Rachel's Story: Meeting Irene

My name is Rachel Ogimachi, and I met Irene Ganiriza in 2007. It was the summer after my sophomore year at the University of Washington, and a group of my friends decided to travel from Seattle, Washington to Jinja, Uganda. God used this trip, and Irene in particular, to grow my faith and reveal himself to me. The blog entry below is something I shared at a church event a few years after meeting Irene. It's cool to read it now, a decade later, and see how God has been faithful, what Irene has done with her education, and how she is now leading a ministry doing exactly what she said she dreamed of doing years ago.

Hi, I’m Rachel and I get share a bit about how God has blessed and changed me as I’ve trusted him. My story starts in 2007 when my roommate, who has long had a heart for Africa, decided to lead a missions trip to Uganda. While in Uganda the previous summer, she had built a partnership with a ministry serving orphans, and now planned to bring some of her peers to learn from and support the work. She told me about it, and I didn’t want to go. I was 19, and just beginning to learn about depressing, overwhelming issues like world poverty and unjust global capitalism, and perhaps understandably, I was feeling depressed and overwhelmed by it all. I felt guilty about my privileged life in middle-class America, and resentful of the fact that I felt guilty, which just made me feel worse. I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to feel like I did, and I was pretty sure that going to Uganda to see the source of my guilt firsthand was not going to help. I can see now that I was way more concerned about keeping my comfortable world intact than I was about pursuing the heart of God. But God’s funny and had different plans for me. During the two-week window in which people had to make their final decisions about whether or not they would go on the trip, I felt increasingly convicted that God wanted me in Uganda that summer. I can’t even remember why, but I was convinced and so I signed up and deposited my money. I can only credit it to God’s perfect timing, because as soon as those two weeks were over, I found myself not wanting to go all over again. So, months passed, we started preparing for the trip as a team, and I continued to struggle with feeling guilty about “the poor in Africa” and resentful of the voices in my head that made me feel so judged. I was upset with God that he would let people around the world suffer so much and upset with myself for doing nothing about it. The trip came at the end of what was, for me, an exhausting summer working with high school kids. As I prepared to go, I found myself complaining about the inconvenience of going to Africa, the expenses of travel, and all the fun and relaxing things I could be doing instead.

But a few days after we arrived, after some jetlag and a food adjustment period, something magical happened. I began to experience a supernatural joy. I just felt so free and so alive. I loved walking through town and peering into the stores and restaurants so different from home. I loved listening to fiery sermons at the local church and letting my voice blend with the joyful, sorrowful praises of those around me. I loved chatting with the Ugandan teenagers at the orphanage and dancing with the kids. I was experiencing so much and my heart was expanding. I expected my sense of guilt to increase as I got to know people in Uganda and was able to put faces to heartbreaking statistics. But what I didn’t expect, was to be speechless with admiration at the strength of the people I was meeting. I didn’t expect to find these people, on whose behalf I had been so angry with God, to have unshakeable faith in a good God who loved them. I didn’t expect to see each dirty smiling face so unmistakably marked with God’s grace. God reminded me that he is powerful and that he powerfully and pro-actively loves his people—the poor, the sick, the orphans, the people the world tends to trample over and forget. As I realized the depth of his passion and the magnitude of His power, my burden of guilt began to lift. And in its place, I found hope. And I found friendship. By far, my favorite part of our Uganda trip was getting to know individuals. I was pleasantly surprised by how much we could connect across cultures. Particularly, I got to know a girl named Irene. At the time, she was 19 and had been living and ministering at the orphanage for about a year. She was leading Sunday School for the kids, teaching Bible stories and songs and helping them develop these beautiful relationships with God. Initially, I was struck by how similar we were. We were the same age, we both loved kids, loved to teach, were involved in ministry, and loved to sing and lead worship. We spent a lot of time singing and laughing together.

But as my friendship with Irene developed, I realized that despite our similarities, our lives had been drastically different. I was a sophomore at UW, trying to choose between numerous majors and career options, warm and well fed in a nice apartment close to my wonderful parents. Irene, I learned, had lost both of her parents to AIDS. She shared her story with me. She told me how she committed herself to Jesus when she was 12, how she was beaten at home in an effort to make her renounce her faith, but how Irene refused. When I expressed my admiration for her strength, she looked into my eyes and said, “How could I pick anything over my glorious God?” She shared about losing her parents, and we cried together.

She told me of days waiting outside the school gate because she was unable to pay school fees after her parents died. When her grandparents were unable to support her, she found work in a neighboring village, only to be denied wages after months of work. After this, she decided to spend her time volunteering at a local orphanage. And that’s where I met her, serving AIDS orphans, not unlike herself, with great faithfulness and love. She dreamed of being a doctor but had no way to pay for school.

Read Irene's Story

Over the course of the trip, I felt God prompting me to pay for Irene’s university fees. I recognized that the differences in our lives and prospects for the future were largely simply a result of where we happened to be born. The sense of entitlement I had in Seattle melted away as I realized how little I’d done to deserve the opportunities I’d been born into. Earlier that year, I’d been paralyzed with stress about college funding and scholarship applications, but now I realized that I was rich in options. I had the opportunity to apply for scholarships, hold a part-time job, and take out student loans in order to pursue the education that would open up the world to me. Irene, although she wanted education more than almost anything, had none of these options. It didn’t make sense that I could go to school, that I could work towards my dreams for the future, and she could not. It didn’t make sense for the giftings and ambitions of this intelligent, godly young woman to waste away as a result of her family background, socioeconomic status, or gender. How easily the situation could’ve been flipped. What if Irene had been born in America and I had been born a girl in Uganda? Wouldn’t I hope and pray that she, in her abundance, would share her resources with me? We had become friends and nothing seemed more natural than sharing my resources with her. I’d finally grasped that they weren’t really mine anyway. This was not charity, it was a just redistribution of wealth. I realized that I could live my life limited by fear, always worrying that there wouldn’t be enough, or I could choose to lean in faith on a God of abundance. I wasn’t sure where the money would come from, but I had faith that God would provide. In my new view of the world, the cost to me of a few extra student loans paled in comparison to the ways that that money could change the world for and through Irene. While in Uganda, I met people who had unbelievable faith in the goodness and provision of God, even in the midst of dire circumstances. I wanted to be one of those people. I wanted to cling to God the way that they did.

Near the end of the trip, I sat down with Irene and told her about what God had been laying on my heart. She sat there overcome, whispering, “Jesus, oh Jesus.” Although she never asked anything of us, I learned that she had been praying for years that God would provide school fees. She had applied to medical school and gone to her admittance interview in faith, trusting that somehow God would provide a way for her to go. In Christian circles, we often talk about God’s resources being unlimited. For the first time, I realized that some of his unlimited resources have been entrusted to me.

We rode a taxi into town and set up a Western Union account for her. I paid her first semester school fees and shook my head in amazement at the way God was unfolding his plan. I traveled home, and shared about Irene with my family and some friends. With some help from them, I was able to pay for Irene's second semester of school as well. A year after returning from Uganda, God opened his floodgates of scholarships to me, and I received enough funding not only to cover my senior year, but to cover Irene’s final two years of school as well. I was astounded, where did this money come from? God was clearly not joking when he assured me that he is the provider, that he is powerful, and that he gives good gifts to his children. Irene and I have been in email contact for over two years now. About her life at her university, she writes… “Life has changed and hope of life is so high, I now see a future full of fruits. This has changed my life and I feel so different, so happy and the joy of the Lord is great in me.” Her dream for the future is to open a children’s clinic and children’s home to serve AIDS orphans, because as she says, “I know what it means to be an AIDS orphan. It’s great pain and they need hope of life and love. I had the torture of this and I feel I should show this love I missed to these kids.” There is a great need for healthcare professionals like Irene who are willing to serve AIDS orphans who face tremendous prejudice in the mainstream Ugandan healthcare system. Irene is also committed to saving up money to send her siblings, Brian, Timothy, and Victoria, to school, all of whom have had to drop out because of the cost of school fees. Every once in a while I stop and think about Irene and her brothers and sister and the hundreds of kids we encountered in Uganda in need of hope and healthcare. And I think to myself, you know, partnering with Irene may just be the most significant thing I’ll ever do. Could it be that God can use my $6000 to transform the future of Irene’s entire family? Could God really use my small act of obedience to give health and hope to orphans thousands of miles around the world? And to think, I could have so easily missed out on all of this. God has been so faithful in honoring my choices to obey Him, even when they’re small, fearful, or reluctant. And he’s used these choices to change me. Every time I wire Irene tuition money and I watch my bank account dip, it hurts just a bit. But that feeling is a good and much needed reminder that my money is God’s and that it is entrusted to me to love people in his name. And it reminds me that God provides and that he calls me to live in the freedom and joy that only comes when I place all my security in his love for me. Who knows what God will do in us and through us when we give him our whole selves? 2 Chronicles 16 says, “The eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose hearts are completely His.” The eyes of the Lord search the earth that he may strongly support, that he may bless, fill, invigorate and empower those whose hearts are completely his. I don’t want to miss out on that.