Hub team sets out for Uganda

Friday June 12th 2015

The Hub team will be working with charities supporting children and vulnerable young women.

Seventeen team members from the Hub Chaplaincy at Queen’s University, Belfast, left for Uganda on Thursday June 11.

They will spend two weeks working on projects set up by two local charities – Abaana, and Waakisa Ministries.

The first project is Abaana’s New Life Homes Project. Abaana is a Bangor-based charity, with seven staff in Northern Ireland, and eight on the ground in Uganda.

Since 1998, Abaana has raised more than £1,500,000 to build schools, to provide clean water, medical care and education. It has also built six ‘New Life Homes’ for children at risk. These houses are each home to 10-12 street kids (boys). The goal of the project is to prepare the boys to attend the New Foundations School, and be placed with a foster family.

The Hub team which flew to Uganda on June 11.

Waakisa Ministries is another charity founded locally, with a charity shop in East Belfast which raises support for their work, and the second project will work with The Waakisa Centre in Uganda. This aims to provide care and support to young vulnerable girls who are pregnant and alone and to deliver health education programmes to local schools and churches. The Centre currently hosts up to 50 girls and their babies.

The Hub is partnering with these two projects because they reflect many of the aims of The Hub’s work with its own students: providing homes, community, education and support.

The team will be supporting both projects through a variety of practical and manual tasks; by running children’s clubs; by assisting in education work; through schools’ work; and by providing relief work with street kids.

You can view the team’s itinerary via its Prayer Diary.