Contagious love

Nancy Peeples describes Kitgum, Uganda, as the most physically uncomfortable place she has ever been. But as she and her daughters discuss the war-torn area from the comfort of their living room on Euclid Avenue, they are overcome with a desire to go back.

Nancy’s attraction to the area started in 2012 when she and friend Francie Deaton — who will tell you she never wanted to go to Uganda — had lunch with an Australian woman, “Mama Irene” Gleeson, at Brio at Brookwood Village.

“We walked out in awe,” Nancy said. “Irene had that much draw. She said, ‘You will come to Africa,’ and six months later we were there. If you met her, you were under her spell like no one you had ever met.”

In 1991, Gleeson had sold all of her possessions and left her beachside home in Australia to move to Kitgum, the area most affected by decades of war waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). For years, LRA leader Joseph Kony had led rebels to abduct thousands of children to become fighters or sex slaves.

Setting up a homestead in a camper, Gleeson began by gathering children in the area and teaching them songs. Rebels would come up to her with guns, and she would tell them, “I am a child of God, you can’t hurt me.” They never laid a hand on her.

“Everything about her was so contrary to how we live,” Nancy said. “She was crazy, but a purposeful crazy.”

Since then Gleeson’s ministry has grown to employ hundreds of Ugandans to run six schools for children in the equivalent of kindergarten through eighth grade. Together they serve about 6,000 children, not just with education but also health care and two meals a day.

Today it’s those children who draw the Peeples and others back to Uganda.

“[The people there] genuinely love like crazy because Irene loved like crazy on them,” Anna Cate Peeples, 18, said. “Her legacy is a love like you have never experienced. Their hope isn’t in their situation, and that leaves a mark on anyone. It’s very contagious.”

Forging relationships

Gleeson’s connection to the U.S. began through another Mountain Brook resident, Drayton Nabers. In the summer of 2010, he was looking for opportunities for his area of greatest passion, discipling men, in Uganda. He knew that in the culture that remained, women, not men, did most of the work to support families. When he found Gleeson’s schools, he became the first American to build a relationship with them.

Working with the Irene Gleeson Foundation (IGF), Nabers initiated a discipleship program for men in Kitgum. Today around 100 young men engage in a yearlong Biblical training program that also involves serving their community. 

Nabers has also brought Gleeson and Ugandan staff members to the U.S. to raise funds and meet people like Nancy Peeples and Deaton, who helped launch a team of seven to visit Uganda in 2012. 

With newly forged friendships, the team that came back to the U.S. wanted to do something stateside. Today around 150 children are sponsored in the U.S., and a board of directors has formed to support IGF in addition to its Australian base. Nabers as well as Mountain Brook residents Mark and Nancy Peeples and Edmond Perry serve on the board.

The U.S. efforts have focused on an IGF school building they have helped fund in Palabek — an area that had never seen white people before the Birmingham group’s arrival. Its nickname is now “Little Alabama.”

Self-sustaining initiatives 

Now, several years after the end of the war in Kitgum, IGF’s focus is shifting to education and excellence rather than simply protection and daily sustenance. Birmingham supporters have been key in envisioning and implementing that process. 

Nabers and Mark Peeples have become instrumental in the operations of the organization, specifically beginning initiatives to help them become at least 50 percent self sustaining.

A new farm of 25,000 chickens employs local workers, sells eggs to the community and provides eggs to the children at the school. The hope is to have an egg for every child in all the schools every day, as the leaders know of the importance of protein for children’s brain development.

Seeing how most construction work for the schools was performed internally, Mark also came up with the idea to contract construction to the community.

Mark and Nabers are also looking into how they can farm their own maize and are traveling to Zambia in August to look at honeybee operations that they could emulate in Kitgum.

Nabers also helped connect friend Gary Ard and his wife Katherine’s passion for clean water with IGF. Now IGF wells serve about 100,000 people, including both the students and general population.

What’s next

In their everyday lives in Mountain Brook, the Peeples and the IGF Board will Skype with the staff in Uganda to encourage them, keep up with them through social media and meet to pray for them. 

The Ugandan staff plan to travel to Birmingham in November, and their American partners hope to host a fundraising event at WorkPlay. This will be their first trip to the U.S. without Gleeson, who passed away from esophageal cancer last July not long after being treated for it in Birmingham. Nancy said it will be hard to have an event without Gleeson to be the face of the work in Uganda.

Still, those involved with IGF in Birmingham have in mind the faces of the children Gleeson loved. 

Nancy and Anna Cate recalled one of the first they met in 2012. Dennis, 13, lived with his six younger siblings in a grass hut next to his parents’ grave. Upon meeting them, he held two root vegetables in his hand that he would cook for his family’s dinner that night — after he had been at an IGF school all day.

At that point, they realized that Dennis was just one house of many in the region. And that realization changed everyone on their trip. It moved Mary Brennan Reich’s father, Peter, to fund a new home for Dennis. And it moved Mark, whom Nancy and Anna Cate said never cries.

“That first night he cried,” Nancy said. “It just breaks your heart and brings us back every time.”

Around 4,000 children in IGF schools are still not sponsored. At $35 a month, a child sponsorship covers education, medical care, two meals a day, clean water and counseling for one child. Sponsors receive four updates a year about how their child is doing in school. 

To learn more, visit igfusa.org. For more information about taking a trip to IGF schools, contact Jamie Ankenbrandt at jamie@alliance-ministries.com or 807-0714.