A Vision for Uganda - World Vision

I'm gonna take you for a trip down memory lane for the next couple of blog entries....

In March 2006, I was part of a group of colleagues who organised a charity cricket tournament. It was on the back of the year of the Tsunami and this same group of colleagues had run a charity cricket torunament to raise funds for the Tsunami victims the year prior. In 2006, they were back, keen to raise for another cause.

I know nothing about cricket but facilitated this streak of enthusiasm. Sadly, the corporate sector's initial reaction was not so supportive. The cause we chose was World Vision's Pader Emergency Education Project. We wanted to raise funds to build a nurturing, supportive education centre for children who had been rescued from the Rebel Army in Pader, Northern Uganda. These children had been forced into child soldier and sex slave situations and needed a trusted place for them to heal prior to being returned to their home villages.

A worthy cause, I'm sure you'd agree. But it was not a high profile cause. It wasn't anything like the tragic Tsunami that had unexpectedly taken the lives of so many people in South East Asia on Boxing Day, 2004. We had a lot trouble getting corporates on board and for a corporate cricket tournament, obviously the support of the corporate sector was vital.

But in the end they came through - Vodafone (of course), Willoughby City Council, IBM, Hutchison and on Tuesday 14 March 2006, we held a bat for povery at the local Chatswood Oval.

And I still don't know anything about cricket.

I was persistent in my pursuit of holding the tournament for many reasons. Obviously, for those children in Pader, for causes which are real and exist but are virtually unknown.... When my colleague, in the early days of organisation, came up to me and told me he felt it was getting hard and that perhaps we should not proceed, I wanted to tell him, to reassure him, to show him, that determination can go a long, way... a way to war-torn Northern Uganda.

In the end we raised over $210,000. $50,000 builds one school. With over $200,000, World Vision can build three and over 1,500 displaced children in Uganda now have a safe learning environment.