By Christi Mays
Missions Emphasis Week was always Sara Hamilton’s '09 favorite week at UMHB. She couldn’t wait to talk to the full-time missionaries and hear about their real-life adventures in the mission field.
While at UMHB, just before going into the nursing program, she was able to go on a two-week medical mission trip to Uganda; she recalled that the East-Central African country felt like home.
“God showed me without a doubt that I was supposed to be in Uganda after finishing nursing school,” she said. With more than three million orphaned children living there, due to poverty, war, disease, and malnutrition, Sara’s heart yearned to help them.
“I felt God leading me to start a home for these abandoned, abused, and orphaned children,” she said. Soon after graduation, at the age of 23, she moved to Uganda and, on a leap of faith, opened Rafiki Children’s Home in January 2010 in the village of Namugongo. What started in a three-bedroom rented home with only two staff members and four children, has today, 10 years later, grown into a ministry that cares for between 20 to 25 children of all ages. The ministry provides access to education, quality medical care, nutritious food, and clean water, as well as shelter in a large family-style home.
The home’s primary goal is to serve as a transitional, emergency care home while social workers diligently try to find family members who can reunite with the children.
“We fully believe that an orphanage is no place for a child to grow up. We desire for each child to grow up in a loving family where they are cared for by parents, relatives, and the community,” Sara said. “It is an exciting time when children who were separated from their families are reunited.”
Through a monthly sponsorship program, supporters come alongside the ministry in prayer, encouragement, and finances, which aids the children in food, medical care, shelter, and schooling (which isn’t free in Uganda).
