thejessiegaul

[thejessiegaul]

[thejessiegaul]

what a view! #savethebay #providence #rhodeisland (at Providence, RI)

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#pinterest #crafts4life #makingglasses #recycling (at Federal Hill)

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This is what's left of my sweet baby. #keepsake (at Limerick, PA)

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I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.

Martin Luther King Jr.

[thejessiegaul]

I like to pretend...

I have this tendency to over think. Sometimes I sit back and I have NO idea where my life is headed. So much uncertainty. Naturally, I am freaked out by this. It puts me in a mood where instead of wanting to tackle life and figure it out, I lay in bed and do nothing. This is not giving up because then a few days later I sit back and refect what I just did and I realize I was just being ridiculous, because doesn't everyone go through this on a daily basis as well? But people don't normally lay in bed exhausted from the overwhelming pressure to figure their shit out, right? Right? 

[thejessiegaul]

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In 2009, Kelsey Nielsen, a 22-year-old Temple senior studying social work, took a three-month leave from school to volunteer at an orphanage in Uganda. She was distraught to learn how many children there reside in orphanages despite having living family members; when she returned to Philly, she couldn’t stop thinking about helping them. So she went back and founded a new nonprofit in Uganda’s Jinja district: the Abide Family Center, which works with poverty-stricken families to help them develop new economic resources that would allow them to keep their kids. On a one-acre plot of land, Abide is equipped with classrooms, offices and a separate emergency-housing facility for individuals in dire circumstances. So far, Nielsen and her team have worked with 15 Ugandan families, and she doesn’t even live there full-time—yet. Come June, she’s buying a one-way plane ticket to Uganda, and Abide will swing into full-time operation, servicing an area that has the second highest number of orphans in the country.

What motivated you to go to Uganda in the first place?

I left Temple [because] I didn’t really know what I wanted to do yet, if social work was what I wanted to do. [But] I was super into the Invisible Children movement, and I was passionate about letting people know these kids are suffering a serious injustice, and we need to speak out and raise awareness about it.

How exactly will Abide help families keep their children?

Most of the children living in institutional care are there because their families are too poor to keep them at home. Uganda’s a country that has over 600 orphanages currently, and people just keep building more, and it really just doesn’t make sense.

We’re not going to be doing as much direct handouts as we are [going to focus on] income generation. So if they grow tomatoes or plantains, let’s help link them up to the larger market in town so they can make a higher income and support their kids at home. Microfinance is another big one. The idea behind it is very simple: investing in families and communities to help them get themselves out of poverty. … There’s also other stuff: [Abide will offer] parenting classes and parenting discussion groups that are going to be led by our Ugandan social workers. Money-management classes, nutritional classes—[everything] that you would have at a center for vulnerable families in Philadelphia, just culturally appropriate for Uganda.

What was the biggest challenge in starting up?

Currently we [operate] under a nonprofit that already exists called the Antioch Group; they are an international missions organization in Washington, D.C. That’s been great because they handle our finances and are already a tax-exempt organization—[so] we don’t have to do that while we’re still in college. Eventually, as we grow as an organization, we would like to split off into our own nonprofit. We’ll have to be dually registered here in the States and in Uganda. The paperwork’s crazy. A lot of times, I take a step back and think, “What on Earth was I thinking doing this at the same time as finishing my senior year of college?”

_______________

My friend Caroline did a great job on this and I am honored she wanted to write about me for Philadelphia Weekly. I just want to clarify a few things. 1) I actually went to Uganda for the first time in January 2010, so it was just about 3 years ago I made my first trip there. 2) Jinja has the 2nd highest number of ORPHANAGES in all of Uganda, not the highest number of orphans necessarily. Orphanage is not synonymous with actual orphans in reality (as this article highlights). 3) While Invisible Children was definitely what first caught my attention about Uganda-through living and working there, developing relationships with my Ugandan friends and hearing their thoughts/opinions on IC and just learning more in depth about the war, I no longer support Invisible Children as an organization, in particular, their Kony 2012 campaign. I think this is important to note as I wouldn’t want any tie to that organization at this point in time. 

[thejessiegaul]

My babies. I will love them for always. :) 

I really could not ask for anything more than being in the same place for the holidays with my two best friends in the entire world. @daniellestrauser #jessiegaul

[thejessiegaul]

For all of the runners, tri-athletes and iron men and women out there. Carb loading, contrary to popular belief, is not eating a large bowl of pasta the night before your event.

The real low-down on carb loading? You need to drain your glycogen stores! How do we acheive this? A WEEK before your...

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What if this was some person's journal and they constructed an entire language of their own so no one could read about their personal life? What if those captions by the pictures say something like " What if flowers looked like this?" and then describes them in detail. Or what if the person who wrote all this was just really terrible at portraying real life in their drawings? What if it's just a story and like Tolkien created a new world and a new language? Or what if he was like Dr. Seuss? I think, we as humans, need to try to make thing mysterious and find meaning to everything, because then we find meaning in life.

[thejessiegaul]

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Every once in a while, you meet someone that matters. And from that point on no matter where you live, no matter what you're going through, how you've changed or how long it has been seen you've seen each other last, you care tremendously about them and would go to any length to see them happy. Even if it means setting your life down for a moment to help repair theirs, even if the happiness they experience is only temporary in what might seem as an eternity of sorrow. 

[thejessiegaul]

Totally obsessed.