As so much of the adult population of her nation have been decimated by an experimental AIDS vaccine, the most urgent need is the increasing numbers of children orphaned by AIDS roaming the streets.  Grandmothers have been trying to raise these children with very little or no income.  Gertrude has organized these grandmothers into a cottage industry to help raise a livelihood for them.  The grandmothers are also teaching the children to carry on the skill and art of basket weaving.  Gertrude’s efforts include finding markets for these beautiful baskets of very high quality for the survival of these fragmented family units.

At one point, she had taken in thirty-five of these orphans into her own village home, subsequently establishing an elementary school for now 200 of these and other needy children.  Her plans include opening a secondary school in the near future, to prepare and equip these young people with the skills necessary to be able to lead their nation with a Christian worldview against the rising tide of Islam which has targeted the whole continent of Africa as their own.

Most recently, Gertrude is excited to have discovered an unreached people group near the Congo border who have never heard the name of Jesus, who also just happen to speak her dialect.  These very tall, very thin people raise cows.  Their only food is cow’s milk.  Besides bringing the good news of the gospel, Gertrude is also teaching them how to garden and how to weave baskets.

Her riveting testimony includes surviving the sequential murder of two of her husbands by Idi Amin and the kidnapping of her third son at the age of two, and how the Lord brought her son back to her twenty two years later.  Her organization is entitled NEEPU, which stands for Nationals’ Effort to Eradicate Poverty in Uganda.

You will be blessed by encountering the very large heart of this precious servant of God.