Hope bringers: How Compassion is changing lives

God’s name has been co-opted by many movements and in many ways over the years, but when Compassion promises to release children from poverty in the name of Jesus, Megan Cornwell says she no longer has to take it on good faith. She has seen it with her own eyes, and she believes

Guavas, bananas, sugar cane, beans, papayas the size of your head. One by one, Sula places the ripe harvest in front of us in bowls. He’s offering it as a gift, but I see it as a symbol of what God has done in his life. 

I’m in hot, humid Uganda, where Sula lives down a dirt track and past dense fields of matoke trees. There’s no tarmac road to follow and, in the rainy season, the terracotta-coloured earth slides into a thick sludge that is impossible to navigate. The only way to get there is by foot, or on the back of the infamous boda boda motorbike taxis that buzz along the main roads in and out of the capital city, Kampala. It takes Sula and his six-year-old daughter, Immaculate, around half an hour to walk to school each day.