Gonza House has been blessed with the funds to connect electricity to our buildings! It has been a long standing dream for this ministry to provide electricity to the orphanage. The addition of lights has allowed the children to continue to play, worship and read at night. Iganga, Uganda is near the equator and receives around 12 hours of daylight year round. Electric lights allow us an additional three to four hours of activity before the need for sleep. This has made a significant impact on the lives of the children who live at the orphanage and those who care for them there. 

We are also thankful for the added safety that lighting has brought to our ministry. Just as our perimeter wall has added to the protection of our children, we feel that the new exterior lights will deter misfortune from visiting our ministry. 

Part of our long-term goal for Gonza House Ministries has always been to add electricity to our facilities. We are happy to have accomplished that and clean water since our founding back in 2016. We also strive to include proper plumbing and running water in our toilets at some point and are continually working to provide a consistent and balanced diet to our children. As things currently are, proper plumbing is not seen in our village. The addition of a plumbing and sewage system would greatly increase the sanitation and safety of our toilet facilities. We pray that this will be accomplished someday just as we have been blessed with clean water and electricity. 

The need for a consistent and balanced diet for the children we care for is, however, a more immediate need. We still see days of food shortages since the drop in donations a year and a half ago when our website donation button no longer provided an easy payment method through PayPal for our generous sponsors. We have since asked for support through apps like SendWave and through other means of money transfers. We recognize that these are inconvenient ways to donate and continue to seek more user-friendly solutions. In the meantime, our children have had days of hunger. To those who have supported us through all of this we say thank you! With more than 30 children in our care we must praise God for the generosity of others that makes it possible for us to provide a better life for these young souls. 

If you have not yet chosen to sponsor a child through Gonza House, we ask that you consider changing a life today by reaching out to Eddy or Tonny Tumbya through our website or through our Facebook page. Your gift of $40 a month provides education, food and care to a child who would otherwise not have hope for an educated and secure future. 

Let us share with you the recent change of situation for our dear boy Gift. Gift is a bright young boy of 12 years in age who wants to be an engineer when he grows up. Gift was one of the first children to be taken into the care of Gonza House Ministries as he was a total orphan, abandoned as a baby outside the police station. Gift is a hard working and dedicated student. He has studied hard in school to progress through the grade levels. His 7th grade examinations that allow him to pass Primary School are just a couple weeks away. Unfortunately, Gift lost his sponsor some time back and had accumulated a large sum of school fees that were left unpaid. He sat at home, not allowed to go to school and not allowed to sit for his exams until this school fees were paid. His dreams of becoming an engineer were suddenly halted. 

Thankfully the story does not end there! We reached out to you on our Facebook page and you answered. All $250 of Gift’s school fees have been covered by generous supporters and Gift will have the chance to sit for his upcoming exams. Please pray that he does well and passes his exams so that he can move on to the next level of education. Please also consider that Gift will need a consistent sponsorship to enroll in secondary education and continue working towards a future as an engineer. While his hard work in primary school will not be wasted and we are glad that Gift can now attend school and take his exams, we pray that his story does not stop there. 

Gift is one of 15 of our children who are currently (or have recently) not been able to attend school due to a lack of sponsorship fees. If you know of someone who may want to change the life of one of these young people, please share Gift’s story with them and direct them to our website. Each child listed on our sponsor children page has pictures and a brief description of their personality and needs. 

You will remember that our school building is currently in use for our church while we are unable to financially support a school through Gonza House. We are happy to see a thriving church family gather every week to worship here. We have many from the community come and are in need of additional furnishings to seat everyone. It is an encouragement and blessing to worship together. We are currently singing with just our voices as we have no instruments or speakers to provide music for us to sing with. It would be an incredible blessing to our church family to have a speaker so that all can hear the message and so we can have music to accompany our worship songs. A single speaker that could reach our entire church body would cost between $190 and $200. The seating needed are benches that can seat three to four people at a time. The benches cost $34 each. You can see the benches needed and the type of speaker needed in the pictures below. 

Another success story we are happy to share is the opportunity for our older children to learn the art and skill of liquid soap making. Through the donation of one of our supporters we will hold a class for ten of the oldest orphans at Gonza House to learn how to make liquid soap. This is one of the more prevalent careers in our rural area. This knowledge provides the opportunity for our older children to have a craft they may use to support themselves in the future. Especially for our older children who do not have sponsors or hopes of finishing their education, the need for skilled trades is great. Please pray for this wonderful opportunity and for others to come to Gonza House and bless our growing children. If you would like to support trades education in our children or gift business start-up funds to those learning this new skill please reach out to directors Eddy or Tonny Tumbya to discuss opportunities. 

As you can see there is much to be thankful for in this blog update. We are always happy to share with you the good news we have along with our current areas of need. We hope and pray to continue to see God working through our ministry to bless the children in our care. We are forever thankful to those who support us in making this happen. Thank you!