“We completed the course, and from there I’ve been moving into the workforce looking for work, and I’ve never failed.” Saviour from Kampala, Uganda, is currently earning the equivalent of $166 a month. This may sound like trivial wages, but it’s a vast improvement from the circumstances of his birth.
Saviour’s parents eked out a living as subsistence farmers in Uganda’s West Nile region, one of the least
developed parts of Uganda. His uncle advised him to leave his ancestral home, come to the capital city, and enroll in a vocational school that he had just heard about. Saviour joined nine other students at the SALT Vocational Training School for 26 weeks of welding practice, theory, and Bible lessons.
Every group of welding students has a different character; Saviour’s class was a group of armchair theologians. It would be unfathomable to imagine a group of welding students in the secular West using their lunch period to debate infant baptism vs. believer’s baptism. Only God knows what fruit this seed will bear.
Saviour and seven other students made it to graduation day. Like many graduates who have never held a formal job, he bounced from job to job for a time—a job welding balcony railing, a job welding forms for concrete culverts, then a job welding metal window and door frames. Finally, he landed his best job yet: welding truck bodies in an assembly factory for dump trucks. He uses some of his salary to assist his younger siblings with the cost of their basic education.
Saviour encouraged both his adult brother and cousin to enroll as welding students and even helped them pay their tuition. If Saviour’s past is any prediction of their future, they will do well.
