Today we’d like to introduce you to Warren and Mary Faye Moore.
Hi Warren and Mary Faye, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Our story begins when our daughter left for Uganda in early 2013 to serve for a year as a guest teacher in a boarding school established by a ministry out of Griffin, GA. In July, we joined one of the mission teams sponsored by the organization that she went to serve with and served with our daughter for two weeks doing various types of mission work. It was on July 20, 2013, the fifth day of our journey, through the beautiful countryside of Uganda that God obviously decided that our lives needed to be turned upside down.
On the previous four days, we had visited church-sponsored schools that the organization supported, and were seated in the shade of nice tents, with seas of children with silver dollar eyes and mile-wide smiles swarming all around us…It was good!!! However, on this fifth day, we traveled for 3 1/2 hours from Jinja to Mbale, a journey which terminated in one of the most forsaken places in Uganda…the Namatala Slum. We had come there to help a small congregation of Christians who had joined together to plant a church in the slum to help bring hope to the thousands of children who lived in the village. WE WERE OVERWHELMED!! As the children, literally hundreds of them’ began crowding around as our bus full of Mzungos (white people) began to unload, reality crashed down on us! The stinch in the air, coupled with the blank stares, swollen bellies, and the faces scarred with unbelievable hopelessness, quickly erased the memories of the smiles and big eyes and mostly clean children from the previous days! Thus began our journey!
We were in the village for less than four hours, but by the end of our time there, we fully knew that God had begun something special in our hearts…something that we were not at all comfortable with. He was tugging at both of our hearts to “Be the One!” to help bring hope to those hopeless children who had no choice but to live there. That evening, back in the safety of our hotel room, we got on our knees after arguing unsuccessfully with God that He had chosen the wrong people, and simply prayed: “Here we are Lord. Send Us!” It was there that the vision of Mission Mbale was born!
That was 9 1/2 wild and crazy years ago, and “absolutely unbelievable” is the only way to describe what has transpired since that time! God began to open doors for us to share our story and He began to encircle us with beautiful people who embraced our vision and began to work to make it a reality. In February 2016, Mission Mbale, Inc was granted 501c3 non-profit status and we began the process of forming a board of trustees. Many times in that process we looked at each other and said “What now?” God wasted no time in answering that question as we had already begun the process of establishing a Child Sponsorship Program in which we would match one of those desperate children in Uganda with an American Sponsor. That program was launched in the same month of our getting our non-profit status when we were able to bring 26 orphans off of the streets and begin housing them in a modified 40′ x 40′ tent which had been donated to us. Today we have approximately 170 children fully sponsored through that program which provides for school, medical needs, and other life essentials…and hundreds more awaiting sponsorship. The beautiful thing about our sponsored children is that when we are in Uganda, we get to interact with most of them while we are there because our children are all from that area in which God has called us to serve…they truly are OUR children!
Our other major vision that was birthed with the ministry was that of providing a Christian School for those children that we had grown to love in the Namatala Slum, a vision which we thought would require a much longer vision focus. In fact, in 2016 as we drew up our vision strategies, we very optimistically set our “school construction” goal with hopes of beginning construction of Ebenezer Christian School in 2023!! Obviously, God didn’t hear the numbers right during that planning meeting because in November 2017, the ground was broken to begin construction of classroom 1-3, and on February 6, 2019, the school bell rang welcoming 73 students in Grades 1-4 as the inaugural class of Ebenezer Christian School…Grade 4 was housed in a temporary wooden one-room school house in the shadow of the main building.
Fast-forward to February 2023 when the school bells will once again ring on the campus of ECS, but this year we will be welcoming close to 350 students onto the campus and they will be attending grades 1-7 in one of the fifteen classrooms which make up the school…And ALL the time God is good!!!
So many other things have taken place as well as there has also been a 5000+ square foot church constructed in the heart of the Namatala Slum that now serves as a house of worship, a feeding station for hundreds of children daily, and so many other ministries! School buses have been given, wells drilled, and most importantly of all…thousands of lives of children and their families have been transformed through the love of Jesus shared by the many mission teams which have traveled with us, and by the precious Ugandan people who have opened their lives to us over the years.
We would love to have you become a part of the Mission Mbale family and join us in our mission of “Transforming futures and hopes through the love of Jesus…ONE CHILD AT A TIME!!!! Jeremiah 29:11 ALL FOR GOD’S GLORY!!!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
To say this journey has stretched us is one of the greatest understatements ever spoken! Both of us grew up in modest homes and have spent our married lives chasing careers, raising children, and living the American dream. To say that Co-Founding a ministry based in a slum village in Uganda was our dream would be absurd…it wouldn’t have even produced a “blip” on the radar of our lives! We’re 9 1/2 years into this journey and have come to realize this very powerful truth…doing Christ-centered ministry in a self-centered world is ALWAYS going to be filled with giant-sized obstacles in your path!
To name a few of those “giants” that sometimes appeared to be standing in our way: the cultural differences, the brutal travel conditions to get there (30+ hours of non-stop travel one way), the resistance from family and friends who couldn’t understand why we felt we needed to go half-way around the world to make a difference for God, the challenges of learning to trust God unconditionally and maybe the hardest…learning that there are simply going to be things along the journey that we will not understand…and that it OK to not understand them!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Warren-graduated college in 1980 with a degree in Psychology and Business, and began a 37-year career with AT&T Telecommunications. Although it seems like an odd fit for a Psychology major, EVERY day on the job dealing with customers stretched my “counseling” skills to the max 😎 Those daily encounters with people have served me well as those skills that I acquired in areas such as relationship-building, conflict-resolution, long-range vision, and that occasional encounter of having to simply make the best of a bad situation, have provided a solid foundation that has been so necessary in establishing and maintaining a vibrant and rewarding ministry opportunity for many.
Mary Faye-graduated from nursing school in 1979 and worked for many years in that profession. In 1986, she transitioned to part-time nursing and began a 36-year career with a major tax preparation firm and is continuing in that career today. Her skills of working in the financial world has proven invaluable in helping to establish a solid financial grounding for the ministry. Her G0d-given organizational skills have provided the groundwork for ten very successful mission trips to Mbale in which close to two hundred team members have had the opportunity to pour into the lives of those precious people and in turn have built life-long relationships that have transformed lives on both sides of the ocean!
What’s next?
As we move forward, we cannot help but be in awe of the amazing things that God has done over the past 9 1/2 years and try to imagine what He must have in store for the days ahead. To His praise and glory, EVERYTHING that has been, and currently is in the process of being constructed is fully funded and there are no outstanding debts associated with the ministry work. We truly do serve a great and mighty God!! And as we look to the future of Mission Mbale’s impact on those we have called to serve, there are several things that are very important to the ministry which are truly the heart and soul of the future of Mission Mbale.
The first of these is our Child Sponsorship Program which gives American families/individuals the opportunity to develop a meaningful and lasting relationship with a child in Mbale, Uganda. Many of our current child sponsors have even traveled with us on a mission trip and met their child face-to-face. There is an opportunity for ongoing communication with your child through our Child Sponsorship Portal in which you can email back and forth. As stated above, we currently have 170 children fully sponsored, but our goal for 2023 is to finish the year celebrating the addition of our 300th child to the program.
The next major goals are associated with the further work of keeping up with the growth of interest in parents wanting their child to attend Ebenezer Christian School as well as the general educational needs of our children. One of those goals will be to see our dream realized of a stand-alone structure to house a Special Education School for the many children who are neglected and abandoned because they have learning and physical disabilities. Another recent area of development is that of helping our sponsored children gain life skills through vocational training that will position them to become self-sustaining.
Currently, we have ongoing construction projects and will be completing Classrooms 13-15 in the early spring but we have three classrooms left to build to complete the construction of the current school block of 18 classrooms. There are also plans to complete the Dining Hall so that the 350 + students who will be eating on campus will have a sheltered place to enjoy their meals as well as a place to study and gather that is dry and warm. Other future plans are for on-site living quarters for the teachers as well as dormitories for the students who live on-site fulltime. Currently, these students are living in classrooms that have been transformed into dorm rooms.
One final dream is to one day be able to construct a permanent church building for the members of the church which is currently meeting in one of the classrooms.
Pricing:
- Child Sponsorship–$50.00/month
- Classroom Supplies–$100/term/class
- Daily Hot Meals for 150+ Slum Children–$40.00/day
- HIV/Aids Support(Meals and care)–$175/month
- Medical Supplies–$200.00/month
Contact Info:
- Website: missionmbale.org
- Facebook: Mission Mbale, Inc.
- Other: Child Sponsorship Link: https://missionmbaleorg.reachapp.co/sponsorships
Image Credits
All photos taken by myself or Ministry Team leaders.
