Watoto Worship Was WOW!!!

Date: 24 June 2012 14:34:44

[caption id="attachment_5602" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Watoto Choir At Cornerstone"][/caption]

This morning at Cornerstone worship was led by the Watoto Children's Choir from Uganda. In short it was a real WOW experience which involved music, movement and testimony.

To expand slightly this choir come from a community which exists to provide care for abandoned women and children; taking up the biblical injunction to care for widows and orphans. The young people in the choir sketched out for us some of their stories and experiences.

The choir gives the parent organisation an opportunity to try and give every child with them a chance to travel at least once in their lives. This is important as part of what they do with children who have been through traumatic experiences is give them a wider vision and help raise up leaders who can imagine an alternative to what they have seen around them. The aim is to raise up people who are able to enter leadership and help rebuild the country and continent. During their current tour they have performed / led worship for a range of audiences including the Queen. There are two Telegraph stories they link to on the organisation's website. One is about how a member of the choir apparently broke protocol when she met the Queen and hugged her and the other gives an outline of that little girls history and more detail on the organisation.

Central to helping these children are the Children's Villages which the Watoto website describes in the following way:

"Watoto children’s homes are constructed in the form of small, vibrant communities we refer to as villages. The village setting is representative of a familiar traditional dwelling for many ethnic groups in Africa. The houses are positioned in clusters with all the essentials of any basic home in a developed country. Each village contains a nursery school, a kindergarten, primary school, high school, vocational training centre, water project, medical clinic and a multi-purpose hall for use as a church and community centre. The villages provide safe and open outdoor spaces with beautiful vegetation and plenty of space to live and play.

A Watoto family consists of a housemother who cares for 8 children (starting at 2 years old and above). Infants between the age of 0 to 2 are cared for at Baby Watoto.

In one house, there are three bedrooms, one for the mother and two for the children. The house incorporates a communal area with a dining and lounge space. The dining area is an important tool in the creation of a family environment. Watoto homes are also designed to have running water and a bathroom, which are rare in rural Africa.

In conjunction with the ministry's home church, Watoto runs a programme called Father’s Heart. Respectable men from the church regularly visit the children in their villages and provide the father figure and male role models needed to complete the family structure."

I have to admit at the start of the service I had had some concerns about the whole thing and whether this project was another form of neo-colonialism and were we back to linking "aid" and "faith" in a way which was reminiscent of a questionable aspect of the Western Church's past history. By the end of the service my fears had largely been proved unfounded.

Whilst, within the whole sphere of development, there are some huge questions to be asked and no right answers because every way of doing things has potentially problematic elements this model seems to be ok. They are working on sustainable development and are seeking to encourage both academic and vocational development of those they are working with. More importantly seeing the children laughing with each other afterwards as they waited for us to go so they could have lunch it was clear that these children who had been victims of trauma were happy and were part of a programme which really does give hope to them. It was a pleasure to have them lead our worship this morning.

Note: what the picture doesn't show is that the congregation which were they were leading is very diverse, including culturally and there are a large number of people from an African background. It was lovely this morning to see their culture more fully represented within worship.