Without vision . . .

Yesterday afternoon, Pastor Sylver and his leadership team presented us with the Kacungwa 5-year Strategic Plan.  They have been working on this for a while now and have recently completed the document.  But it’s far more than just a document with a lot of words on it, it is a sweeping vision of how God is going to use the church in Kacungwa to affect the spiritual, economic and societal lives of the people living there.

Pastor Sylver began by reminding us how far the church, school and community have already come since beginning the partnership with Canby Christian Church.  The greatest thing he has seen develop is a sense of hope.  You can see how materially poor the people are, but with the support of our church and regular visits by our short-term mission teams, hope is getting a strong foothold

There are plans to establish IGA’s (Income Generating Activities) and empower people to achieve those by training and the church supporting the people through the process.  For example, they are looking at some of these areas to generate income:

• Piggeries – people will be given a pig, taught how to care for and raise it, breed it and when it has a litter of piglets, they are to return some to the church to continue the program.
• Dairy – the plan is to provide people with dairy cows and taught to process and sell the milk.  Funds for the cost of the cow will be repaid to the church.
• Beekeeping – there will be hives established and people trained to maintain the bees and harvest & sell honey.

In all of these examples, people are not given free handouts - there is an expectation of repayment and accountability.

There are plans for the school as well.  One specific area is the establishment of a computer lab.  The headmaster would like to have 5 computers for the children to learn on.  The biggest challenges to making this happen are: the cost of the computers themselves; internet access; and the availability of power.  It would require adding solar power to the school or extending government power out to the school.  We learned that electricity has been extended to the village center in Kacungwa and we saw the wires when we were there yesterday.  This means that some can have electricity when it is available, though it is still very expensive.  Internet access will be an issue that has no specific resolution at this time.

I will not go into all of the detail here, you will be hearing more on this in the days to come, but it is a significant step forward indicating the progress of the people, the quality of people in the church leadership positions and the vision God has provided this small village.

At the end of the meeting, we placed the Strategic Plan document in the middle of the table, laid hands on it and Ken prayed that God would bless the plan, empower the people to bring it to fruition and continue to show Canby Christian Church how we can be effective partners with Kacungwa.