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I AM Family Ministries is a holistic care program that was initiated as a response to the overwhelming number of orphaned children and vulnerable women in Uganda whose lives had been devastated by Cholera outbreak and AIDS epidemic in 1999. How we started: A sack of 50 kilograms of maize and another of rice fed the Lwakatale family of 13 for a month. The father, Ponsiano Lwakatale, a pastor in Kampala, Uganda, took note of each grain. When cholera swept the Lwakatales’ neighborhood in 1998, their youngest daughter, Omega, 8, began sneaking scoops of maize and rice to her friend whose father died from the disease. At the end of the month, the Lwakatales were short of food and the father, discovering that Omega had been sneaking it out, was angry. As he was about to punish Omega, she said, “If you beat me for giving to the needy can you still be a pastor?” Her words halted her father. “It was an eye-opener for him that there was so much bigger need outside our family,” O

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