A NATIONAL Evangelisation Team (NET) returned home to Australia on a high after the organisation’s first foray into Africa.
Eight young people from Brisbane and New Zealand embarked on a journey of faith in July to Uganda, where youth represent 70 per cent of the population.
The volunteers spent three months running retreats, leadership seminars and youth ministry training for hundreds of young Catholics in Masaka diocese, just south of the capital, Kampala.
They left behind a NET training program for young Catholic leaders who will in turn spread the message to other young people across the country and beyond.
The team said young Ugandans ‘are always hopping on God’.
‘When something goes wrong they don’t blame God but wait in faith for help. They are on fire and want more.’
NET team member Angela Hayes from Brisbane quoted Mother Teresa: ‘God hasn’t called us to be successful, he has called us to be faithful’, to reflect her experience in Uganda.
‘As I was preparing to go to Uganda … I was worried about success instead of faithfulness,’ she said.
‘How could I, Angela Hayes, make any difference in the lives of the African people?
‘I should have been asking: What can God do through me in Africa?’
She said some of the people she met in the impoverished country had no family, very little education and no money.
Yet they had an enormous amount of hope and joy, which came directly from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Angela said many of the young people they met on their travels were just like young people in Australia with the same thirst
for truth and desire to love and be loved.
‘The young people we met who had a faith, recognised the need in their own society for young people to hear the gospel proclaimed, in a meaningful way, directly from other young people.
‘They openly embraced the NET charism of evangelisation and were eager to learn more about the way that we do things in Australia.’
Mother Teresa’s quote will remain in the back of Angela’s mind as she returns to life in Brisbane and university next year.
‘I have learnt that it doesn’t matter what we do, whether we go to Africa or travel Australia or just simply be a Christian in the workforce or at university. The main thing to remember is not to have success as our main objective but faithfulness, and in doing this God promises we will be successful,’ Angela said.
NET will send another team to Uganda from mid-April to July in 2005. Donations are welcome.
For further information phone NET on (07) 3397 9666.
