The New Lease of Life Ministries is a Christian based Non Governmental Organization, with a vision to provide care and management to Orphans and Abandoned Children, in Uganda.

Currently, we are caring for 97 boys and 13 girls in 2 homes, 1 in Kampala, and the other in Kakiri, along Hoima Road. The biggest number of boys, is in the Kampala home where I live myself.

The vision developed from observing that there are many resourceful humans in Africa, who spend their whole lives in misery, scrounging for survival, in an environment swamped by poverty and disease. All this is as a result of lack of opportunity. Take the example of a talented footballer who is hungry and homeless. He will lay aside the football playing and first look for food and shelter. If the endeavor to look for shelter is a lifelong quest, then he will never have time or resources to exploit his football talent. The same goes for musicians, authors, preachers, you name it. That is the reality in Africa. The death of a child’s parents becomes a lifelong sentence to misery, because it means; if the home they lived in was rented, and if no one is available or willing to give the child shelter, then the only alternative will be to live on the city street.

A child who grows up on the city street will be exposed early to the dog-eat-dog life. Without proper guidance and someone to teach them the basics of life, like cultural and social norms, they become social misfits.  They will not even have the courtesy of humbly and coherently asking for a casual labor job. They will never know the means of earning an honest living. This means a life of delinquency, later to turn into criminals, and in Uganda, lower scale criminals don’t live long.

After observing all this, the Lord pointed me in the direction of trying to reach out to the unfortunate children with the purpose of making a difference in the life of at least one child.

When I personally accepted Jesus into my heart as my personal savior in 1997, I was down and out physically and spiritually. I accepted Jesus at the United Christian Center Church, pastored by Pastor Stephen Ssenfuma. At the time, I was homeless and jobless. I asked pastor Stephen to help me and he accepted. I had been involved in a motor accident, where I got a compound fracture in my right ankle. They provided money for food and the treatment of the fracture.  In the course of time, the fracture healed and I regained my health. I quickly learned to play the piano, a ministry I carried on for 5 years. I had previously trained as a Grade III teacher, and subsequently sought a daytime job, because the church ministry activities usually happen late in the evenings and on Sundays. 

I found a teaching job in a Primary School owned by one of the elders of the church. The school, now defunct, was called Tropical Junior School and it was in  a place called Bwaise. This was in 1999. It was during this time that I took in the first unfortunate child. He told me that his mother used to sell alcohol during the daytime, and in the night, offer her body in prostitution to some of the men who used to drink the alcohol she sold in the daytime. This young boy came to me and asked me to help. After consulting with Pastor Stephen, he came in and the ministry started. At the time, I was sleeping on an old mattress in the room that was used as a Sunday school classroom for the younger members of the congregation. Besides teaching the boy in school, I also taught him to play the piano. He is now an accomplished Musical instrumentalist, playing all the available Musical instruments at church. That church later took over the provision of his educational needs. He is now in 2^nd year at Makerere University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Education.

 Later that same year, 1999, I took in 2 more children and some time in 2000 my sister died leaving 2 sons, whose father, whom I didn’t know at all, had died earlier. I was still teaching in Primary School, when a good man in the church offered to sponsor me for a journalism course. I would wake up early, prepare the children for school, go and teach in school and in the evenings would go for the journalism classes at the Uganda Institute of media and business studies. I completed the Diploma Course in Journalism in 2001. The Lord gave me a job at Capital Radio, where I was employed up to November 2006.

In all this time, I was going ahead taking in more unfortunate children. The number grew and we were asked by the Church administration to move to another place because the church could not take responsibility for the upkeep and welfare of these children. These children are from diverse backgrounds, from different regions of the country. Apart from the few whose parents I knew before they passed away, the others are unknown to me. I gave them Christian names and we are on our way into uncharted waters with the only solace being in the Lord who has been providing for us miraculously for the past 8 years. The limited financial means at my disposal enabled me to pay the rent for our 2 roomed house, in which we lived for 7 years and the fees for some of the Primary school going age children. The situation nearly went out of my control, because of the limited financial means. The problems of feeding and clothing the children were too heavy for me, that I nearly despaired. I sometimes seriously considered abandoning the children because I could not bear to see them hungry and miserable. And all this time, they were growing older and the neighbors started regarding them as a threat. But God was with us all this time.

In November 2005, the Lord brought to Uganda 3 men from The Netherlands, who had come to Uganda with a purpose of seeing how they could help in the work of helping orphaned children. We met just by a miracle, I gave them details about the work the Lord was using me to do. They went back to The Netherlands and started sending us financial help. They gave us money to rent a big house where we live now with the children. They have started paying the school fees for some of the children and they are working on sponsoring more of them, through project HELD. I am very grateful to God who has used these brothers in Holland to help us with this good work by connecting us to good and kind people like you. We have a lot of hope that the Lord will take us to further heights until at least we get to care for 5,000 orphaned children in Uganda.

So it is with this mission in mind that we endeavor to set up a Home for orphans and abandoned children. We aim to try our best to provide them with the early age care they would have missed, give them the informal education so necessary if they are to be good neighbors in society. On top of everything, we will try all means possible to provide them with formal education and training, which will enable them become independent citizens, able to earn an honest living which will in turn enable them to have what to give to those in need. In all this, we will be giving them spiritual guidance and training them in the Christian principles, because for a human being to develop uniformly, the spiritual stature must also be nurtured to maturity. We pray that God will provide us with the funds to carry through this work.  May the Lord who began this work, bring it to perfection.

There are 4 big tribal groups in Uganda, with numerous subgroups falling under the big ones. People from the subgroups belonging into one of the 4 large ones, can understand each other’s dialect. But it is not uncommon to find people who can speak all the languages  of the 4 large groups. At the start of the ministry, all the children were from the Bantu group, this being the group dominating the central part of the country, where the capital city Kampala is situated. But when we started to get children off the city streets, we found that they came from different parts of the country, from different tribes. Luckily, we all have a common language in Uganda, which is English. Everybody who has gone to school in Uganda, must learn English, because all the text books are written in English.

The AIDS problem is still big, in that the cure has not yet been discovered. But people are not dying off in large numbers like it was a few years ago. In fact, malaria kills more people each year than AIDS. Another factor is that people have learned to live with AIDS, using Anti-Retroviral drugs (ARV) so helping them to live longer and when they die, it is not in a very painful way.  When taking in these children, I don’t mind if they have AIDS or not. But after taking them in, I take them for medical blood tests to find out their sero-status. But so far, I thank God that among all the 97 boys and 13 girls, only one has been found with HIV. He is 7 years old.

I would be lying to say that it is simple work to provide care and management to more than 100 children. But in this case, it is not as hard as it seems, simply because God himself is doing the work. First of all, the children are obedient and well-behaved. The Holy Spirit has taught them to regard this opportunity as a very special one upon which the goodness or badness of their future lives hinges. So they live humbly. There are no negative reports about them either from their schools or from the neighbors.  And they are obedient, sometimes it is a challenge to me. I remember my childhood and consider if right in the middle of an interesting game, and someone told me to stop if I would immediately stop, rather than telling him to wait a bit longer. So it is the Lord doing the hard work of softening their hearts.

My day to day duties include doing most of the planning, shopping, supervision, school visiting and attending meetings. Christine cooks the meals and cleans the compound as well as doing the laundry for me and the 6 youngest boys. George is the caretaker and janitor, mending things and taking the rubbish out to the dump. The older children do their own laundry. The rest of the work is done by the children themselves under their leaders. Godfrey (20) who was with me in Holland, does a lot of supervising inside and outside the house. Lawrence(19)  is his deputy and Fred (13) manages the food store.