August Mission Moment

What an exciting time

Forty children recently received life-changing surgeries for crippling deformities or burns at the Arusha Lutheran Medical Centre in Tanzania — and that was just one week! The ability to perform that many operations is just one of the benefits of the expanded training and program development at the center.

Your contributions allow ELCA missionaries Dr. Mark and Linda Jacobson to be a part of this important growth. “What an exciting time of great thanksgiving this is for our ministries in Tanzania,” they say.

“Our training efforts to address the huge shortfall of health care professionals have leaped ahead. In the last few months we have been registered as a training center and our assistant medical officer training program has been accredited.” Also, they add, “We have taken the final steps toward opening our own nursing college in February 2013!”

The center has also become an international training center for African surgeons to study laparoscopic surgery and join the global movement to this video surgical care.

“These are some of the programs and ministries that you have been supporting so generously. We have great opportunities to serve 
and to share together in these ministries and outreach,” Mark and Linda say.

Your gifts are helping to make a world of a difference in God’s global mission! Thank you!!

Over 240 missionaries
 serve in over 50 countries.  To find out more about how to directly support a missionary either personally or through adoption by your congregation, visit: www.ELCA.org/missionarysponsorship

We cannot be quiet about what we have seen and heard! Acts 4:20

Christine Donahue

TLGCS Mission Interpreter Coordinator

Send me your congregation’s God Stories! cedonahue@gmail.com

July Mission Moment

God’s Warm Embrace 

Ndenaghafumwa Umburi (her name means “let us glorify God”) is a busy woman to say the least. Ndenaghafumwa, who goes by Mankia for short, lives on a shamba (farm) on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. I met Mankia and her family the day they received two LWR Mission Quilts, delivered by the local Lutheran pastor. (The Quilts arrived just in time as it was rainy season in Tanzania and quite cold and wet in the village.)

On the day I spent with Mankia, she prepared breakfast for her family, cut banana leaves to feed her cows, harvested mchicha (amaranth greens) and cooked them for lunch, walked to a distant field to weed her corn and bean crops, walked back home, cooked supper, tidied her small home and cleaned up all the dishes from the day. She also shared a good laugh with a neighbor who dropped by, hosted her pastor for tea, and caught up on the village news with another neighbor.

At the end of the long and busy day Mankia was able to rest warmly under her new LWR Mission Quilt. The second Quilt covered her son, Goodlove, who has been confined to his bed for 18 years after a fall from an avocado tree left him paralyzed from the waist down. An extra layer of warmth from an LWR Mission Quilt will help prevent what could be a life-threatening illness for Goodlove, who is especially vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.

And just as the Quilts will warm Goodlove and Mankia physically, they will also warm them spiritually and emotionally as they feel supported and cared for by people who are serving Christ through serving him.
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Does your congregation have quilters? Encourage them to make quilts for LWR’s 2013 quilting campaign. Through programs like this, we, as the ELCA, are changing lives! Thank you!

To view a video about Ndenaghafumwa Umburi click here: http://youtu.be/Lzgi553fLHA

To get more information on LWR’s 2013 quilt campaign, visit: ‪http://lwr.org/quiltcampaign

We cannot be quiet about what we have seen and heard! Acts 4:20

Christine Donahue, Mission Interpreter Coordinator

June Mission Moment

A Brighter Tomorrow

In the Kasagamaa Sub County of Uganda, it’s not unusual for children to serve as the heads of households. Of all of the countries on the African continent, Uganda has one of the highest percentages of people living with and dying from HIV and AIDS, leaving many children orphaned and to fend for themselves.

Sentongo Abdul’s parents died of AIDS in 2006, leaving Sentongo in charge of looking after his younger sister and brother. Without the help of their parents, the Abdul children were often hungry. Although there is a free primary school in their community, the children did not have the required school supplies to attend.

“Well-wishers gave us food once in a while, but no one ever offered us money to cater for some of household essentials and scholastic materials,” Sentongo says. “It hurt me so much to watch my friends attend school on a daily basis, yet I could not afford basic materials which everyone took for granted.”
But thanks to a partnership between ELCA World Hunger and the Rural Action Community Based Organization, a local community service organization in Uganda, the Abduls’ lives are changing.

In 2011, the children were given a new house, a water tank, household utensils and two pregnant goats as a part of a larger initiative that distributed 280 goats to 90 households. For people in Uganda, a goat is as good as money in the bank. Goats can provide nutritious milk and meat, but more importantly, they can be sold when a family finds itself in need.

In the next phase of the project, the program will also provide gardening and food preparation training to children who lead households and people living with HIV and AIDS with the hope of increasing food security in the region.

In Sentongo’s case, the Rural Action Community Based Organization taught him how to properly care for his goats including how to build a pen, how to feed them properly with locally available foods and how to keep them from falling ill.

His goats each had two kids, and when the organization saw how well Sentongo was caring for his animals, they gave him two more. He was then able to sell four of the goats to procure books, pens, pencils and school bags for his siblings. Now Sentongo spends his days taking his goats to graze on the fresh grass in the hills where he lives, while his brother and sister get an education.

“I had given up all hope for life after our parents’ death. My siblings’ dreams of becoming teachers can now be realized because of the goat project. My future and that of my siblings is surely brighter.”

Thank you!! Your gifts help make stories like Sentongo’s possible. You are a life-changer!

We cannot be quiet about what we have seen and heard! Acts 4:20

Christine Donahue, Mission Interpreter Coordinator