CHANGERS has begun!

March 5, 2009

What a wonderful start to this project. Today CHANGERS held its first program at Bumagani Army Primary School, outside of Mbale town. To our surprise, the school has a populous of about 3000, so it was a blessing in disguise that the P6 class was the only class available for the time that we had scheduled. Still, we had about 300 students.

After the classes assembled, we had one of their teachers help us to choose 20 of the most theatrical students to help us with the career skits. They were very excited when assigned their role and told what to act out. So even used their own creativity to display the career further than what we had suggested. As Glenn came out to introduce CHANGERS, we quickly had the audiences’ attention. They eagerly looked around for their first friend who would be coming to act for them. So, out came “the president” and his body guard-soldier. The kids did a really good job of exciting the audience with the president’s speech. Then Glenn asked the kids questions, like what do these careers do and what do you need to study in school to become a person of that profession. It was very active participation. Other careers we were able to present were chef, electrician, police man, doctor, nurse, and painter. It was interesting to see how some of the students were enlightened that some skills could actually be good paying jobs- like a chef in a nice hotel.

Quickly, as school was ending, our audience grew from 300 to about 1500. This became a bit overwhelming, so we had to cut things short. But overall, the students really enjoyed the program and the teachers were appreciative, inviting us back to present to the other classes. Our prayer, as we visit each school, is that CHANGERS will help cast a vision and set a goal for the kids to look forward to as they go through school.