InternFocus: Natalie

Adventurous. Life-changing. Rewarding. While three words cannot encompass her entire experience as a ChildVoice intern, these are top of mind for Natalie Fasnacht. After spending August through December 2008 as an intern living at the ChildVoice Centre in Lukodi, Natalie boasts a repertoire of great stories, life lessons and incredible experiences.

Instead of taking a job after graduating with her Master of Science degree in Special Education and Literacy from the State University of New York, Natalie decided to volunteer her expertise - and headed directly to northern Uganda with ChildVoice.

"I have a lot of experience working with traumatized children in special education settings, so when I became aware of the needs in northern Uganda, I felt very strongly called," Natalie explains, noting she has also been an active advocate for racial justice and equality.

ChildVoice has been on Natalie's radar since its birth in 2006. Her pastor, Nathan Mandsager, son of ChildVoice founder Conrad Mandsager, is very involved in the organization and has traveled to northern Uganda several times.

Putting skills to work.
The ChildVoice Lukodi Centre, which houses 29 young women and their children (which number almost 50), was approaching its one-year anniversary about the time Natalie arrived on the scene. With the goal of the program being to eventually reintegrate the young women back into their families and villages, Natalie was charged with helping staff develop detailed reintegration plans.

"I developed and then trained the teachers and counselors at the Lukodi Centre on the use of an Individualized Reintegration Plan (IRP) for each girl in the program," Natalie describes. "The IRPs are based on Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) that are used extensively in the US special education system."

The IRP allows a team of Centre staff members to work with each girl to determine personal goals appropriate to her specific needs. The plan consists of future-oriented, measurable, and realistic goals.

"With an IRP in place, each girl can imagine a future for herself and it gives her the tools and support she needs to create an economically-stable, healthy life for herself and her children," Natalie says. "The girls are then able to take responsibility for themselves and make wise choices about their own bodies, their children's lives and their own futures."

Fruits of her labor.
Natalie witnessed excitement and anticipation among both the girls in the program, as well as the staff. She says the girls began thinking seriously about what they really wanted in their lives and what it would take to achieve their goals

The staff also embraced and appreciated the challenges of setting class goals, learning how to assess their own teaching, documenting the process, and providing individualized feedback to the girls.

"There were many cultural differences and I had to make adjustments as I implemented this project," Natalie recalls. "I found it very challenging and it really stretched me by significantly increasing the amount of patience, grace and gentleness that I was able to show others each day."

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Venture into northern Uganda through Natalie Fasnacht's words, written just prior to her return home in early December 2008.

I've always had compassion for poor people in the US. People who can't pay their electricity bill, people who can't afford a car and have to rely on public transportation, people who never seem to have enough left over to buy new clothes. But for the grace of God go I - and I have been that far gone a brief time or two in my life.

But the poverty here in northern Uganda... the only word I can think of to describe it is - alien. The weight of the poverty here is literally crushing. The weight is heavier than the 20 litres of water women carry on their heads every day, crushing their necks, their spines and their dreams.

Imagine carrying this weight slowly, balancing step by step as you walk, squeezed between earth and water, the two things you cling to for survival. The slippery mud of the rainy season has become slippery sand in the dry season. The blazing hot sun beats down upon you, more glaring then the yellow jerry can that slops water onto your shoulder, as sweat drips down your forehead. You carefully balance the water that you will boil to cook the food you planted months ago. You've weeded this food for weeks and now you have reaped the harvest - maize, posho, rice, beans, boo - all pulled out with your own hands, walking slowly, bent double, the weight of gravity pulling on your lower back, increased by the weight of a sleeping child on your back, as the sweat drips down your forehead.

Then come the choices you have to make about this precious water, this weight carried by your spine, your neck, your shoulders, your bones... How much do you boil for food? How much do you use to clean? How much of it can you spare for the children who have been playing in the dirt all day? And what, if any, is left over for the orphans, the ones you took in after your sister died? Will one more day without washing them really make a big difference? They are already so filthy their skin has gone from the burnished mahogany black of the Acholi to the grey dust of days-old dirt.

And at the end of a long, hot day, a day just like every other day, do you make the trek again? The long, dusty trek to the borehole to gossip and laugh as you wait your turn, then bearing the burden once again, feeling the crushing weight of this alien poverty. Alien to me that is. But as familiar to these women as the sweltering heat, the muddy roads, the crying babies, the sweat dripping down their foreheads.

It was a shock to me when I realized these girls had no idea what, or where, New York was. They had never heard of it before. Can you imagine? They could never conceive of a store bigger than Lukodi Centre. A store filled with stuff they would never guess they needed - not as much as the commercials tell us we do. They don't know, can't possibly imagine, what they're missing - right?

There is a moment, perhaps you've had one, when you realize that there has got to be more to life then this... this dead-end job, this empty relationship, this aimless, lost feeling. And I see that in their eyes. They might never have heard of New York, but they know there is more to life then this crushing weight they find themselves bearing. There is more to life then this back-breaking labor as they try to stand, crushed between earth and sky, bent over as they dig, weed, harvest, wash clothes, sweep, clean floors, carry babies.

There is a weight even more crushing - the weight of a hope deferred, a hope for more, a hope for something better…