I live inside the Christ School compound now . . . . We are fenced, gated and walled in, along with our students and staff and the rabbits and the goats too. It’s good for us to be fenced in - students study better without the distraction of marijuana and opium and waragi (local brew) and without free access to the village girls who are so easily impregnated.

Sometimes, though, I forget how the world looks outside. Perhaps I don’t make enough of an effort to move around, to visit the hospital and nutrition projects, to see local friends outside the gates. But inside we have many friends too, the yard is always full, the door always swinging and footballs always in play. Yet this world looks different from the one just outside our gate. Here, the babies are chubby, the preschoolers speak some basic Enlish and understand imaginary play. Mothers check in on their children with words, not palms raised in heavy-handed threat. Students move around with clean and whole uniforms and their bodies and skin show that they being fed and fed well, that their water is clean and that they have mattresses and nets.

WHM Bundibugo recently held the latest Kwejuna Distribution, where food provided by generous donors was distributed to over 100 positive moms and their babies. They are thin, weak, and impoverished and their lives have been taken over by a fatal, debilitating and disgraceful disease. These are “the least of these”, the ones who pull at your heart, who make you cry. Down at the health center are more of the least, small Biira whose malnutrition is devastatingly complete and those children born with open spines or suffering post-malarial brain damage.

Sometime I wonder what I am doing here within these walls when “the least of these” is right around the corner. When children are dying within word of my voice, I am here with those that are fed and well. But isn’t that why we’re here? To offer a cup of cold water in Jesus name - or an experiment on a never-before-imagined bunsen burner. To offer three meals a day when at home there may only be one. We are here to begin the work of Kingdom coming - in the lives of a few hundred at a time. Here they begin, just begin, to experience more of who they were created to be, to start to see the lives they will be able to touch. Our lesson in contrasts, the life lived on-campus vs the life lived off, allows our students to see that they desire more, that there is more to be desired. To see that life can be lived whole and well, that food can be enough, that their minds and hearts can grow strong. That they are believed in, valued, and worth healing and helping.

But the vision is even bigger . . . .We are in the business of multiplication here. Christ School is offering a foretaste of greater realities in Bundibugyo. A time when our students come back with a knowledge of what can be and how life can be lived. When they bring their skills, their knowledge, their integrity and their deep commitment to both their people and their God; and use all that to change the future for hundreds and thousands of the least in Bundibugyo. Someday we pray, nutrition and HIV projects will be staffed and directed by the Babwisi themselves, men and women of integrity and purpose who have the qualifications and knowledge to do the job well. The other day one of our students told me that she hopes to become a chemist and open a fertility clinic in Bundibugyo to help those who don’t even understand what infertility is. Amazing. Our students are on their way; from lives of abject poverty to this middle ground of struggle and promise and on to a future that is, we pray, both well-fed and poured out in abundance towards others.