Francis Candiga Biography
His background and how he came to start Smile Children’s Charity Village
"My Name is Francis Candiga. I am an ordained clergyman with the Episcopal Dioceses of Kajo-Keji in South Sudan. I am the founder of Smile Children’s Charity Village, a charity organisation founded in 2020 to provide support to vulnerable children from Uganda and South Sudan
I was born to a very poor non-Christian family. My father was an alcoholic. He always came home drunk and would often sell whatever was in the house for money to buy alcohol. We had no food in the house. We could hardly find food to eat at home and we survived on wild fruits and begging from neighbours. My mother says, until the age of six, I did not put on clothes because she could not afford to buy any for me
At one time, my father attempted to sell my sister to get money for drink, but my mother was able to rescue her
At the age of seven years old, I started going to school, but I had no one paying my school fees, I struggled to find ways to get money to pay for my schooling. I used to make brooms to sell and pay for my school. Through a lot of struggles, I was able to finance my education until I completed primary seven. The challenge now came how to get money to take me to high school (secondary school). This forced me to leave home, so that I could go and find opportunities to advance to secondary school. I went to live in the refugee camp. It is where I got the opportunity to join high school, where I was supported by the UN. I studied through senior four. After that, I got stuck, I could not advance to college, so I came back home, because I could not continue any further. However, because I loved God so much, I had dedicated my life to serving God in the church, it is there that I got an opportunity through a missionary lady from America who agreed to pay for me to go to college. In college, I studied Business Administration and came out with a diploma in Business Administration. When I graduated, I was contracted by a Christian organisation called Samaritan’s Purse, to teach English in the Nuba mountains in Northern Sudan. It was my first time to see and get into an airplane. I signed a one year contract teaching English in a completely marginalised community, deprived of all social services by the government. Besides teaching, I volunteered to reach out to the children in the school. My supervisor quickly noticed my passion for witnessing Jesus Christ to the community and immediately started involving me in some of their ministry programs. After the end of my teaching contract, I was asked to come back and specifically do ministry work. When I came back the next year, I was named the ministry coordinator for Samaritan’s Purse in the Nuba mountains. I planted a good number of churches in predominantly Muslim communities. I moved around the villages in a four-wheel motorbike showing a Jesus film. Many Muslim people came to put their faith in Jesus. I did so much for the Lord in this part of Sudan. I served the Lord in the Nuba mountains with Samaritan’s Purse for five years and it was such a joyful experience
I worked for Samaritan’s Purse until 2018, when God called me to Child Evangelism Fellowship. Reaching boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord in South Sudan. In 2017, we were forced out of South Sudan because of the civil war. I moved my family and the ministry to Uganda and we have since been reaching boys and girls in the refugee camps in Northern Uganda for almost seven years now. The situation in South Sudan is still very unpredictable, there are no hopes for peace to return soon
In 2019, when the COVID 19 pandemic came to Uganda, it badly affected the refugees in the camps. The UN reduced the food rations they were giving the refugees. Life became so terribly bad for the refugee population in Uganda and many children starved to death. I was so touched with the condition of the people and I started to lobby for food to give to the vulnerable children in the camp. In 2020, I distributed over 50 tons of food in the camps
One day, I visited one of our Good News clubs (where children meet in the neighbourhood to learn the word of God). I sat there to watch the teachers teach the class. I noticed that almost half of the class was not paying attention to the lesson, they were sleeping. At the end of the club, I talked to two children who were sleeping while the lesson was going on. The girls told me that they were hungry, that they had not eaten food for two days. They survived on wild fruits only. The children looked to be so starved and malnourished. I was heartbroken, so I went and looked for food for them. I saw the misery that the orphaned children were going through in the camps. Many of the children had their parents killed in the war, a few mothers died in the camp due to lack of proper medical care and died from treatable disease. I was full of conviction, because of the pain, and started to mobilise food for the orphans in the camps. I started distributing food items to orphans in the camps, to homes with orphans. However, I realised that the needs were enormous and I needed to do more than just distributing food
That is when I came up with the idea of registering a charity, whose objectives would be to provide holistic support to the vulnerable children. The charity organisation was registered in Uganda in 2020, “SMILE CHILDREN CHARITY VILLAGE”
My heart and vision for this charity is to provide food, education, health and spiritual support to suffering orphans and vulnerable children"