Uganda is one of the countries in East Africa, it has a population of approximately 44 million people half of which live below the poverty line. AIDS and malaria are still prominent causes of death. Uganda has a young population with 70% below the age of 30 years. In fact, estimates say that Uganda has an average age of 15.5 years.
Most of the kids don’t have nurturing care as we know it in the USA or Europe, the poor families need their kids to help in the gardens digging and working, so that there will be food on the table. The better of family’s parents work and therefore don’t have to much time to spend with their children.
World mission aims to help tackling this very issue, by engaging children in sports at football camps.
Most of the children are in boarding school for a period of 3 months and during school break the ones from well off families will sit home and watch TV, while the ones from poor families must dig, collect water from far distances among other things. Our aim is to give these children from all different backgrounds and social statuses a place they can be kids and be active too.
At the football camps we have football/soccer obviously, here they are trained about football/soccer, discipline, team work, they also have other fun activities like camp fires in the evenings, games mostly outdoor, story telling, etc. This gives opportunities to the kids to have fun and socialise with each other.
During this time at the camps, we invest in the children spiritually and emotionally through devotions, worship and one on one talks. Devotions are done in a big group but are also discussed later in small groups on a more personal level. This makes these camps different from the usual football camps.
For now, we rent a campsite big enough for us to have space for our activities. We have realized that in the long run renting a campsite will be very expensive and inconveniencing. Therefore, we aim to buy our own piece of land. We have scouted a great property near the main road, easily accessible to a large amount of people living around.
We aim to buy 5 Hectares of land that will help us to set up 3 football fields, a dormitory, a kitchen and a conference hall.