Bewitched

This is Patience. She’s 16 years old and in the equivalent of our sophomore year of high school. 

Patience is one of the 15 young ladies who will be in our brand-new program next year. We recently sat down with her and a few other young ladies who will be in the program to get to know them better and document their stories. Patience has an incredible story and we wanted to use part of it to tell you about one of most common threats against children here in Uganda.

Up until Patience was 7 years old, she was a very active and outgoing child. She led music and dancing at the church where her mother was a pastor and other children were actually a little jealous of the favor on her life and the natural leadership abilities she possessed. 

But one day she got very sick. For seemingly no reason she started having incapacitating stomach problems. It was so bad that she would miss weeks of school at a time and have to stay home in bed.

Her mother did everything she could to try and find out what was wrong with her. The doctors even thought at one point that she had stomach cancer, but after many tests and examinations, they concluded there was nothing physical causing her symptoms.

It was around that time, after almost 3 years of pain and suffering, that her mother decided to take Patience to their church to eat, sleep and stay for a whole week while she fasted and prayed to God for an answer to her daughter’s unbearable condition. After a week of living in the church, God spoke to her mother and told her that Patience had been “bewitched” or cursed. They were immediately taken back to a time 3 years ago when Patience had finished kindergarten and a strange woman in their village gave her an apple as a gift. God showed them that the woman was a witch and the apple was how she put a curse on her.

We know what you’re probably thinking, “that hocus pocus stuff isn’t real!” Well, unfortunately it is and we’ve seen it firsthand. Jared has personally witnessed a Ugandan friend’s foot rotting from a curse put on him by a witch doctor because his relatives wanted land that was given to him. After praying over him and declaring the curse broken in Jesus’s name, he came back the next day with a perfectly normal foot.

This stuff is very real and it happens every day here in Uganda. And children usually get the worst of it. Just do a quick Google search about “child sacrifice” or “child mutilation in Uganda” and see what you get. Children disappear in the bush daily to be sacrificed or to have body parts removed all because their families have been deceived and don’t know about the love and power of Jesus. Children are doused in acid or thrown alive into fires all because families believe they carry a curse that can only be broken by death. It’s sad. It’s gut-wrenching. It needs to stop.

Please join us in praying for all the children in Uganda, our staff, and our family as we encounter and deal with this stuff daily. Another great way to help us in the fight to keep children safe from witchcraft is by sponsoring a child or giving toward our overall vision and mission here in Uganda. The more kids we can get into safe and loving homes, and provide them the holistic care that every child deserves, the less children there are to be preyed upon.