Meet Carol Bogezi, Tusubira’s first field and advisory board coordinator based in Uganda. Carol is a university graduate in Zoology and a master’s student in Environment and Natural Resources Management.  Born a Ugandan, she is a resident in Kampala, 27 years old, unmarried, but with parent-like responsibilities for her four younger siblings who by God’s grace she’s trying to put through school financially and provide moral support. With a job at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Uganda as a senior field coordinator, Carol is no stranger to traveling long hours on bad Ugandan roads and camping in the remotest areas, meeting new people and trying to always be warm and friendly. In addition to her background of biology, Carol has been working in community development for more than five years, first as a volunteer in 2002 in rural eastern Uganda; attending an eight month course in public relations, then regularly contributing to the children and gender meetings of her village in Wakiso district. Carol has a deep down love for helping the needy, and regularly visits orphanages, trying to chat with the kids, provide a bit of cheer, and most importantly, listen to their stories.

 Why do I want to help?

My help comes from the Lord, and He has brought me a long way to realize that I too can help and it’s a pleasure for me to help; a blessing and a service.

I have always lived in Uganda and was blessed to go to some of the country’s best Christian schools. It was while there that I learnt that not all other people had the privileges I had. I was in primary school in the 1990s and had the awful experiences of having a classmate or someone I knew get picked up from school to go and bury a beloved one (usually parent) who had died almost every week! Through my mother I learnt that AIDS was then responsible for more than half the deaths I had heard of. It broke my heart seeing my friends orphaned so young. My friends were lucky to have returned to school and that they didn’t have to stay home and nurse the ailing parents or relatives; it’s not the case for all Ugandan children, the majority drop out of school and their lives are almost irreversibly affected by HIV/AIDS.

It was this loss and hopelessness of children (then just like me) that made me go out of my way and my fairly comfortable world to find them. After my high school, I worked as a volunteer with Student Partnership Worldwide teaching reproductive health in rural schools in the Kamuli district, Eastern Uganda.

After that experience, there was no turning back, no ignoring what I had learnt and discovered as some of the needs of the children especially girls in the rural areas. Innocent girls had early sex either out of ignorance, peer pressure and even more out of need. There was numbness among some rural people to the deaths due to HIV/AIDS that the people cared no more about prevention. There was hopelessness about a bright future through education and hard work; how when no one is there to morally and financially support these children to hang on to education?

It was touching and I was touched even more as a Ugandan; realizing that this was all happening to people my age, living in the same land as me. I had to do something. I wasn’t going to wait for other volunteers overseas to come and do it. I couldn’t pretend and couldn’t ignore the problem.

I eventually lost both my parents in the same year, 2005, my mother to AIDS, and later my dad to high blood pressure: through the sad, fast and shocking experience, I felt the Lord Jesus lift me in His arms, and it was me comforting my relatives and siblings. I tell our orphaned children that I am one of them and that they can make it. I pray it gives them some hope. I believe that I should spread the good news and hope first to Jerusalem (here, home in Uganda), then to Samaria (minister to nearby communities or countries) and to the entire world.

After the voluntary work, I studied public relations in Nairobi and spent time at Nairobi Pentecostal church attending the youth church and teaching in the children’s church. At the end of this time I returned to Kampala to join university, but first returned to eastern Uganda to check on the villages I had worked in. During one such trip, I met friends and together we went to visit Save the Aids Orphans, a charity NGO and orphanage. I started to visit the children there often and offered what I could. They recorded me as the first Ugandan who gave money and clothing to the orphanage as all aid they got was from abroad. As I grew older I realized more and more that people need help, we need each other. After my university in 2008 when I wasn’t in the field researching small mammals, I went to volunteer at Save the Aids Orphans, where I worked in the administration office until I left later that year.

Am so grateful that Tusubira called me to work with them, I feel so blessed to serve in the Tusubira ministry. I have future plans in community development; I’d like it to give attention to the helpless AIDS orphans and widows, as well as to the environment that we are so fast destroying. I trust that God will give me the wisdom to make that happen.

Today as a field and advisory board coordinator I need not only coordinate information and money, but also give hope to the villages where we work, and assurance to the Tusubira team in the US that their love reaches the smallest household in the communities Tusubira supports.