Emily Graves spoke with Cherish Uganda Director, Rachel Parsons

Rachel: That's a good question. When I was a little girl I remember we used to have this big five-gallon pail full of Lego and I used to build little homes and hospitals for kids. From a young age I had the desire to do something for children that nobody else wanted. I remember when I was about seven or eight years old I had a dream that I would build a home for mothers who wanted to abort their children and I would convince these girls to have their babies and then give me all their babies to raise them. It was just childish dreams, but all of them pointed to saving lives that nobody else wanted. When I was about 21, I made a short-term trip to Liberia and it was not long after Charles Taylor was ousted from the country as president. There was incredible unrest. There was an orphan project where about 370 children had been forced out of their orphanage at about three in the morning by rebel soldiers who had come in to take hold of that place as their base. Kids walked through miles and miles all through the night into Monrovia. I had joined a team of women who went to be there when they were returning so that it could be a comfort trip and to comfort them as they tried to get back to normality. On that trip God did some really cool stuff in my heart. Even though I couldn't stand the heat and the children were incredibly needy, I spent most of the time in chaos because I knew that God was stirring something in my heart for moving to Africa and doing something, but I had no idea that it would be in Uganda or that it would be specifically with children living with HIV. I believe God was taking me on that journey though, so that's how it began.

Emily: While you are over in the UK, you've been going around various churches telling people all about Cherish and what's happening in Uganda, but you're also talking about the six three exchange. What's that about?

Rachel: We've been launching something which is called the six three exchange. I'm sure that most people have been exposed to a sponsorship programme, where you give money monthly and somehow you connect with a child or a project that's caring for children, especially in Africa. For a long time people have asked us could we sponsor a child at Cherish? Could we take on one particular child? For six years we've said no; not because sponsorships are a problem, I wouldn't want to give the impression that we think all sponsorship programmes aren't worthwhile as there are many that are very reputable and very worth doing; but in Uganda especially when children are cared for in home settings, sponsorship programmes can often cause a child to look at people giving money from a distance as the saviours of their world, as the people who make what's possible, possible in their lives and it can kill and squash the entrepreneurial spirit that we believe lies in every child that God would want developed. We want children to become self sustaining and able to grab a hold of what they're able to do for themselves and for others. If a child always has their hand out metaphorically, in their minds, believing that somebody else will provide, what it does is squash their understanding that they can give. We want young people to grow up who have overcome these obstacles of being victimised by their disease or their orphan hood, or their abandonment, the way that they've been treated; we want them to become not just survivors, but be people who can be generous and give back and contribute and see themselves as co-labourers in changing the story. We can't do that and condition our children to believe that everything that they get comes from someone else and that they are somehow remaining in a victim position. I've seen young people grow up into their 20 and 30's still hold on to that same sponsorship mentality; far beyond their schooling. What we didn't want was for that to develop in the lives of our kids. We also didn't want in our homes for our children to believe that their sponsorships were the reason why we could employ mothers. We didn't want the children to feel it was a power play, which can sometimes happen where a child can look at the mother and say, well my sponsor is paying for your salary or my sponsor is paying for all you see around us and we didn't want that to creep into our homes. We wanted to have unified Ugandan families.

I shared all of this with one of my team members who was trying to convince me of the sponsorship idea yet again and he said to me, well if you share those same convictions with people, they will understand exactly what it is that people want and understand the reasons why you've done what you've done and maybe we could form it a little bit differently. In Matthew 6:3 Jesus said to his disciples, when you give to the needy don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing and from that verse we started thinking about it and saying we could form a sponsorship programme that keeps the child unaware of the sponsorship programme; that keeps them in that position to keep being faithful in their home and participators is what God's doing. We want that entrepreneurial spirit in their lives to be nurtured and given every opportunity to thrive. At the same time we can offer people who want to be a part and who want to come and partner with us, we can give them the opportunity to know this particular child, Tom, for example. They get Tom's photo and they know that Tom is a crazy good dancer, or they know that he is doing excellent in school, or they know that Tom needs some prayer right now. We wanted to keep people connected to individual stories without the child knowing.

For £22 a month we're offering this opportunity for someone to take on a child, exchanging their right to be known as a celebrity sponsor in that child's life in exchange for total confidentiality. Then we will invite that person on to the Facebook page of that child's home. If I was using an example of a boy in one of our homes called Tom; he's from a home called Nisi home and Nisi home Facebook page would be exclusively inviting that sponsor in to see the life of that child and following along with everything that's going on in their family home. It's a way of connecting in and participating financially; hearing a story and witnessing a child growing without all the darkness of what can sometimes happen on the other side of that story and we believe it's in line with what Jesus said about giving to the needy. We think it's a powerful way of re-inventing the sponsorship story to serve the child that it's created for.

We would invite people to go on our website to Cherish Uganda.org and you'll find under the give page this six three exchange and you'll read about it and contact us and we can hook you up. We can connect you with a particular child and begin that journey. It's really an exciting thing to be part of and it's a long term commitment, to be a part of a child's life and to really see a story change, not just for that particular child but for the whole country.