Colossians 3:12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
"When it comes to human dignity, we cannot make compromises." -Angela Merkel
Here is a list of the ministry activities that we are currently conducting in Western Uganda:
Mending the Soul: Transformed for Life (TFL) is partnered with Mending the Soul (MTS) on the ground in Uganda where Mending the Soul operates under TFL to train and equip our students, staff, pastors, community, and others with Christ-centered trauma trainings and healing groups.
Community development programs: Transformed for Life has been working hard to empower our communities through sensitizations, home visits, prayer, counseling, trainings, Bible studies, life skills, and Bible study classes to help empower and develop our community.
Early education and primary school: Transformed for Life runs an early education and primary school called “Transformed for Life Christian School” for non-paying students from vulnerable families in our community. This school provides a high-quality Christian education that also includes breakfast, lunch, school uniforms, counseling, medical care, and parental engagement classes for the students in our school.
Support to children in crisis: Transformed for Life (TFL) receives calls from the police, child welfare officer, probation officer as well as community members concerning children in crisis that have been abused, tortured, abandoned, trafficked, and orphaned in our community. When TFL receives such a call, we immediately meet with the child and ensure that their immediate physical needs are met which include medical care, food, shoes, and clothing. We then work on finding a safe relative where we can resettle the child. Whenever we place a child in crisis into a new family we conduct family counseling and provide a resettlement package to the family that includes comfort objects for the child as well as household items for the entire family to ease the process that include: a food package, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, and an animal or financial empowerment project.
Residential and foster care for children unable to be immediately resettled: In situations where we are unable to find a safe and willing relative to resettle a child in crisis to, we find a foster family that we have put through parenting and trauma trainings or place that child in our residential care home situated on our land. Whenever a child is placed with a foster family we provide counseling as well as ongoing emotional and material support to ensure that the child is safe and their needs are being met.
Vocational trainings for vulnerable women. During COVID Transformed for Life put a small group of women in our community through a one-year tailoring course. We then financially empowered them to start-up their own small business by paying for six months of rent at a location of their choosing and purchasing for them all their start up materials.
Support of the local church: After moving to Kibaale District we quickly realized that although the area was well, “churched” with at least one local church per village, that local pastors had a very limited knowledge of the Bible and what it looked like to lead a healthy church. Although they loved God, some of their practices were driving people away from the church and hurting women and families. We have therefore been partnering with Africans Training Africans, a team of Ugandan seminary graduates to take 65 of the local pastors in our area from 25 different villages through an adapted Bible course that has been split up into 16, one-week intensives that we host on our site. The pastors concluded these trainings in December 2023. They have learned so very much and are already preaching what they are learning in their home churches and coming together for evangelism crusades in our communities. When ministering to the community in large numbers such as through our medical camps and sensitizations, we continue to partner with these local churches to minister and evangelize to the community alongside of us.
Support of resettled street and vulnerable children: Over the years Transformed for Life (TFL) resettled over 100 street children home with their biological families. Once they were resettled we continued to support them with an education and for all of their needs to be met from home. While the majority of these children have grown up and graduated from our programs, TFL is continuing to sponsor the remaining students in vocational schools and Universities. We are so proud of them!
Safe rooms for women in crisis: Transformed for Life currently has four safe houses available for women experiencing homelessness and fleeing domestic violence in our community.
Radio campaigns. As few people have a laptop and internet is expensive, radios are the primary way that people in our District receive new information. We have therefore aired radio campaigns with information that we share at our sensitizations and Bible studies so that people in our District of 250,000 can receive the same Good News and life skills that we are sharing with those in our programs.
Discipleship camps. We continue to pay for the teenagers in our program to attend discipleship camps during school holidays with Watoto Church and Scripture Union.
Land and construction of homes for vulnerable women: In the past 5 years, Transformed for Life has purchased land for as well as constructed and repaired homes for vulnerable mothers in our community.
Employment of vulnerable women: Transformed for Life currently has a women’s program where we are hiring 20 vulnerable women from our community on a daily basis to conduct agricultural activities on our land. Each day the woman works we add a small portion of money in a savings account for her. We also conduct weekly life skills (such as learning how to make energy saving stoves in the left hand picture), money management classes, and Bible studies.
Vocational training for youth.Matthew 4:23And He [Jesus] went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. When we began the construction of our school, we had a group of 12 former street children that were turning 18-19 years old and had struggled to finish a formal education. We therefore put on a two-year vocational program for these young men where we taught them a variety of skills including: cooking and catering, animal rearing, forestry, welding, and building. These boys were then paid to help construct our school classrooms under the instruction of an engineer. The students were mandated to place 90% of this money into a savings account until the completion of the programs. After their graduation, many of our students used their savings to purchase land and construct homes for themselves or to start up small businesses.
Medical camps: For the last four years Transformed for Life (TFL) has put on medical camps for our community. At these medical camps we provide medical care, medications, health and blood testing, family planning services, minor operations, prayer, and counseling. TFL also provides follow-up operations that are unable to be performed at the medical camp such as for fistula, hernia, anal, and uterine prolapse and orthopedic operations.
Medical care for people in crisis: Outside of our annual medical camps, we have had many desperate mothers come to our site seeking emergency medical treatment for themselves or their children. This includes those who have been severely burned, cancer, born with birth defects, in need of an emergency c-section, and children that have been in accidents with bad bone breaks in need of orthopedic surgeries. Transformed for Life provides for this medical treatment by taking the family to a high-quality hospital in Kampala or Entebbe (depending on the services needed) and paying for the transport, meals, housing costs, medical fees and follow-up care.
Justice to the vulnerable:Amos 5:24 But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! Transformed for Life will step in to protect the vulnerable through assisting to arrest perpetrators preying on the vulnerable in our community. We only do this when requested to by women coming to us seeking protection. We protect these vulnerable women through hiring private investigators, bringing in police to conduct arrests, bringing witnesses to court, helping victims to file paperwork at the police, conducting citizen’s arrests when necessary and taking abusers to police. We have been able to arrest and see imprisoned rapists, attempted rapists, traffickers and abusers from our community.
Agriculture: To reduce food costs and increase nutrition in our school and programs, Transformed for Life has planted many acres of nutritious food on our land. We have planted 15 acres of matooke (a type of banana and food staple in Uganda that is peeled, boiled, and mashed), a 10-acre fruit orchard around our school full of guava, tangerine, mulberry, jackfruit, tamarind, mango, plum, and avocado trees. We have also planted sugar cane that we crush with a juicer and sweeten our student’s porridge with in the morning. We have a school herb and vegetable garden. We have planted a moringa tree plantation that provides nutritious leaves that we crush and put in our children’s lunch each day and use as fodder for our pigs during school holidays when food scraps are few. We have also planted 15 acres of jackfruit trees. Jackfruit is the heaviest fruit in the world with a high protein content that can lower blood sugar levels. It also has a high caloric value- making it a great solution for food insecure families or to increase milk production in cows. These jackfruit trees were planted to provide fruit for our students, food insecure families, and our cattle. We also have a mobile chicken project (chickens under a mobile cage that we rotate through our fruit orchards) as well as a medium-sized piggery where we take our food scraps every day (as seen on the right). The piglets that are born in our piggery are then distributed to vulnerable and foster families in our community.
Financial empowerment projects. Transformed for Life (TFL) believes in supporting vulnerable children through financially empowering families. To this end, TFL has distributed hundreds of animal projects that include a training followed by the distribution of rabbits, chickens, goats, or piglets. TFL has also helped to start-up small businesses and shops for women and distribute agricultural inputs such as hoes and seeds to thousands of farming families in our community.
Care for the elderly. Climate change has made life even more challenging for our farming community. Many families have lost crops due to hail, irregular rains, and drought in the last five years. Transformed for Life has been providing assistance in the form of care and food packages to elderly households in our community in need of food during times of scarcity.
Reforestation and tree planting: Although the community we are ministering to works very hard as subsistence farmers, they remain very poor. According to Global Forest Watch, our region, Kibaale District had a 93% tree cover in 2000. Well over half of this tree cover has been lost in the last 23 years. It is predicted that if the current trends of deforestation continue, within the next 40 years, all the forests in Uganda will be gone[1]. Poor harvests and food insecurity in Uganda is tightly connected to climate change through drought, irregular weather patterns and pests[2]. In the last few years, we have seen the devastating effect that deforestation and climate change has had on our community struggling with food and water insecurity like never before. We have seen drought, hail and irregular rains destroy their crops and their water sources (ponds and streams) dry up during increasingly longer dry seasons. We feel it is important to replant trees as well as to train our community about the importance of trees, how to care for the earth and to provide for these families nutritious seedlings that they can plant. Transformed for Life has been able to plant over 500,000 indigenous, fruit and nut trees on our land. We have also distributed thousands of fruit and nut tree seedlings to those in our community to plant in order to boost their household nutrition and income levels.
Creation Care/ Wildlife conservation: Psalm 24:1 The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. In addition to seeing wildlife parts as magical, Ugandans in the village have false beliefs about wildlife, especially beneficial species believing them to be harmful, venomous, and dangerous when they are not. Instead of people admiring wild animals and appreciating God’s creativity and beauty, they live in fear and they kill them on sight. As we have been teaching about our good God and helping people to understand and appreciate wildlife, we have seen many people overcome chronic fears and satanic bondage. Many people have publicly accepted Christ as their Savior, acknowledged that they were held in bondage and asked for us to pray over them for spiritual freedom. We have been teaching people that God is loving and kind and that He gives us good gifts through His creation! We have also been working to help people understand wildlife species, with a large emphasis on beneficial species such as owls, chameleons, and pangolins so that they can learn to respect them and live in harmony with them rather than driving them to extinction. In the process of raising awareness about wildlife, people have begun calling us when they see an animal that is being trafficked or is injured. We have been able to rescue and release 27 pangolins which is wonderful since they are an endangered and iconic African animal that is predicted to go extinct unless people do something about it! Pangolins are also anteaters and therefore extremely helpful to small-scale farmers.