SS Refugee Crisis Blog 1: 2 months in Uganda begins
We have some exciting news! This time tomorrow I'll be on a plane to Uganda, followed in a weeks time by Reninca and the kids, as we go to help ramp up HHA's efforts in response to the South Sudanese Refugee Crisis.
As many of you may now be aware following our trip to the region a few months back, South Sudan is facing the worst refugee crisis in Africa and the fastest growing crisis of its kind globally. There are now around 3.5 million displaced South Sudanese people, of which almost half have become refugees in other countries following the devastating consequence of a brutal civil war. Uganda, with its compassionate open border policy, has subsequently taken on huge influxes of refugees in 2017, including many HHA South Sudanese friends, board members and local partners.
Whilst HHA have been looking to start working in the region for over a year, our visit a few months ago highlighted the incredible need for action now. I'll go into a few of those specific calls to action that we faced in separate blogs over the coming weeks. Those needs, paralleled with a joint desire from us and BMS World Mission (who are part sponsoring this trip) to get things ramped up quickly, has led to a fairly swift decision for us to head out as a family for the next 2 months.
Whilst in northern Uganda we'll be undertaking a number activities, including overseeing a range of HHA led nutritional programmes, starting up some disability work in the refugee camps and training up local capacity to sustain and grow our work when we leave. Lots more on all of that to follow...
We just wanted to make this quick announcement as we'd really value your support in the coming months. As most of you know, Reninca and I have done mission placements many times, but this will be a first for us with our 5 year old son and 7 month old baby.
We'll be blogging and doing video updates etc. through out our time with pointers to specific prayer points which we'd love your support with. Beyond that, we'll also need to raise some more funds to scale up the impact of HHAs efforts in the region. So...whether it be through prayers, sharing some of our social media posts, or helping with a bit of fundraising, we hope you'll join us on this exciting (but slightly scary) new phase of HHAs work.