The Rugumba's Updates

Greetings!!

I would like to start by thanking you for your continued prayers and support.

Vena had her third chemo round on Monday. She is feeling better than when she had her first and second round. Pray it is not hard on her. We are still praying for flights to open and we can all join her.

Zoe has graduated from Kindergarten. We continued to teach her at home and we are doing the same to all our kids at Mercy village. We have teachers that stayed and were quarantined with us. This has also helped keep our kids busy and occupied.

The kids had a break from our homeschool, they went and spent some time at my parents’ and my sister’s home. They had not seen them for the past 3 months.

We were able to get most of the boys sponsored, and they are thriving at the village. We were able to not just furnish one house but two, and were also able to buy them clothes. It was a joy as each received 5 shirts and 5 shorts. Thank you for the support.

Since we cannot meet in church, we turned the Sunday school rooms to food stores and have transformed the main sanctuary as a food distribution place. We have reached out to over 1500 people from our community with food and face masks, and we would like to continue reaching out families with the goal of helping at least 5,000 more.

We have reached out to close to 50 rural pastors, boda riders and teachers with care packages; these groups have been affected the most by the pandemic. It has been a joy to see Muslims, and many non-believers come to church for the first time to receive food, and it has given us the opportunity to pray for them.

For the food that we distribute, we buy it from local farmers and food distributors, some who are members of our church. By purchasing from them, in a small way, we are helping these local businesses survive during this pandemic.

It is currently illegal to walk without a face mask in public; you can be fined or put in Jail for that. At this time, tailors don’t have Jobs, so we have provided jobs to widows and teenage girls in our program and they are making cloth face masks.

Daisy, a mother to our sponsored kid, Angel, is a single mom whose husband abandoned her with the kids in Nansana slums. She later became homeless with her kids, and that is when Mercy started sponsoring her oldest daughter, Angel, who is now in Grade 7. During this Covid season, she could not afford to feed her family, but through the masks program, she is now making enough money to care for her family, pay rent, and even bought her own manual sewing machine.

Vicky, a teenager who dropped out of school due to her parents not being able to afford her education, has joined our vocational skills training program and has learned how to sew. She has always had them of owing her own electric sewing machine, and because of this program, she has saved over half of the money. In two months, she has the goal and hope of having enough saved up for it.

Now that public and private transport has been allowed, we have started searching for families of our kids that were rescued from the streets, please pray that we are able to find some of their families.

Your prayers are highly appreciated.

Thank you very much!