SOZO Dream Foundation sends Ugandan doctors, medical students, and volunteers into hard-to-reach communities with free medical care and the hope of Jesus.
Dr. Rebecca Hunter, SOZO’s founder, at an outreach clinic.
Sozo is the Greek word the New Testament uses for being saved, healed, and made whole. Rebecca adds: in that order.
Healing a body is good. A whole life is better. That is why every SOZO outreach brings two things: the best medical care the team can give, and the good news of Jesus, offered freely to anyone who wants to hear it.
“I remember vowing to myself that I would grow up to be the one who takes the services to the people.”
Rebecca grew up in a village in Masaka District with nothing close to a clinic or drug shop. When she was sick, her aunt carried her on her back for kilometres to the nearest one. Orphaned as a small child, she came to faith in Jesus as a teenage runaway in Kampala and trained as a doctor at Kampala International University.
In 2022, still a medical student, she led her first free outreach. She hasn’t stopped since.
Read Rebecca’s storyClinics lasting a day to a week, in places with no hospital nearby. Consultations, lab tests, medicines, referrals, and health education, all free, often set up under trees or in school yards.
Some patients need more than one day can give. SOZO keeps a list, raises support, and walks with them to surgery and specialist care.
Help for final-year medical and nursing students who would otherwise drop out over fees. Three of them are now doctors, two running ministries of their own.
When the team finds a need it can meet, it acts: five classrooms for a school meeting under a tarp, a home for a refugee family, health lessons for schoolgirls.
Since 2022, SOZO teams have held outreaches in 15 districts, from mountain villages in the far northeast to a fishing community on Lake Victoria and an island on the Kenyan border.
Some days a few hundred people come. In Gulu in 2023, about 2,500 did, and the team handed out the last bag of medicine at 7:30 at night.
At a one-day village camp, the team met a little boy who had never walked. There was nothing more they could do for him that day. Rebecca asked to follow him up anyway.
Faithful gifts from supporters paid for the medical and surgical care he needed. A year later his mother brought him back to see the doctors, running around and full of life.
A gift to SOZO doesn’t stop at the end of the clinic day.
Help the next patient
Patients waiting under a tree at a week-long outreach in Napak District, Karamoja, 2023.
Gifts buy medicines for outreaches, pay for patients’ surgeries, and help students finish their training.
Ways to giveFor the team on the road, for patients waiting on surgery, and for the communities they serve.
Follow on FacebookMedical students, clinicians, and volunteers in Uganda: join a team on an upcoming outreach.
Email usEvery gift goes through The River Church in Oregon City, designated for SOZO and receipted for your records.