Uganda generally has two seasons; wet and dry. However, due to climate changes in the past several months the dry season turned into a severe drought followed by torrential downpours that destroyed crops and homes. As a result, many are experiencing famine in Uganda — especially those in the rural areas where ROWAN serves.
Uganda is one of the countries that are greatly vulnerable to climate change impacts, in respect of climate variability including increasing temperatures, increased frequency and intensity of rainfall, heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. The regions and ecosystems across the country, like the mountain regions, the lowlands and the cattle corridor, differ in their vulnerability and adaptive capacity. In general the sectors most vulnerable to climate change impacts are agriculture, water supply, health, transport, housing and personal safety and security.
(http://www.ccu.go.ug/)
Pastor Paul, our founder usually plants a field of maize that yields enough harvest to feed our orphans every week at our Saturday program and provide for widows and families in need. But this year he has only been able to produce a tenth of that…3 bags of maize instead of 30. And already, that store has been depleted because people were hungry and came to Pastor Paul for food.
“There is no way I could look at those families sleep hungry when I had something in my store. I just saw God directing them to me, so it was very hard to say I don’t have when God was seeing some food in my store.”
~Pastor Paul Nyende
We prayed for wisdom and discernment and how to prepare for situations like this in the future. Our hearts ache to see so much excess while many are suffering, but we know God always takes care of His children. We sent out a plea for help and Little Man Ice Cream along with a few other generous donors raised $4,000! We are sending these funds to Uganda immediately and that will buy food for 200 families over the next month and a half.
But we didn’t want to stop there. We want to equip our people to be sustainable and so we are pursuing a plan to send some of our key leaders as students to Farming God’s Way Academy.
Africa is the most poverty stricken of all the world’s continents, with approximately 750 million subsistence farmers, who are living undernourished and degraded lives where their current crops yields cannot even provide for their families requirements. Billions of dollars stream into Africa every year and yet the poor are getting poorer and the numbers of poor people are increasing….
We believe that Farming God’s Way is part of God’s solution for Africa, where it can be turned around from being the “begging bowl” to the “breadbasket of the world”. Farming God’s Way is simply a tool of equipping to empower the poor to help themselves. Farming God’s Way was originated before man was on the face of the earth, when God first put His ways in place to govern His creation and their interrelations with one another. God is the master farmer who has been farming this way since the beginning and by simply following His Ways, amazing solutions to the food security and poverty crisis can be revealed.
(http://www.farming-gods-way.org/overview.htm)
