The Prayer Letter, it all starts here...

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Dear Friends and Family,

I hope this letter finds you doing well. As many of you already know, I graduated this spring with a degree in Civil Engineering from the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston and will soon be leaving to work in Uganda as a Rural Water Supply Officer. I will be serving with an organization called African Technical Community Service (ACTS) from August until the end of February 2009.

I would first like to rewind a little bit and share about how God has led me to this opportunity. During the last three years, I have had the privilege to serve on missions teams to Nicaragua and Haiti, as well as numerous opportunities to serve the less fortunate in the local community where I have been studying. Throughout these experiences, God has continually and increasingly placed on my heart the desire to help those who, by societal or worldly standards, are needy and disadvantaged. The longer I serve, the more I realize how great exists the need, as well as the failure by most of us (sometimes unintended, other times deliberate), to support these people as God has commanded us to, with nothing but the same love with which He loved us. The lyrics in the song God of Justice, by Tim Hughes, are as follows and always resound within me whenever I hear or sing them:

We must go

Live to feed the hungry

Stand beside the broken

We must go

Stepping forward

Keep us from just singing

Move us into action

We must go

Now, God has once again provided me with the opportunity to do something with what He has convicted in me. When I look back, it is amazing how God has been laying the path ahead of me, often completely without me knowing. I first learned about ACTS while serving with Engineering Ministries International last summer. A member of my team to Haiti had served as an intern with ACTS and encouraged me to consider the position. I have been further encouraged by the increasing number of friends and family who I have personally witnessed stepping out in faith into the mission field. After much prayer and reflection, I applied and was accepted for a position with ACTS that will allow me to serve those in need with the engineering skills that I have learned.

ACTS is a Christian organization dedicated to providing community development assistance. My role on the development team will be to focus on the research and design of water projects in the South Western region of Uganda. This internship is fully sponsored by Ledcor, a private construction and engineering company, so I do not need to raise my own support. However, what I truly require is your prayer support. While the focus of the trip will be to serve through my technical knowledge and abilities, I am also going to Uganda to serve as a witness for Christ and I would greatly appreciate if you would partner with me in prayer.

The most pressing requests at the moment are:

• Pray for mental and spiritual preparedness, this summer has been a whirlwind of events and as a result, I have not had the time or the environment to prepare like I had in the past.

• Pray that God would break my heart and reshape it with a deeper understanding and compassion for the Ugandan people.
• Pray that I would have the opportunities to serve in the community and help these people to realize their spiritual needs as well as their physical ones.
• Pray for team unity as most of us have never met but we will be eating, living, and working together for much of the following 6 months.
• Pray for the physical health and safety of our team.

Thank you for taking the time and care to read this. Furthermore, thank you for being a part of my life and helping to shape me to who I have become up to this point. I would love to share more with you, so please feel free to email me at wesleytse[at]gmail.com. I will also be trying something new this time by writing updates via a blog which you can find at wesinuganda.blogspot.com. I pray that I can be a blessing to those I will be serving, just as many of you have been to me.

With much love and thanks,

Wes