Student shares experience volunteering in Uganda

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Maci Keppler enjoyed reconnecting with residents of Obwobwo’s Light during her return trip to the CarePoint as a team member volunteer. (Photos provided by Maci Keppler)

Visiting Uganda has given Maci Keppler a new outlook on life. It’s something she wants to do again because “once you go and love it, it’s so hard to not go again,” she said.

By Willis Patenaude | Times-Register

 

When winter break rolls around, the vast majority of high school students spend the occasion relaxing with family and friends, taking in the holiday season, maybe catching a movie, playing video games or binge watching the latest series. It’s generally something comfortable, and low-maintenance. But, for the second year in a row, Maci Keppler spent the bulk of  break flying to Uganda as a team member with Obwobwo’s Light. 

 

While the Ugandan CarePoint and local efforts to fundraise for and support the community—largely spearheaded by Jamie Wingert—have been well-documented, the experiences of a student, a junior like Maci, have gone unrecognized. But they also serve an important role in volunteer efforts to aid a small community in a country mostly overrun with poverty and lack of accessibility to everyday needs most in Elkader take for granted. Maci quickly realized this after her first trip last year. 

 

After learning about Obwobwo’s Light through Wingert, a close family friend and inspiration for Maci, she felt called to get involved in summer 2023. She also wanted to meet Josephine Anyede, one resident of the CarePoint sponsored by her family. Maci started fundraising, not just for the trip, but also for the CarePoint specifically. 

 

Along with her mom, Angel, Maci made and sold cookies and helped Wingert with multiple fundraisers, including an “Alpaca Birthday Party,” yoga retreats, delivering flower baskets and the annual barn fundraiser with a silent auction, food and live music, which raised over $7,000 last year. 

 

“Volunteering, to me, is important because it has altered my perspective on life and how I live it,” Maci said. 

 

Volunteering led Maci to hop on an estimated 20-hour flight to Uganda last January, marking her first trip to the country and Obwobwo’s Light. She called the experience “surreal” and a “culture shock, but in a positive way.” 

 

“The people there are the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Maci said. 

 

The trip altered her perspectives on life, specifically in the reasons for where someone is born, a result Maci credited to luck more than anything. The implication of that assessment is that Maci found a new outlook on life, suddenly realizing there is more to life than the little things, while also becoming a more “grateful person.” 

 

Interestingly, one thing that stood out from that first trip was washing feet. Quoting the bible passage John 13:13-14, which says, “You call me teacher and Lord - and you are speaking rightly, since that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet,” Maci found the pathway to humility. 

 

What Maci implies is that foot washing requires people to lower themselves and, in some cases, even kneel before another person, in an act that “represents kindness and generosity.” It mimics the selfless acts of Jesus, who Maci said, “constantly lived that way, putting the needs of others before his own.” 

 

The act of foot washing left a profound mark on Maci, who said, “It was the biggest thing that stuck out” to her about that first trip in 2024.

 

“I feel like a lot of people will think that, because we are the only white people in this tiny African town filled with people, we are better. Which is not true. Foot washing humbles us in the most amazing way,” she said. 

 

During that first trip, Maci saw firsthand what people “take for granted here at home.” She also acknowledged one of the biggest challenges in getting people to listen and get involved is helping them understand what the people of the CarePoint go through, like having young and old women with babies on their backs, water jugs in their hands and items on top of their heads trekking miles from the water source back to the community. They do it without ever complaining. 

 

“These people live in huts, no bathroom, no air conditioning, no running water. They have to commute to the borehole in order to pump water, and then have to carry it back to their homes walking on very small paths,” Maci said. “Most of the kids don’t have a clue as to what we have in America, but me, knowing what we have in the U.S. makes it hard for me to see the living conditions in the village of Obwobwo.” 

 

Despite the hardships faced by the people of Obwobwo’s Light, Maci said they are the “most selfless, generous and lively people there are.” There was never a moment she felt unwelcome, and that didn’t change this year, when she returned for the second time on a trip she said was “even better than the first one.” 

 

This time, Maci knew what to expect, felt more comfortable and had a goal to achieve: to get all the children of the CarePoint sponsored for just $45 a month. 

 

That effort had Maci reaching out to her mom, to find someone to sponsor a girl named Catherine. According to Angel, Maci’s exact words were “There’s a girl named Catherine. She’s amazing. She needs a sponsor. She speaks really good English, which proves she works really hard in school.”

 

The reason for that extra effort is simple, at least for Maci, who said, “Sponsorship builds a relationship with these children, and it makes them feel so extremely special. We did end up getting all children sponsored, which is amazing!”

 

Maci did more hands-on activities with the kids this trip, like painting nails and teaching them how to make s’mores, as well as going on multiple home visits. She was also “gifted” a chicken, which is a way families of the CarePoint “show their love, appreciation and gratitude,” Angel said in a social media post. “What may seem so simple to one is so very important to these families.”

 

The experience has changed Maci’s outlook on life—being surrounded by people who “wake up happy” every day, while staring down hardships unknown to those living in Elkader. It’s an experience she believes has made her a better person, less prone to making excuses and one where she is treated in the “kindest ways” imaginable, which she admits is not always the case back home. 

 

But it’s also an experience that comes to an end. While her mom sat anxiously waiting for her return to Iowa, Maci was thinking about the children at the CarePoint with their smiling faces and unfettered happiness, who are “filled with so much joy” when they meet their sponsors. It’s like Maci, in real life. 

 

It’s something she wants to do again, because “once you go and love it, it’s so hard to not go again,” she said.

 

“There is no better exercise for your heart than reaching down and helping to lift someone up,” famed radio host Bernard Meltzer once said. Following a call to help, Maci exercised her heart, lifted people up and put smiles on the faces of the people of Obwobwo’s Light.

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