After praying, thinking and talking to many people I trust, I am delaying college for one year to serve for five and a half months in East Africa among South Sudanese refugees. I plan to split my time between three groups:

• Empower One

• Seed Effect

• A missionary family in Northern Uganda

For Empower One, my dad (the co-founder), is asking that I survey communities around the churches they’ve planted in the refugee settlements (camps). He, and the African leaders of Empower One, want to find out what kind of impact these churches are making. I will also survey the believers inside the churches as well. They want to give this information to the faculty and leaders of the bible school they started so they can either celebrate or change anything in their curriculum to make the churches healthier.

He’s also told me we’re going to flip the normal script. Instead of me coming from America to disciple South Sudanese, there are three strong women leaders I will sit under and learn from them, instead.

Seed Effect is a Christ-based micro-finance organization that serves mostly South Sudanese refugees and some Ugandans with savings groups. They have 25,000 people in savings groups. Refugees save their own money and lend to one another, mostly to grow their small businesses. I will survey these groups to help them learn even more about the depth of the impact of these groups. Plus, I will go through the program myself as an intern with local Ugandans.

For both Empower One and Seed Effect, as I am doing my work for them I will get the opportunity to meet with many people who have powerful stories. As I hear people's stories I will be collecting them in a shareable way for both the organizations, by doing that they have more content that can help them better communicate what God is doing on the field.

The third part of my assignment is to spend time with a missionary family near the refugee settlements. In addition to helping their family overall, they are awesome disciple makers and church planters. I plan to shadow them and learn all I can about how these real, long-time missionaries work.

I am trying to raise $8,000 for this five and half month assignment. Would you pray about supporting this extended mission trip?