Someone famous once said, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Ok, so that was Bilbo in Lord of the Rings, but I think it’s still accurate. In fact, I would go so far as to say the same holds true of email. It can be dangerous to open and read an email because what is in that email might just cause the course of your life and your family’s life to shift forever in a different direction.
Exactly one year ago today, a friend forwarded me an email he had received that told about a place in Uganda (East Africa) where children were being held prisoner in unspeakable conditions. My friend, Michael, is a filmmaker and his first instinct was to get on a plane to see this place for himself and through his filmmaking abilities, capture this situation and show it to the world. I won’t go into all the details here as you can read about this place and the ministry we started last April in order to help this situation at SixtyFeet.org.
A lot has happened in the past 12 months and SixtyFeet now has 3 full-time staff in Uganda that visit this facility twice each week leading Bible studies, holding medical clinics, bringing food, water, clothing, books and school supplies as well as funding to pay for the children to go to school. We also found 5 other similar facilities around the country and have started assessing their needs this year. We have 2 women from the United States that are going over in August to live for a year helping SixtyFeet.
SixtyFeet in the US is comprised of 5 families besides mine and together we visited Uganda 7 times in 2010. Our first team for this year is on the ground right now. This morning I asked if they could jump in my iMeet room to see how well we were able to communicate. They happened to be driving back to Kampala from a remote area of the country but they had a laptop with a USB Internet stick from Orange Wireless. They connected to my room and one of their excited spouses and son joined from Atlanta as you can see in this screenshot.
I have to admit, even though my team works on building iMeet, I know what connectivity is like in Uganda. In fact, communication between teams over there and back here are some of our biggest frustrations. I expected the quality to be too bad to be able to talk, but I was wrong. I could hear them more clearly than I could the other person that was connected on their phone in Atlanta. We did lose the cellular signal and they reconnected back at the house with Wi-Fi (which connects to the Internet via the same USB stick). Having iMeet and being able to open the room up to our full-time staff on the ground in Uganda will make a huge difference in how we are able to serve the imprisoned children of Uganda.
Oh, but I didn’t finish telling you how this ended up changing the course of my family forever. Please read Home At Last to see how we wound up with 2 more children in our home.
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