families are strengthened, the vulnerable and truly orphaned are cared for and set into families, where education is available for a price that allows families to stay together, and a lighthouse of truth for the teenage culture in Uganda so that we avoid much of the orphan care crisis before it begins. It’s big…but God is bigger. And I am so ready.

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