uganda {akanyijuka}

The word “Akanyijuka” (pronounced ahh-can-jew-kah) is Ruchiga and means He remembered me. I absolutely love that meaning. Akanyijuka Children’s Home is a home in Bubaare, Uganda (pronounced boo-ball-eh, or if you are from the UK boo-bar-eh, which actually makes more sense based on the spelling but in Uganda their r’s and l’s are all messed up). Akanyijuka was opened up in 2007 and now has about 50 orphans and 6 house mothers. If I remember correctly they take kids in as young as 3 up to 8 or 9 years old but then I believe they can stay there indefinitely.

Akanyijuka is another division of Victory Community Care Services (I hear the website is almost ready to go live, I’ll update once it does with a link, it’s live! Check it out here!), they are in partnership with Destinations, a ministry based out of Australia.

We were never able to go into the Akanyijuka homes but we were able to see the kids in school a number of times. Since there are so many kids from the home they have built their own school, the boys from Humura attend here as well.

The school is currently running out of temporary wooden buildings that you can see in the photo below, at the bottom of the photo you can kind of see some digging that has been done, that is for the permanent, two-story school they are hoping to build. I believe it has actually been like that for some time now but they are waiting for all the funding before they build the school.

Break time and I guess everyone had to use the outhouse at once:

Recess:

This little cutie pops up in so many of my photos (something I didn’t notice until I got home), I was joking to Jared that it’s kind of like Where’s Waldo, except it’s Where’s Sam and instead of looking for the red and white hat you just look for this huge smile. I totally would have taken him home with me if I could have. The last Sunday that we were there, he may have been making paper airplanes in church, which reminded me so much of what Jared would have done at that age (who am I kidding, he still makes them at this age, just not usually during church).

John, one of the boys from Humura, he always has a smile.

Where’s Sam? This one is a little hard, but he’s there!

Where’s Sam, okay, so this one is obvious. This is one of my top 2 favorite photos from the trip (and Jared took both of them).

Every time we would walk into one of their classes they would all stand up and say: “Welcome to our visitors, we love visitors . . . ” They had this whole long speech which I don’t remember, but it was really sweet.

The boys from the special class. They are boys from Humura that are older (15 & 16) and so mainly the goal is to get them to be able to read, write and speak English and then enroll them in a vocational school.

This sweetheart is Gilver, he is the boy that Jared and I sponsor, I’ll do a full post on just him yet. He’s another one of those guys that you just can’t get a bad photo of.

 

Special class and Jeremiah:

Where’s Sam?

Because I’m a teacher I was very interested in how they had their classrooms set up and the limited resources they had to work with:

Where’s Sam? (He’s such a little poser!)

Okay, now I have to leave you with one of my favorite videos from the trip, the class in the photo above sang us a song, Sock it to the devil, first of all, very strange title, but I just love their energy. And, not sure if I’ve mentioned this but I totally wanted to take Sam home with me. 🙂

Linking up here!

with love,
Chantel