WMF Scholar Highlight: Jimmy Francis Odongo

By Wells Mountain Foundation on October 22, 2010 in Scholars

Jimmy Francis Odongo, a WMF Scholar from Uganda studying Program Planning and Management, sent us this remarkable story of this life, simply titled “My Story.” Read it in its entirety below.

MY STORY

I am born in the family of 12 children and I am the third born, all of us are still alive and all our parents too though old age is living in their door. I had wonderful time as a young boy until 1998 May when the LRA insurgency strongly hit our village. This insurgency changed my life trend because on two occasions, I almost got captured by the rebels. In May 1998, we used to sleep in the bush in fear of the attack at night. And one day, early in the morning I snicked home to untie the cows because I was the only one now around the home, all other family members had fled to Lira town. While I had just finished doing it, the dogs started barking from my uncle’s home. As I tried to find out, suddenly I met the rebels who started chasing me. What saved me while he was about to capture me was my dog named Mandela, it caught him by his leg and threw him down leaving room for me to escape. I am sorry that Mandela died of bush fire while hunting in 2002 because no body was any longer in the village to give it food.

The second escape was when I had gone to burry my dear Aunt on the 11^th/October/2002 again in the same village. As soon as we laid her in the grave, the news spread that the rebels had already surrounded the village. Every body ran away but I remained a while behind because we had hired certain things for the burial and I was fearing that they might destroy them. At around 7pm they draw very close to our home and wanted to attack the vehicle which had come to carry the hired items. We jumped in the vehicle and the driver took off very fast while they were about 50 meters to catch up with us. They never shot the vehicle as they used to do because their other interest was to attack the health centre to loot drugs which they succeeded in doing.

Because of that we fled to town suburb and we were depending on food distributed by world food program. I then started volunteering in the camps handling child development in a holistic environment. I later started volunteering with world food program taking food to people in the camps across our sub-region up to July 2006. Since then, I have been a community volunteer doing HIV education, mobilizing people for voluntary testing and counseling, and at the moment mobilizing the community to embark on sustainable livelihood activities as a better option to foster development in our areas.

As a result of all these experience, I made a decision to pursue a study, doing bachelors degree in project planning and management so that I can be a better change agent in my community through development projects. To test my capability in that, I and some few members of our community have come up to open a secondary school next year February where we want to begin helping some very vulnerable children acquire free education. The greatest challenge now is raising funds to do this work. The good news is that my father on hearing this, donated land worth 15 thousand US Dollars for the classroom construction. Through membership contributions, we have also started raising two class rooms and we plan to roof it in mid November if we manage to get some money again. We are even asking those who can join us to support this noble task. We believe that through this ,our brothers who can not afford the high charges at government and other private schools shall be able to get a second chance life making them more resourceful members of the community. This is my dream and I hope with determination and good will, help of well wishers and strong commitment, God will see us through this life arena.

Life is what one makes it to be and where there is a will, there is a way.

Jimmy Francis Odongo

Lira District, Northern Uganda.

Some pictures…