Transcription
Yes, yes. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause]
I want to thank you for giving me your time today. Uh, people ask me to give this talk from time to time, and they say, "Oh, we don't want to impose, but could you come and give the talk?" It's the air that I breathe; this is what I want to do. I'm a corporate lawyer; that's what I've been trained to do, but this is this is our passion. Uh, I'm a Catholic; I'm a sinner; I'm not a saint. I am married to this beautiful woman here, who's my high school sweetheart. She comes back into the story in a little bit that I'm about to tell. I have three children; I have nine grandchildren, and they all live very close to me. One bought the house next door, one lives with me, and the other one lives around the corner, and she lived with us for five years. So we're a very tight-knit family; all of them have been to Africa. I've been there 14 times, and as God would have it, this morning I had a discussion regarding tithing with my daughter who lives with me and her husband, and um, I, as God would have it, right, because this is about giving well. And so my daughter was questioning uh, tithing, and she says, "Dad, I'm not ready to tithe," tithing being giving a tenth of whatever you have, tenth of whatever you earn, uh, to God, and she said, "I'm not ready to tithe," and and I said, "Well, you're also not ready to run the Boston Marathon," and she looked at me, and I said, "You don't just say, 'Hey, I'm going to start running the Boston Marathon,' and go out and do it. If the work, you have to work out; you have to train to do that," and I said, "Charity is the same way. You need to exercise that charitable muscle; start out small, start out throwing 10 bucks into the collection basket, but eventually you'll build up that muscle, and you will be tithing before you know it, and it'll just come naturally. So it's not something that you necessarily set out to to do at the highest level, like going to Uganda," although you're all welcome to go to Uganda with us.
So anyway, I'm going to tell you where we've been, how we got here, where we are, and then where where we're going. So um, we've been doing this Uganda missionary work for uh, 16 years, and Uganda is in this section of Africa. So it's uh, equatorial East stock for Africa; we're right on the equator, and then in Uganda we're kind of right in central Uganda, right here, and Entebbe is down here; Kampala's down here, and then we drive—once we fly into Entebbe—we we go on a bus up there. Uganda is surrounded by turmoil, and it's called the pearl of Africa, but there's there's a peacefulness about it. Up here you have Darfur; we all have heard of Darfur and and what happened up there. Kenya, every time they have an election, erupts in into violence. A Democratic Republic of Congo is constantly in in turmoil. Rwanda had a genocide. So you get you get the picture of what it's a Sea of Tranquility almost um uh in in a uh a very tumultuous area of Africa.
So our story involves genocide, child sacrifice, Witch Doctors, all of which uh, we we would all go, "Well, that's crazy," in in the United States. This is this is Fox News just a couple of years ago talking about the witch doctors in Uganda telling that the people to sacrifice their children to end a drought. That's the evil that they deal with there um and and this is the headline in the USA Today: "Children's body parts to be sacrificed for witchcraft." Like this is their day-to-day existence. I know Dan was talking about Faustina and what she's facing, but take that eating once a day and then superimpose that on top of it. So this is the the priest that invited us 16 years ago to come to Uganda; his name is Father Joseph. My wife and I had been doing High School youth ministry for about 10 years, and every year we would go away with our 60 kids from our high school youth ministry to Camden or Appalachia, and uh and we enjoyed it, but it wasn't challenging enough, and we started to pray that God would lead us to a richer missions field. And um, our pastor at the time had this missionary priest from Uganda visiting him, and he told this priest our story. So we would go away for the week, and we would come back to the Saturday night Mass, five o'clock, with all of our kids all dressed in their matching t-shirts and All Fired Up From The Retreat that they were just on for the week, and then walks this priest saying the mass. Well, of course, I'm beside myself with disappointment because this priest doesn't know my kids; where's my pastor? He knows their story; he's going to engage them, and and this this guy can barely understand. So my wife tells me, "Just calm down, you know, and and God's got a greater plan than yours anyway." So uh, the priest walks in, says the mass, he had heard our story from our pastor, and he takes a shot, and at the very end of Mass, He blesses the congregate; we were sitting right there, all 60 of us, and He blesses the congregation, and he goes, "You must come to Uganda," and my wife who stands who's sitting right here jumps up out of the Pew and goes, "We're coming," as all Catholic women do at Mass, right? And and that began a process that began, and and my wife would tell you she thought we were going to go for a vacation; we were going to go visit Uganda, you know, we're going to Safari, and it'll be great. Well, that was 16 years ago, and dozens of trips, millions of dollars, uh, and and lives changed on their side, lives changed on our side.
So the next morning we go to Ben and Herb's in Hunting Valley with this priest that I don't even know, and I walk in as the big American, so, "Father, what are we going to build for you?" And he takes my hand, literally takes my hand, and he says, "Oh, you Americans—" I'm going to do a little Ugandan accent; I won't do it fully because you won't understand what I'm saying—he says, "Oh, you Americans, you like to build things; feel so good about yourselves, but then you never return. You will build relationships, because if you love my people, you will always return." And at the time I thought, "You're out of your mind," because I'm not getting any of these guys here to go build relationships with me; we got to swing a hammer; we gotta, you know, we gotta lay a brick; we gotta—but the wisdom of that, building a relationship, is is uh just uh unbelievable; it's undeniable. So we have built relationships there that uh have led to Dan developing relationships and and uh and everybody knows Dan's story, but so it's a a beautiful thing that comes out of building relationships.
So what I want to talk to you about briefly at the beginning is the grinding poverty. You heard a little bit about Faustina, but I want to talk about the grinding poverty that these people experience on a day-to-day basis. These we we have five schools in Uganda now; we have our high school, which is the the main—it's kind of the center of gravity in this area—and then we have three elementary schools and a vocational school, because not every kid goes on to University. So we you'll hear a little bit about the Vocational School in a bit. Um, so we we started this uh high school at the invitation of Father Joseph and his order known as the Apostles of Jesus. Apostles of Jesus are in a missionary order, and they said, "We have one square kilometer of uh acreage here in Uganda, and the people consider it cursed." Why did they consider a curse? Well, because there was a genocide that took place in Rwanda. In Rwanda, a million people were killed in 90 days in the African bush wars in the lower triangle. If you looked it up on the internet, you'd find out that probably more people were killed, but it was over a longer period of time. So the people fled from this area because the government sent in soldiers to kill every living creature in this particular area. So imagine if Bucks County was under that edict, right? And and and the government said, "Go," and to the soldiers, "Go and kill every living creature, not just men, women, and children, but animals too," um, in Bucks County, what would you do? You would flee; you would run away; you'd grab your family, and you'd go. And so that's what these people did, and that's why they considered this particular area cursed. So we were offered the opportunity to build a high school in a third-world country, and when we were offered that opportunity, we said, "We know nothing about building high schools in third-world countries," so we're in. And so we started this process. That's a kid that's really ahead on the curve; he's got two shoes; they're not the right size; they don't match, but at least he has two shoes. You're going to see pictures of kids wear one shoe over there, and they feel privileged because they have a shoe. This man is known as William. William is actually a friend, and he's going to come back and in the talk in a little bit, but if you notice what William's wearing is on this mannequin. So one of the things that I do, and these clothes that you see hanging here are um from Trading. So I see somebody like William, and and I say, "Here," see the pile of clothes in my wife's lap. Okay, I traded all of those clothes, and you're gonna see how well he dresses now compared to what I saw him—and my wife saw him—met him and said, with tears in her eyes, almost breathless, "You've got to come with me right now, and we got to take care of this guy." Back to your scripture verse, right, about having pity on the poor. So what I say to people is that William wasn't wearing even a rag; William was wearing trash; you wouldn't keep this as a rag; this is this is rotting clothes; he's wearing rotting clothes. Give you another example; this is a this is the school uniform of a young man that I met over there; you wouldn't send your kid to school in in this uniform; you you wouldn't even you wouldn't even keep this as a rag; you would throw it in the trash, and that's what they're wearing, and that's what you see, and so um it's it's breathtaking, um and you you like Dan, you say, "What can I do? What can I do?" And you know what you do? You do whatever's in front of you; you do the next thing; you give him clothes; you give this kid clothes; you give whatever you have, and you try to help as little as you can. That's William. I went to William Penn High School, so William got my William Penn High School shirt, and you'll see him a little bit later. That's a classroom; that's an elementary school classroom; that is a home for six men. Six men slept in that hole that was covered by corrugated steel, and when we were there in Africa, one of our board members saw that, and it haunted him. He said, "These guys sleep in a puddle when it rains; I can't I can't live with this," and so he sent two thousand dollars over and built them a house. Right now is he helping everyone in Uganda? No, but he helped those six guys, right, sleeping in a puddle. And so people often ask, like, "How how does Bridgeview gone to work? Why does why does Bridget gone to work?" And there's four reasons: One is Christ is first, and you're going to hear a little bit about that when I show you the high school. Christ is first; without Christ, none of this happens. Second, we have a man on the ground who thinks like an American, Father Joseph; we'll talk a little bit more about that. Number three, all of our board members have been to Uganda multiple times, most of them, and that's a requirement to be on our board because you have to fall in love with the people. And then the last thing is, if you see something when you're there, go for it; let's let's do it, and we don't hold people back. This was not necessarily part of our mission, but that's okay.
So five schools; first school, Pope John Paul II High School, which was built right smack dab in the middle of where the genocide took place, right? And this is deep in the jungle; this is deep in the jungle, so much so that we have literally had people there, and there have been problems that we would be hearing about, and people say, "Now I feel safe here because you're so remote; you're not at risk," so security is not an issue. This is when they started to clear the land of the high school, right? Satellite picture of the virgin jungle, and then we started to build. This is this is about a four or five-year-old picture, so it's even more magnificent than that. Um, this is one quarter mile from Father Joseph's house all the way over to here where we had the pigs and the the rabbits and the chickens and so on. So that's one quarter of a mile; it's a pretty magnificent um campus. Dan has some great drone footage, but right in the center of the campus now you're going to see a picture of it, sits here a chapel, a chapel that is as beautiful as any Chapel that is is here in the United States, and you're going to get to see a picture of that, but that was important; we wanted the center of our high school and actually the center of that entire area now to be anchored by Christ. So we—one of the things we do is we send a sea container over every once in a while filled with all kinds of clothing and and musical instruments. One time we sent all these musical instruments over there; we had no idea what they were going to do with it, but we just loaded up a sea container; people were just donating all of these instruments, and so what do they do with it? They create a marching band; they created a marching band, and when I was there, one of the young men who was in the marching band came up to me, and he said, "We'd really like you to do something for the marching band," and I said, "Well, what would you like me to do?" He said, "We would like you to pay us," and I said, "All right, Jethro, we're probably not going to pay the marching band, but how about this?" And I pulled up on my phone; I said, "How about we get you marching band uniforms?" So we came back, and we told the people, and it turned out that the people that we work with here in the United States, it turned out that William Tennant High School was getting new uniforms, so we sent all of the uniforms over there, and this is what we got. Let me see if I can get this to work. [Music] [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Applause] to the high school. This is the gate; the gate opens. Remember I told you William's a little more dapper than he used to be? That's William right there; he's one of the neighbors, and he's welcoming us to—what I believe that's what heaven will be like; you'll be led in by a marching band, and everyone who loves you will be lining the streets and saying, "Hey, you made it."
So we we started off doing little by little, uh, and and I I once heard a talk by Dennis Prager, who I think is one of the greatest philosophers of our generation; he said, "If you want to get good at something, do a little a lot. If you want to get good at the piano, play the piano 15 minutes a day, but do it every day. If you want to get good at exercising, do 15 minutes a day, but do it every day." And so this organization is a little a lot, and so we started by building a a bunch of buildings, and this happens to be the biggest building on campus; it's kind of like the auditorium, but that's where they have Mass every morning. This building—I wanted to see this; I'm going to tell you numbers just because it gives you a sense of what a little a lot is and how you can make it—how people can make a difference there. This building holds over a thousand people; we built it for fifty thousand dollars, and it was built in about four months because we didn't have to deal with the snowy white owl or the the snail darter. If we were trying to do what we did there here, we would still probably be in permitting. Um, so this came from a gentleman, a friend of mine, 75-year-old man, who said, "I'm going to give you twenty thousand dollars; what can you do?" I said, "Twenty thousand dollars? I can put in a water tower; they can have flushing toilets; we can have a whole drainage system; they can have running water," and and so they and they do now. And he said, "Well, I'm going to give it to you; there's one stipulation." I said, "What's that?" He says, "I want to go see it." So the 75-year-old guy got on a plane; he went with me to see it, and that's the outcome of that. So this is a second water tower because we've grown so big; we have in our high school 725 students now; we have a staff of like 150 people, um and so we needed a second water tower. We PR—we have provided them uh protein food. Okay, so it's a classroom; typical classroom in the high school. We built them a little uh basketball court. So here you go. So now you have these African students on the land where a genocide took place doing chemistry experiments, going, dreaming of going to the university. Uh, the the person who donated all of that equipment, when he walked into that, just broke down in tears because he couldn't believe, you know, that this was taking place. Um, we have in that Auditorium—one end they have Mass; on the other end we put—we sent over one of our sea containers—an 80-inch flat-screen TV, so they can watch the World Cup; they can watch movies, and they actually use it for teaching, too. This is the library; that's our nurse; she's actually a graduate of our of our high school. Um, you'll see that it's well stocked; it wasn't always that way. There was a time when we went there one time, and it was uh like one bottle of aspirin on the shelves, and a member of our team saw that and said, "This can't happen," and so he tithes for pharmaceuticals for the entire school, so that's why it's well stocked. That's the boys' dorm; girls' dorms, much neater. Um, that's a computer lab, and again, by just telling stories, a friend of mine had knew our story; he called me up; he said, "I just met somebody who funds computer labs in Africa," and so I connected with the guy; the guy wrote me a very large check, and we just we created a computer lab, which they needed; we already had one, but it wasn't as spectacular as that. We must have 50 computers in there. That's the student body. We have a generator because you're in the third world; you lose electricity. So some—one of our donors paid for a generator there, so they—we were there the last time; we were out of electricity for about 24 hours, and but the generator kept us going. That is a picture of the high school. Okay, you remember you saw the the virgin jungle or whatever; this is—this looks like a resort. So you can imagine, based on what you heard about Faustina earlier from Dan, uh, what I showed you with this grinding poverty—these kids don't want to go home; this is—they call it Heaven; our our school is Heaven. So you can imagine, but this is what a little a lot gets you. That's 16 years of just doing a little, doing a little bit more, doing a little bit more, and eventually you get that net. That is the the chapel. Um, that's the inside of the chapel; it's magnificent, and it's used all the time; kids are always going in there and praying. Um, another view; another view. That's the girls' dormitory complex, and I'm gonna I'm gonna end with my girls. I'll tell you a little story right now. Um, this is a soccer field back here; I don't see the goal, but back there is a whole soccer field. We just put in a sprinting track for them for exercise; we just built a new basketball court for them. Two-thirds of the girls, two-thirds of the students in our school are girls, and I once read somewhere that if you want to change a culture, educate the girls, because the girls will educate the kids, and if you want to see what it looks like when
You don't educate the girls, go to Afghanistan, because that's what you're going to end up with, right? So, um, we're very proud of the fact that two-thirds of our students are girls at this school.
More of the girls' dormitory, kind of—that's the wash day, by the way—that's how they wash their clothes, and then they put them out on the grass to dry. And then the equatorial African sun, it dries pretty quickly. This is a new—this is a new um—visitor's house. So, for all of you are going to sign up that want to go to Uganda with us, I just want you to know this is where you'll stay. It is the most magnificent building that he has built. That's at night. It has—it has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and it's just—it's just spectacular. Father Joseph has an eye—remember I said he thinks like an American—so he's going to make sure his American friends that come there feel comfortable.
We just—we just built this because the kids—700 kids—when they had to eat, had to stand out in the rain or in the hot sun waiting to be fed, and they did, getting soaked. And so we said, well, let's build a canopy so that they can have some dignity. A lot of this is just to give them dignity. Those paths that you see there, they used to walk around in the mud when it would rain, and then we put these pads in, and it just gives them dignity. This gives them dignity.
All right, as—as poor as our kids are, and they're the poorest of the poor, and every year they test in Uganda and—and scoring the top five percent of high schools of all of Uganda, which is remarkable. And people say, well, how does that happen? As well, because we have really good teachers. Well, how do you get really good teachers? Because remember, they're teaching in this grinding poverty, these kids that are coming out of this, and—and well, it's because we pay them. And you would say, what do you mean you pay them? Doesn't everybody get paid? No, in Uganda you could go an entire year and not be paid. So our teachers get paid every week. So if you're over there and you're a teacher in Uganda, where do you want to work? You want to work at our school because you're getting paid every week, and you get a house, and you get food, and they're just great teachers. So our kids do really well.
But one of the things they're taught is, as poor as you are, there's people who are poorer. So this is a family—this is a guy I visit every time I'm there. This guy literally hugs me and is in tears when he sees me every single time, as if I did this—I had nothing to do with it. I just—I get the benefit of it. Him and his family of seven lived in this house. This is one edge of the house—that's the other edge of the house—that was four feet deep—seven people living in that poverty. But our kids raised the money, as poor as they are, to build them a new house. They also—that's our boys digging the foundation for that—because as poor as you are, there are people out there that are poorer, and you need to help them. And so they do.
All right, this is the next school. So remember I said to you, our board members would go over there and they would see things and they'd say, I can't live with this, I gotta—I gotta fix this. This is Saint Andrews—what's your Parish? St. Andrews Parish has helped a lot, but um—that was the CL—this is one of the best elementary schools in that particular region. This is a classroom. When I first pulled up to that, my friend said to me, hey, uh, is that a stable where they keep the goats? I said, no, this is a classroom—look, there's the kids inside the classroom. So we went from that—and that—that was the other block—to that—to that—for about forty-five thousand dollars, we transformed that particular school. We did one other thing—we put shoes on these kids because they're all barefoot. Two and a half years later we came back—every kid in that school had shoes on. Well, that's weird because they outgrow the shoes, the shoes get lost, the kids move on—what, they just shouldn't all be wearing shoes—but something happened—that Community was Dan, who said, is it possible that by doing this and putting shoes on their kids, you raise their dignity to the point where they say, my kids always gonna have shoes—plus the dollar for a pair of shoes—but as poor as they are, they're going to make sure their kids have shoes. And—and the smiles on their faces are just undeniable.
So St. Joseph's Vocational School—remember I said not every kid goes to uh—University—so we have vocational school that we built. That's uh—the masonry class—that's the carpentry class. So you see how that—see how they had this rude—rude accrued—um—lean-to essentially—that—that's where they had their carpentry class. We paid for pavilions so that they can do masonry and carpentry, not with that primitive type of shelter. So you heard about Saint Andrews—we said, okay, we can do that with a 200-person school—let's do it with a 700-person school. So we found Saint Charles Lawongo, which was not far away. This is 700 kids—see the kid with one shoe—he's so proud—he's got one shoe—and we're transforming this school just like we did with St. Andrews, and we're going to put shoes on all these kids—we're going to see what happens there—see if this really works. So this is—this is um—in process right now—that's the—the chapel that we built there—and uh—friends and clients of mine, John Elisa Lawler, funded this whole thing. Um, Marangoni's the third Primary School, and uh—that's the boys' dormitory—now that's the boys' dormitory that's being worked on right now—it may actually be done by now—so we're going to move the boys from there to there—that gives them dignity. There's more pictures of Marangoni—this was our first graduating class that went on to University. So almost—I don't know that everyone—it would be an overstatement if I said they all had jobs—but um—most of them have jobs. Uh, we—we helped fund—we don't pay for all of their University education—but we help to fund some of it depending on their need—to go to the best university in Uganda, which is called Makerere University—best university in East Africa—tuition, room and board, fifteen hundred dollars a year—so it's nothing—and—and so we—we help to support them.
But back to our school—so the high school uh—tuition, room and board um—and uniforms and books—150 a year. So remember I said about educating the girls—people say to me, what—what do you do? What are you actually doing over there? They said, wow, we're building buildings, we're building relationships, and we're helping kids like this—this girl—again, one shoe—she's ahead of the curve. My question—so what we do is, I say we take this girl—it's not the same girl—so don't say, oh, it's not the same girl—you'll get the point—um—we take that girl, we put her in our school—that's her—that's the girl—our student—at home—that's her home—that's her mother—we take that girl, put her in our school, and she becomes that girl—she's a University graduate—studied oil and gas production at Makerere University and is now employed. And we had the—the beauty of coming through our system—she didn't graduate from our school—but we sponsored our education of that girl—she's a medical doctor—so—her name is Lucia. So my question to people is always, who's going to help that girl? She needs help. So got to do a little—a lot—and don't worry—it's not the most magnificent thing or the most, you know, the most grandiose thing or whatever—it's like Dan was talking about with the hammers—you just got to do a little bit and move it a little—move the needle a little bit—um—and you can make a big difference.