African Hearts Community Organization

June 2012 Update

Dear friends and supporters, I have the pleasure to bring to you news from African Hearts in a different version.  Please enjoy these updates of how God is blessing our ministry.

Children in Our Ministry

Ivan Lusiba, a boy rescued from the streets in 2008, is now able to explore his talents. He is a craftsman who can play with anything to make something of his own. Creative ideas just flow from him every day. This time he made a toy ship by connecting used cells on a motor and then displaying for his brothers how the water becomes an ocean in the basin. Ivan wants to be an engineer.  His teachers say he is one of the best performers in class. We are very proud of Ivan.

Kassim and John, our youngest children, started school this term year. They pretty much don’t know what it is all about but they enjoy the early morning breakfast. They love to play, and to them it is cool to carry their backpacks as they go to school. Steps to their future have begun.

Kisito Issa is one of the pioneers of African Hearts Community Organisation. He was picked by the organisation in 2002.  He has been through the school system and finally discovered his tailoring talent. African Hearts took him to a tailoring school where he emerged as the best student of his year. He is now the uniform designer at the African Hearts Junior School.  He is able to meet all his needs and support himself. He says he is forever grateful for the support from African Hearts, and we at African Hearts are also grateful to God and all the people who support our mission. We have a vision of expanding this project and other vocational skills because with such schools, youths are able to get jobs more easily than waiting for white collar jobs.

School News

School is going well.  Enrollment increased to 403 pupils.  We have been blessed by visiting teams, and they conducted a massive medical treatment of children and their parents at the school.  Furthermore, some vulnerable children and orphans were blessed by their fellow child Anna from America who collected over 200 pairs of shoes that were given to the children.  Happiness was all over the place.

African Hearts office

We feel blessed to have this new office block for African Hearts operations. This is a government requirement, but also it is a good place for all of us to meet as a team on a regular basis and for proper custody of official documents. African Hearts has taken a journey to professionalism and this is one of the needs we realized in our SWOT analysis. This is a journey, so please keep praying for us.

Future Plans and Prayer Requests

We are first of all grateful to God for how far he has brought us. We look back and say there is no way we would have gotten here by our own.  One of the issues hitting my heart really hard is the struggle to help the children who have grown up in our ministry and have become youths. How can we prepare them to launch in life?   Although, they have had great opportunities and hope from African Hearts, many of them reach this stage and feel not hope but dependency.  Some of them may not make it to the university due to finances, while others even after university find it so very hard to find jobs. Unemployment is very high in Uganda. The youths are greatly affected because they cannot even access credit facilities to start up income generating activities.  Banks often ask for collateral security which in most cases is land, yet most, if not all, of them don’t have land in their names.

It is against that background and other issues that African Hearts has started up a youth program where it seeks to train the youths in entrepreneurial skills and a micro-loan scheme for successful candidates as a launch plan for the youths to start up their journey of being independent and productive members of society. We also want to place these young men with mentors to train and disciple them so that they can be prepared for life in the real world.  Pray that we get clear direction and also the funds to establish this program to help many young men as they transition from childhood to youths and then to men with families of their own.

Other Prayer Requests:

• Health
• Children who are taking their exams that they may go well
• Safety of the children living on the streets; there have been several round ups recently and some children managed to escape from the government rehabilitation facility
• More business for the African Hearts Band.

God Bless,

LUTAAYA ABDUL
Executive Director African Hearts Community Organisation