Uganda: Alumna works at children’s home
A few weeks after graduation, Wesley Steeb ’13, flew to Uganda to begin work as an administrative assistant for New Hope Uganda. It was only a matter of weeks before she realized the twoandahalfyear commitment would challenge her in ways she never expected.
Serving in Africa had been a dream of Steeb’s since she watched the documentary, “Invisible Children” in high school. She said she always thought she would travel there as a doctor though, not as an administrative assistant, and never right after college.
Plans to work at New Hope Uganda—an organization spread between three facilities in Uganda which seek to fulfill family structures to children without parents—began to form during the fall of her senior year at Hillsdale College.
Assistant Professor of Religion Don Westblade explained, “New Hope Uganda never uses the term orphanage, because orphanage will conjure up in your mind warehouses of kids. What they are doing is to try to recreate families for kids.” They community is organized with the schoolhouse as the center, radiating out into circles where Ugandan parents live with eight to 20 kids. Each family’s house is surrounded by the fields where they grow their own food.
Steeb went to the informational meeting for the mission trip, researched the organization, and found the job listing for the administrative assistant – a position she had experience with through the GOAL Student Coordinator position.
“People have always told me that they think of me in administrative work,” Steeb said. “I really think that experience with GOAL got me this job.”
Steeb ran into many obstacles along the application process, but by February she was offered the position and a month to decide. “Even though it was not a traditional job, I felt like this is where God was leading me,” Steeb said.
Director of Health Services Brock Lutz and his wife Jen talked with Steeb often throughout the application process, and Skype with her now. Lutz said they encouraged her to pursue the opportunity to work in Africa.
“She had a couple offers for positions that were more typical jobs, but she talked about Africa from the perspective of it always being something that she wanted to do. We encouraged her to think outside the box a bit, and not necessarily do the safe thing,” Brock said.
When Steeb arrived in Uganda on June 21, she jumped into five months of training and acclimation that included sporadic assignments pertaining to her job—made more difficult since her boss left two weeks after her arrival for a yearlong furlough—but most of the time was unexpectedly devoted to “heart training.”
“I wasn’t expecting to be coming into a training that was going to be at a heart level,” Steeb said. “I thought that I would be doing more appearance level, practical issues of working with orphans and vulnerable children and while that came out in the training, it was really more heart issues. Now that I look back, it was an incredible blessing that my first step after college got to be increasing my relationship with God, and just making the time to make that relationship a priority.”
Uganda is only just beginning to feel normal, Steeb said. Though this week, she said, has been the week of snakes—small snakes that have been found around their housing, but snakes that are likely Black Mambas.
She has learned to factor in greeting time to her morning walks, and she is used to crossing through a few herds of sheep or cows on her way to work.
“It is a very friendly culture. If you know the person you are going to shake hands or hug them, say ‘how is your family?’, ‘How did you spend the night?’. We do this greeting – even if you need to be somewhere, people take the priority, which is really beautiful, but from my mindset is a big adjustment,” Steeb said. “If I need someone to do something, I can’t just walk into their office and ask them.
I need to pause and say something like ‘Hi Uncle, how are you? How is your day going? I heard your wife is sick, how is she doing?’ It’s learning to have the grace to take that time.”
With still over a year remaining in her commitment, Steeb is excited for building relationships with the family she belongs to.
“I’m just recently starting to have lunch weekly at school with one of the girls from my family group. I just love leading devotions and working in the garden, what they call fields, with them. So I’m just excited to see how those relationships grow, because ultimately even though I have an office job, I’m here for the people, especially the children,’ Steeb said.
Steeb said she also loves how her job as administrative assistant includes some of her passions like writing and photography. One of her jobs is to compose the biannual newsletter, though she said, “I never thought that part of my job would be communicating back home.”
Steeb is confident that God will use this experience to prepare her for what she will do next.
“I’ve learned more about myself, I’ve hopefully grown some, and I’ve learned to look for God in the hard situations,” Steeb said. “All that process of applying, and actually making the decision, and actually getting here, and seeing enough support come in to sustain me here has really shown me that even when it’s difficult to stay that God led me here and I know that I am supposed to be here for this time. Those types of lessons will carry me into the future.”