A core part of living the Christian faith is loving our neighbour, and in the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus made it very clear that our neighbour includes people who are very different from us - different ethnicity, different cultures. If they are in need, the Christian will seek to help them.
In this spirit St Peter’s has, for more than 25 years, supported work in a very poor area of Eastern Uganda called Teso, after the more than 2 million Iteso people who live there. It is an area that has been ravaged by violence from many conflicts and insurrections and so poverty is high.
St Peter’s supports the people of Teso through a charity called the Teso Development Trust, a link which started through the initiative of Honor and Clement Dixon who visited Teso many times. They established a particularly strong connection with a community secondary school in the town of Ngora. Giving and fund raising at St Peter’s was instrumental in helping the Ngora Parents' School develop from just a couple of hundred pupils to over a thousand, supporting the building of classrooms, a magnificent school hall and a dormitory for girls.
When the Parents' School as able to stand on its own feet, it was decided that the church would now support a new secondary school in a rural area in the south of Teso called Aminit. There was no secondary school provision in the area so thousands of children did not finish education. The support from St Peter’s has enabled Aminit High School to build seven classrooms over a period of six years. Much work remains to be done but the school is now set for rapid growth and over the years thousands of children will have the education to be able escape poverty, in part thanks to the efforts of people here in Ruddington.
St Peter’s also supports the wider work of the Teso Development Trust through the church's regular giving. The strong relationship with the Teso region is now well founded and could well last another 25 years or more.
For more information about the wider work of the Teso Development Trust visit www.tesodev.org.uk