2025 Impact!

In Northern Uganda, healing is often passed from one wounded heart to another. Jennifer knows this better than anyone.

As a child growing up in the remote villages of Bungatira, Jennifer lived under the constant shadow of the Lord’s Resistance Army. One night, when she was just twelve, rebels stormed her village. In the chaos, she was abducted and forced into the life of a child soldier - trained to obey, to numb her emotions, and to survive at all costs.

She eventually escaped during a raid, but freedom came with its own weight. At a rehabilitation center, she began the slow work of healing: learning to name her pain, share her story, and rebuild her life piece by piece. Over time, Jennifer discovered something she never expected — that her deepest wounds could become the source of her greatest compassion.

Healing became her calling.

Years later, that calling led her to a trauma healing class in Amuru District, where she met a quiet, guarded fourteen-year-old girl named Ada.

Before the training, Ada described herself as “a wounded beast.” Life had taught her to protect herself with harsh words and distance. Born to a mother who is crippled, mocked by neighbors, and later orphaned by a violent land dispute that took her parent’s lives, she carried a sense of unworthiness that kept her awake at night - often sleeping no more than two hours.

She fled with her sister to Gulu, and her sister got married. Ada lived with them, but they soon divorced. After her divorce, her sister moved in with another man, leaving Ada behind with her ex-husband. He chose not to throw her out, but she became a maid in the house, taking on housework and farm work. By the time she entered Jennifer’s trauma healing class, Ada believed she was “the unlucky one.”

Jennifer recognized the signs immediately - the anger, the fear, the quiet ache beneath the surface. She had once lived through those same emotions.

Patiently, gently, she guided Ada and her classmates through the pain they carried. She taught them what trauma really is: not weakness, but a deep wound of the heart and mind. She taught them how to grieve, how to name their stories, and how to begin walking toward hope.

When the class reached the session called “taking your pain to the cross,” Ada describes it as the moment something in her cracked open. The beginning of liberation. The first breath of freedom she had felt in years.

Jennifer didn’t stop there. She visited Ada’s home. She invited her to dinner with her family. She made sure Ada knew she was seen, valued, and not alone. Slowly, Ada world began to shift. After the training, Ada described the change like this: “I experienced an exhilarating wave of love and renewal... I realized I don’t need to stay stuck in the past. I’m not the unlucky one. I can shape my future.”

For the first time in years, she could sleep. She could smile. She could imagine a life beyond survival. Ada now dreams of helping others find the same hope she found, through the teacher who saw her, believed in her, and walked with her.

And Jennifer, once a child soldier running for her life, now stands as a healer, lighting a path forward for girls just like her younger self.