My last full day in Uganda.
I had a quite schedule that, of course, turned out to be anything but. They came at 9:00. Our plan was to talk briefly about church plans for the coming year. The meeting lasted for more than 3 hours! There is SOOO much to do, and our team is so willing, but they need training. So I did what I could in the time I had, then we loaded the van and went to lunch. We were back at Garden City once again. I ate a pita sandwich from a Lebanese stall at the food court.
At 2:00, I was scheduled to meet Monique at the clinic. This would be our first meeting since we fired Monique for mismanagement some two and a half years ago. It was also the first time I had seen the clinic since it was completed. It was very nicely done! There were at least eight beds, and there is a doctor on duty more or less all the time. They actually have the capacity to hold patients overnight! They don’t have much in the way of equipment, but Monique said they see a lot of patients.
I talked with her for over an hour. None of my team would go in the room with me. There was much to discuss! She still contends that she took no money and that she simply had a poor bookkeeping system. We talked about many things and about a lot of specific kids and situations. Then I went around and made pictures. Monique called home to make sure all the kids were there, and we drove her in our van to her house. I got to see everyone, Kathy, Phoebe, Andrew, and Anna. They have grown tremendously, especially Andrew. Helen was also there. She has reentered school in Monique’s program. The kids were very cool. In fact, they said nothing at all to me. John came in after a few minutes and we talked a bit more.
I can’t say that we settled much. John did agree to sign a letter of release from an old church registration. And it truly was good to see them all. We’ve known this family for nearly twenty years, and in truth, I miss them! We sat around and drank soft drinks for a bit, then we got up to go. But Phoebe and Helen decided (or perhaps Monique decided for them) that they should write to Lisa so we had to wait almost long enough for each to complete Gone with the Wind in Latin! I finally made a family photo and we took Monique and Kathy back to the clinic.
From there, we went back to church and I gave them more pointers on Excel. This time, they took exhaustive notes and I gave them a chance to practice what I was showing them. Both Joseph and Grace were working through everything with Vincent and Michael watching. It went very well.
Michael said I had three visitors waiting for me. The first was Mutebi. He was like a new boy! Monique had thanked me for helping him-he is her nephew. His eyes were so much brighter and he was actually laughing a bit. He is still terribly disfigured by some sort of skin infection, but he said the medicine made him feel better. The doctor wanted him to come back tomorrow for treatment. He handed me a small paper envelope. Inside was a syringe and a small container of medicine. He said they sent him out for it and said he would get the injection when he returned tomorrow.
And so another very odd thing about the Uganda health care system. The hospital does not keep medicine! There is a pharmacy nearby, so the doctor gives prescriptions and the patient most go and fill it. In cases like Mutebi’s, he actually bought the syringe and everything then he goes back later to get shot!
The boy was simply ecstatic! Again, I believe it was more about someone paying attention to him than the treatment he was receiving, though some of the pus seemed to be drying up in the mass of tumors on the side of his face.
Mark was also waiting to see me. He said he had heard that President Ford was dead and it made him very sad. He obviously had never heard of President Ford, and he was most amazed that we were waiting until next Wednesday to bury him! In a nation without embalming, I guess he thought President Ford would be well passed ripe by then!
His mother, Jane was also waiting outside. To get outside to talk to her, I had to step around a teenaged mother who was breast feeding her tiny baby. There were a couple of guys out there talking to her, but they left when I came out. As I talked to Jane, it sounded as though the baby couldn’t decide whether she wanted the left or the right. There was all sorts of shifting and moving and cooing going on but I kept my eyes on Jane!
Jane had come to thank me for working with her on her housing and on her son’s education. She was very appreciative and she talked for at least half an hour. She was very excited that I had visited with Monique. She said it was good that we were somehow talking again. She told me Mark was going to be a minister, and I told here we would certainly support him in that, IF his grades this year indicated that was a reasonable course of study for him. I told her God would use Mark in whatever field He led him into, so let us wait and see how he does and encourage him in the way that is best for him. She seemed to listen to me. This had been the source of much of the problems with Mark and his mother. She wanted him to be a great student and he is a somewhat marginal one at best. I told her Mark had served as my translator on Sunday and he had done a very good job. I told her I was very proud of her son, and she left us glowing. (Her rural tribe had broken out the front teeth of her son when he was a young teen because his father had died of AIDS and Mark had no prospects. The missing teeth were to be a badge for all to see that he had been declared worthless. But as a result of very hard work, Mark often works as a translator in the church and he also works with small children there).
I went back inside and they asked if I had spoken with Juliet. I went back out and found that the young woman I couldn’t possibly look towards earlier was, in fact, one of our sponsored children! We had learned last term that she was pregnant and being forced out of school. The baby is now two months old and Juliet’s mother has agreed to keep the baby if we will allow Juliet to return to school. I had already spoken to the sponsor, and she is ready to support Juliet in this. So I told her we were ready to put her back in school February 1. She talked with the team for a few minutes to work out details, then went away.
The mosquitoes were terrible again tonight, and, once again, I forgot my DEET! I got bitten once on my arm. I had managed to avoid it for three weeks, but got bitten on the last night!
I climbed in the van to avoid providing a meal for any more malarial bugs and in a while, everyone came out. Several of the church members had come by to see me off. I probably won't make it to the church tomorrow, so I probably won't see them again.
Lydia joined us for dinner, our last meal together. We went to the Chinese place we had visited earlier in the week for lunch and had quite a feast! It began with hot sauce. Grace basically dared Lydia to eat some. So Lydia put some chili paste on her plate, dipped her finger in it, then howled when the burn hit her. Grace laughed and laughed, then Lydia said something in Luganda and Grace also took some of the firey sauce! She howled louder than Lydia, who then took more. These two had no water or anything else to drink, and I know it was very hot because I enjoyed the sauce on all my food when it came. Lydia and I were the only two that ordered soup. She ordered chicken and mushroom, I ordered seaweed soup, which absolutely grossed everyone out! It was basically egg drop soup with a few pieces of seaweed thrown in but you would think I was eating worms from their reaction to it. Joseph asked to taste his wife’s soup, and he ate almost every bite before he gave it back to her!
Michael would hardly eat because he had eaten an entire medium pizza by himself at lunch, but everyone else seemed to have a good time. They really wanted Joseph, Lydia, and Grace to try squid, so I bought a dish even though it was quite expensive. The food was wonderful, and the company even better. They told me at the end that these restaurants were places they had never been. Joseph said he had actually entered one of them once and asked for a cup of tea. He said he wanted to see what went on in a place like that. The owner came to him and told him he couldn’t order tea unless he ordered a meal with it. Joseph said he didn’t want a meal, and the owner told him he should leave immediately and very quietly.
They took me back to the hotel and everyone but Vincent had to come up to my room. Both Grace and Lydia had a fit in the elevator! They squealed and grabbed onto each other even more than Priscilla had done on Christmas Day. I’m not sure Lydia had been in an elevator, and once I thought about it, I realized that Grace always takes the stairs!
I had downloaded a picture of a squid from the Internet, and Lydia was appalled that she had eaten such a thing. Michael finally admitted he couldn’t really eat Mr. Squid tonight because he knew what he had looked like alive!
Grace asked me to make some changes to a report on my computer. She said she knew that I could do it more quickly than she could, so I cleaned up the report for her and everyone left.
I won’t be online tomorrow. I will check out of my hotel early tomorrow morning. I have lunch scheduled with a missionary who will be arriving in Kampala tonight, then I’ll start out to Entebbe. My flight doesn’t leave until 11:00 p.m., but I’ll have to check in at 8:00 p.m. I will fly to Amsterdam, then to Detroit, and to Cincinnati before flying home late on Saturday afternoon. It will be 26 hours from departure from Entebbe to arrival home. I will have a bit of a layover at each of my interim destinations, and I have realized I forgot to bring any kind of sweater or jacket! I do have a long sleeved shirt and a very light rain coat, but I’m not sure how it will be in these airports in an equatorial adapted body with no protection from the cold.
I’ll finish writing about the trip after I get home, probably on Sunday night or Monday. Until then, thanks for reading!!
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Wednesday December 27: A Day of Teaching
The wait staff at the breakfast buffet couldn’t have been nicer. A man made me an omelet, a woman made me toast. I even had someone bring me another glass of “orange juice,” a pale yellow concoction that tasted of nothing!
They came around 9:10 and we went directly to the church. I spent three hours talking with them about policies and procedures, and showing them things to do in Excel to make their lives and mine a lot easier. We have huge issues in the program. A lot of kids are asking to move to boarding school. For many, it is merely a preference but for some orphans, it is a necessity. I had a long talk with the team about our intention of funding needs not wants. They have a hard time telling a child that he can’t go to boarding school when another is getting to go. I showed them that our plan was to have children going to school and living in a safe environment. If that took boarding school, so be it. But if a child has a perfectly good place to stay in a reasonable distance from school, then both needs are met by paying school fees. They seemed to understand.
But there are major problems for us to resolve. There have been seven deaths of guardians in the three weeks I’ve been here. I don’t know what is going on. Several were from AIDS, but not all of them. They will have to work very hard to figure out what can be done with these children. They will actually have to negotiate living arrangements for them with a relative because the kids are too young to do it for themselves.
They also asked me about John Bosco. Since his last parent died last December, the boy has no place at all to stay. We aren’t even sure where he sleeps. He is asking us to fund a place for him to live because at nearly 20, he is too old to move in with a relative. Joseph says we can set him up in a room for about $30 a month, so I told him to go ahead and do it. John hopes to enter university this year. I hope we can work all this out for him. He is a young man with tremendous potential!
Mebel came at noon and she directed us to her school. She is studying for a teaching certificate at the YMCA. I wasn’t sure what to expect at the YMCA, probably a large building with Mzungu recreational facilities, but was I ever surprised. This was a huge building, four floors, all classrooms of one type or another. It was the largest school I’ve seen in Kampala, and it was very nice! There was a music school at one end, and the students were there practicing away. There were secretarial labs and gigantic classrooms. Mebel said her classes had 70 in them! Most of the programs ran at night, and there was a large parking lot in the back that Mebel said was packed each night. Mebel has no car and she lives far away. Her commute to school involves catching a taxi into the city, then walking more than a mile to class. When her classes end at 8:00, she walks with other ladies back to town and catches a taxi home. It is another half mile from the main road to her house. She has a husband and four children of her own to care for plus two other adopted kids. She is amazing!
After we had seen it and made Mebel’s picture, we climbed back in the van and Vincent took us to Garden City. We had told Mebel we would take her for Chinese food, but Vincent chose the Food Court instead! I ordered Chinese for her and Michael. She ate a bit of her pork, but hated his chicken. They both got French fries with their food, which couldn’t have helped it very much. I had two lamb kabobs from a Persian stand. They were quite good with steamed vegetables and saffron rice.
After we finished, we dropped Michael and Mebel at a taxi stand and Vincent and I continued on to visit a pastor I had met during his visit to Chattanooga. I had called him in the morning and he told us to call him when we got in his neighborhood. His neighborhood was one of the largest Muslim communities in Kampala. We called as he instructed us to do, and a few minutes later he pulled up and motioned for us to follow him.
He took us up a steep hill to a gigantic church, a two-story brick and concrete structure. He took us inside where there was a concrete floored sanctuary large enough to play professional basketball. All the chairs were stored away, so there was only a gigantic open space with five people at the farthest end walking around and praying to the top of their lungs. “They pray every Wednesday for our American helpers,” the pastor explained.
We went into his office where we met his wife, who spoke very little English. He told us about all his projects, including 80 children in a sponsorship program. He couldn’t find the records for the kids and blamed it on his secretary. Finally he produced a few pictures. He said the kids lived in the neighborhood and were all orphans.
He seemed to have me confused with someone else because he kept talking about our correspondence. I have never corresponded with the man, and I finally pointed out to him that I had known him about a month, not for three years. Then it dawned on me that he never knew who I was when we went to dinner!
We got in the van and Vincent took us through a Muslim community. The looks I got here were not exactly hostile, but they were more challenging than friendly. We drove down a very good road, then along the main road for a bit, then off onto a terrible dirt track that led through a very poor neighborhood. We stopped atop another hill and the pastor showed us his chicken project. He had buildings underway to house 5,000 chickens and he has already started taking delivery of the chickens. He showed us his huge plan for the site which included a plant to mix feed. We walked further up the hill a bit and he showed us homes for 90 pigs which would be delivered soon. These were a project for the widows in the church.
We didn’t have time to go see his brick factory or the rest of his land, so Vincent took us back to the church. He told me that he had been trained in a Presbyterian seminary and even though he couldn’t be affiliated with a denomination because of his work in the Muslim community (an argument I couldn’t understand), he practiced Presbyterianism in his services. I also found it unusual that he didn’t have a sign for his church when the Jehovah’s Witness Assembly Hall down the hill was clearly marked!
We left after a while and Vincent took me to the hotel to rest. I had thirty minutes before we needed to go to the church for me to teach. I went upstairs and decided to read a bit. I fell asleep and woke up an entire hour later! It was 2 minutes until I was supposed to start teaching.
So Vincent flew to the church and I arrived only 15 minutes late! They had asked me to talk about how to set up a family budget, and I did for more than an hour. Then there were a number of questions for about the same amount of time. It was my last time with the church and even though the numbers were very small, the people seemed to enjoy listening. The only bad things were as soon as the sun started down, we were attacked by a huge mob of mosquitoes and I couldn’t get to my DEET and the Mosque nearly blew me away when they started their call to prayer. They had the speakers trained on us and turned up louder than speakers should ever go!!
When I finished, Grace told me there were two boys I had to see. The first was Mutebi, who had been to the doctor and was to go back in the morning. They had given him antibiotics, and he seemed like a new kid! He was much more lively and showed a real interest in all that was going on around him!
The other boy was Samuel, the boy who’s grandmother had died in Jinja on the day we were there. (He has grown a foot, Amy, and he looks very healthy now!). But he was very, very distraught. His brother, Regan, has asthma and the grandfather who is now in charge of him won’t pay for his medicine. He is living in a filthy home, and Samuel is very worried about him. He said he is also worried for himself because his grandfather doesn’t really want him to go to school.
So we talked to him for a time and I made a picture, then we put him in the van and drove across town to an area near my hotel. Traffic was back to normal! At one point, we almost hit a boda boda that was passing a taxi on a steep downhill stretch. He was solidly on the wrong side of the road with no headlight at all. There were pedestrians walking in front of anything that moved, and the traffic coming into town was bumper to bumper as far as we could see.
We turned up a wide, dirt road in total darkness. There were people walking along the road and a few boda bodas. Samuel suddenly pointed to the left, and Vincent turned into a very narrow alley. There were MANY people there, and several came up to look into the van. I asked Vincent not to drive into that area because we couldn’t see well at all, so he, Grace, and Joseph jumped out of the van with Samuel, leaving Michael and me sitting in the midst of all these strangers who kept looking in the windows at us.
They were gone for a long time, but when they came back, Samuel was the first one to the van. He was smiling from ear to ear and waving to me. They said he was so pleased that someone actually cared about him and his brother.
The problems for these brothers are not yet over. We have to find a relative that is willing to take them. The aunt where Samuel is staying does not have room for two growing boys, but I’m sure our team will find someone who will take these guys. They are fine boys, and they work hard.
I had told all four of the team members that I would take them to dinner tonight. Vincent said there was a different Indian place he wanted to try. It was the Thai restaurant we had discovered last year. They serve excellent Thai food, dishes that would outstanding anywhere at prices that would also attract attention in most cities. But even though they thought it too hot, they seemed to enjoy the burn!
We sat over ice cream and talked until everyone else had left the place. They were talking about extended families and the cost of caring for them. There had been questions about this at church, and I explained that many in America don’t pay a lot of attention to elderly parents and grandparents, and that a lot of elderly people end up alone in the later years. I told them that would be a concern for Lisa and me since we have no kids. “Oh, Elder Jim,” said Michael, “you have many kids in Uganda!”
“You must find a way to come here and let them care for you!” said Vincent.
They brought me back to the hotel well after 10:00. For an easy day, it certainly was a long one! And for the first time tonight, I realized not how hard it will be to leave because I am very homesick right now, but how hard it will be to stay gone!!
They came around 9:10 and we went directly to the church. I spent three hours talking with them about policies and procedures, and showing them things to do in Excel to make their lives and mine a lot easier. We have huge issues in the program. A lot of kids are asking to move to boarding school. For many, it is merely a preference but for some orphans, it is a necessity. I had a long talk with the team about our intention of funding needs not wants. They have a hard time telling a child that he can’t go to boarding school when another is getting to go. I showed them that our plan was to have children going to school and living in a safe environment. If that took boarding school, so be it. But if a child has a perfectly good place to stay in a reasonable distance from school, then both needs are met by paying school fees. They seemed to understand.
But there are major problems for us to resolve. There have been seven deaths of guardians in the three weeks I’ve been here. I don’t know what is going on. Several were from AIDS, but not all of them. They will have to work very hard to figure out what can be done with these children. They will actually have to negotiate living arrangements for them with a relative because the kids are too young to do it for themselves.
They also asked me about John Bosco. Since his last parent died last December, the boy has no place at all to stay. We aren’t even sure where he sleeps. He is asking us to fund a place for him to live because at nearly 20, he is too old to move in with a relative. Joseph says we can set him up in a room for about $30 a month, so I told him to go ahead and do it. John hopes to enter university this year. I hope we can work all this out for him. He is a young man with tremendous potential!
Mebel came at noon and she directed us to her school. She is studying for a teaching certificate at the YMCA. I wasn’t sure what to expect at the YMCA, probably a large building with Mzungu recreational facilities, but was I ever surprised. This was a huge building, four floors, all classrooms of one type or another. It was the largest school I’ve seen in Kampala, and it was very nice! There was a music school at one end, and the students were there practicing away. There were secretarial labs and gigantic classrooms. Mebel said her classes had 70 in them! Most of the programs ran at night, and there was a large parking lot in the back that Mebel said was packed each night. Mebel has no car and she lives far away. Her commute to school involves catching a taxi into the city, then walking more than a mile to class. When her classes end at 8:00, she walks with other ladies back to town and catches a taxi home. It is another half mile from the main road to her house. She has a husband and four children of her own to care for plus two other adopted kids. She is amazing!
After we had seen it and made Mebel’s picture, we climbed back in the van and Vincent took us to Garden City. We had told Mebel we would take her for Chinese food, but Vincent chose the Food Court instead! I ordered Chinese for her and Michael. She ate a bit of her pork, but hated his chicken. They both got French fries with their food, which couldn’t have helped it very much. I had two lamb kabobs from a Persian stand. They were quite good with steamed vegetables and saffron rice.
After we finished, we dropped Michael and Mebel at a taxi stand and Vincent and I continued on to visit a pastor I had met during his visit to Chattanooga. I had called him in the morning and he told us to call him when we got in his neighborhood. His neighborhood was one of the largest Muslim communities in Kampala. We called as he instructed us to do, and a few minutes later he pulled up and motioned for us to follow him.
He took us up a steep hill to a gigantic church, a two-story brick and concrete structure. He took us inside where there was a concrete floored sanctuary large enough to play professional basketball. All the chairs were stored away, so there was only a gigantic open space with five people at the farthest end walking around and praying to the top of their lungs. “They pray every Wednesday for our American helpers,” the pastor explained.
We went into his office where we met his wife, who spoke very little English. He told us about all his projects, including 80 children in a sponsorship program. He couldn’t find the records for the kids and blamed it on his secretary. Finally he produced a few pictures. He said the kids lived in the neighborhood and were all orphans.
He seemed to have me confused with someone else because he kept talking about our correspondence. I have never corresponded with the man, and I finally pointed out to him that I had known him about a month, not for three years. Then it dawned on me that he never knew who I was when we went to dinner!
We got in the van and Vincent took us through a Muslim community. The looks I got here were not exactly hostile, but they were more challenging than friendly. We drove down a very good road, then along the main road for a bit, then off onto a terrible dirt track that led through a very poor neighborhood. We stopped atop another hill and the pastor showed us his chicken project. He had buildings underway to house 5,000 chickens and he has already started taking delivery of the chickens. He showed us his huge plan for the site which included a plant to mix feed. We walked further up the hill a bit and he showed us homes for 90 pigs which would be delivered soon. These were a project for the widows in the church.
We didn’t have time to go see his brick factory or the rest of his land, so Vincent took us back to the church. He told me that he had been trained in a Presbyterian seminary and even though he couldn’t be affiliated with a denomination because of his work in the Muslim community (an argument I couldn’t understand), he practiced Presbyterianism in his services. I also found it unusual that he didn’t have a sign for his church when the Jehovah’s Witness Assembly Hall down the hill was clearly marked!
We left after a while and Vincent took me to the hotel to rest. I had thirty minutes before we needed to go to the church for me to teach. I went upstairs and decided to read a bit. I fell asleep and woke up an entire hour later! It was 2 minutes until I was supposed to start teaching.
So Vincent flew to the church and I arrived only 15 minutes late! They had asked me to talk about how to set up a family budget, and I did for more than an hour. Then there were a number of questions for about the same amount of time. It was my last time with the church and even though the numbers were very small, the people seemed to enjoy listening. The only bad things were as soon as the sun started down, we were attacked by a huge mob of mosquitoes and I couldn’t get to my DEET and the Mosque nearly blew me away when they started their call to prayer. They had the speakers trained on us and turned up louder than speakers should ever go!!
When I finished, Grace told me there were two boys I had to see. The first was Mutebi, who had been to the doctor and was to go back in the morning. They had given him antibiotics, and he seemed like a new kid! He was much more lively and showed a real interest in all that was going on around him!
The other boy was Samuel, the boy who’s grandmother had died in Jinja on the day we were there. (He has grown a foot, Amy, and he looks very healthy now!). But he was very, very distraught. His brother, Regan, has asthma and the grandfather who is now in charge of him won’t pay for his medicine. He is living in a filthy home, and Samuel is very worried about him. He said he is also worried for himself because his grandfather doesn’t really want him to go to school.
So we talked to him for a time and I made a picture, then we put him in the van and drove across town to an area near my hotel. Traffic was back to normal! At one point, we almost hit a boda boda that was passing a taxi on a steep downhill stretch. He was solidly on the wrong side of the road with no headlight at all. There were pedestrians walking in front of anything that moved, and the traffic coming into town was bumper to bumper as far as we could see.
We turned up a wide, dirt road in total darkness. There were people walking along the road and a few boda bodas. Samuel suddenly pointed to the left, and Vincent turned into a very narrow alley. There were MANY people there, and several came up to look into the van. I asked Vincent not to drive into that area because we couldn’t see well at all, so he, Grace, and Joseph jumped out of the van with Samuel, leaving Michael and me sitting in the midst of all these strangers who kept looking in the windows at us.
They were gone for a long time, but when they came back, Samuel was the first one to the van. He was smiling from ear to ear and waving to me. They said he was so pleased that someone actually cared about him and his brother.
The problems for these brothers are not yet over. We have to find a relative that is willing to take them. The aunt where Samuel is staying does not have room for two growing boys, but I’m sure our team will find someone who will take these guys. They are fine boys, and they work hard.
I had told all four of the team members that I would take them to dinner tonight. Vincent said there was a different Indian place he wanted to try. It was the Thai restaurant we had discovered last year. They serve excellent Thai food, dishes that would outstanding anywhere at prices that would also attract attention in most cities. But even though they thought it too hot, they seemed to enjoy the burn!
We sat over ice cream and talked until everyone else had left the place. They were talking about extended families and the cost of caring for them. There had been questions about this at church, and I explained that many in America don’t pay a lot of attention to elderly parents and grandparents, and that a lot of elderly people end up alone in the later years. I told them that would be a concern for Lisa and me since we have no kids. “Oh, Elder Jim,” said Michael, “you have many kids in Uganda!”
“You must find a way to come here and let them care for you!” said Vincent.
They brought me back to the hotel well after 10:00. For an easy day, it certainly was a long one! And for the first time tonight, I realized not how hard it will be to leave because I am very homesick right now, but how hard it will be to stay gone!!
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Tuesday, December 26 Kassanda
Today, they arrived about 20 minutes early! I understand that though, because our destination was Kassanda, which is a very long way from anywhere! The trip begins with a drive through town, then out of town as though we were going to Mpigi. But at the very outskirts of the city suburbs, there is a round-a-bout and we turned northwest instead of southwest. We were on the road to Kassanda!
Vincent reported that Priscilla was feeling much better. He had found ice and put it in the plastic bag I gave him. He said between the ice and the medicine, she wasn’t hurting today. He said she was telling everyone about riding the elevator. It amazed her to be so high! My room is on the second floor, which is the third floor for us Americans because the ground floor here is 0. He said she seemed much happier this morning. He also said she is normally a very talkative little girl, but she is afraid of me!
There was still no one in the city! We flew through round-a-bouts that had been parking lots all last week. Still, most pedestrians were remaining on the sidewalks, or waiting patiently for an opportunity to jaywalk. We didn’t even come close to running over a boda boda!
The world changed as soon as we left the round-a-bout. The jungle started almost at once. The drive is incredible. It follows a low ridge line that is just high enough to provide decent views of the sweeping valley and taller hills. There is a whole rainbow full of greens in this jungle, with occasional red or yellow or purple flowers thrown in for spectacular contrast. This is farm country, so the road is lined with small stalls selling a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The homes are about the same as in Kampala’s slums, a lot of home-made brick and plenty of mud walled huts.
The story, however, is the road itself. The sides have flaked away until there is barely a whole lane of pavement left! And what IS left is filled with potholes, which leads to a strange story. When he was here, Jim would sing about how much he hated the potholes. I never heard him call them pottieholes, but somehow, they did. So every time we hit one, one of them would start singing about pottieholes! It made for a very odd day because we were in potholes more often than we weren’t!! And these were crack your head on the ceiling holes because Vincent WOULD NOT slow down unless he saw a true axel breaker.
For all the years we’ve been going to Kassanda, there has been a road project here. It is now complete, which means after you go through about 10 miles of this destroyed roadbed, there is a decent road with a bit less erosion (but still plenty) and far fewer potholes. This also means every driver has the opportunity to tempt fate and absolutely FLY through this lovely jungle.
After an hour of this fun, we were pulled over by a military unit. Vincent pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. Two uniformed me came to my window and talked to me. They spoke in a friendly way, but their faces showed no friendliness at all. Finally, one of them opened the back door and said something to Vincent. The other one asked me if I minded giving this man a ride. They slammed the door and the smelly man and his very large gun sat beside Joseph as we drove on down the highway (at a much slower rate of speed!). The man didn’t say a word for the fifteen minutes he rode with us. Vincent suddenly swerved into a wide dirt road and stopped. The man climbed out. He almost thanked us!
It turns out this was the road to Kassanda, so Vincent plowed ahead on this wide, somewhat maintained road. The maintenance soon ended and we were riding on a washboard filled with pottieholes! The game became to go as fast as we could swerving from shoulder to shoulder at will in order to avoid leaving the oil pan in one of these caverns. The really interesting thing is that oncoming traffic was doing exactly the same thing! So not only were we jarring our teeth out and suffocating in the red dust, we appeared to be in constant danger of a head on crash because either we or the oncoming car were on the wrong side of the road, still going as fast as possible. When someone decided to pass, it became almost comical! There would be three cars out of place all at the same time with no particular indication of which direction any of them might choose to go next!
After nearly an hour of this, we reached the tiny village of Kassanda. This is a very remote place! The road we followed is apparently the only way in and it passes through a swamp that often floods the road. The round-a-bout has a four foot tall pile of dirt that has grown over with grass. It’s about six feet in diameter. We went around the circle and headed out of the market area along a better road. The sign for Kassanda EPC was on our right.
We arrived right at 11:00. There were about a dozen kids there waiting for us and Elder Michael, a military officer who has spent a lot of time in Northern Uganda. He and Joseph talked for a while, then Joseph turned to me. “The pastor has told everyone to come at midday, not 11:00 as we told her. I have asked Michael, ‘Don’t you know that we are white now? We follow the clock, not the sky.’”
In any event, we decided to go see their new land! A church in North Carolina donated the money to help them last January. At the time, they were having trouble with a land lord who was telling them to move or he would seize their church. He even let his daughter start a small school inside the church and told the church they couldn’t stop it. The church installed doors and locks and DID stop it, and that made the landlord even more angry. So I delivered the money for them to buy the new land. A year later, they haven’t moved. They said the landlord backed off because he was elected to Parliament. He was using them as a way to show the Muslim majority in the area that he would stand up to Christians. Once elected, he has left them alone with the understanding that they will move “soon.” The new land is properly recorded and the only hold up is that they can’t move until they have an approved toilet on the site. They are raising the money for one now, and have begun digging!
We drove back to the round-a-bout and turned out opposite the way we came in. Within 300 yards of the round-a-bout, we turned down another track that looked much more like a place for goats to run than vans to drive! Vincent, of course, wasn’t phased by this. He headed straight down the steep track. At least it was dry today!
Suddenly, I recognized the place. We were pulling into the secondary school where we first met Irene. Irene was a beautiful young girl, the lead singer in the choir, and an excellent student. She planned on becoming a nurse, and we were ready to help her do it. But she disappeared as she graduated from high school. She was an orphan, and apparently, an uncle sold her to someone to be a wife. We’ve never seen her again, and neither has anyone in the church.
We parked in the school yard, and the head master came out to greet us. He took us through his garden to a field planted in corn. He led us through the nearly finished stalks to a point behind a small building. The purchased land started here. We walked the length of the building, then a bit further and he said this was another marker. Then we turned through the corn field. They call it maize here, and that’s a great name for this field, though the spelling slightly off. We were in a maze! The corn wasn’t laid out in any pattern I could imagine. Our leader kept ducking between corn stalks, in one direction, then another. Suddenly he stopped and started sweeping his foot across the ground. “I know the marker is here somewhere,” he said. He kept looking in a widening circle, but he had no luck. Elder Michael began helping him and so did Joseph. I tried to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for so someone had to look again everywhere I went.
After a few minutes, the headmaster said, “I knew it was here. It is here.” He pulled back the grass and pointed to a pineapple plant. They had planted a pineapple plant at the corner marker. Sure enough, there was a marker at the base of it. The fourth marker was easy to find from there. The land slopes a bit down toward the school. It is presently covered in corn that is about to be finished. It appears they will be able to move as soon as they get the toilet built. I tried to videotape the plot, but between the corn and all the guys trying to get in the shot, I don’t think I did very well. It never fails, if you get out a video camera or still camera, people will walk in front of you so that they will be in your picture! This has nothing to do with age. Young and old both enojoy this. I don’t know why one would want their backsides in the middle of an otherwise great shot, but Ugandans seem to desire this above most other things! They never say a word, they just block your shot then go on until you’re ready to shoot again!
We drove back to the church and found a few more kids there, but still no pastor. Another elder had come and she said she had been told midday. In African time, that could be anywhere from 11:00 until 2:00! So we sat down and the kids sang every song they knew. Then they sang a couple of them again. Then Joseph talked, then I talked, then Pastor Faith came in. She ran to me and shook my hand. “I am so, so, sorry,” she said. “I was trying to cook, but my son is so sick. I had to stop cooking and take him to the hospital. I want you to come to my house to eat after we are finished here.”
I knew it would be useless to ask what was wrong with the child so I asked if he was going to be okay (thinking that if he was going to be okay, there would be hope for me if I caught it from the cook!). She only said, “Ah, he is sleeping now.”
We had 100 pairs of shoes to distribute. Again, things were highly organized. They called out names three at a time and the kids came up. Despite all we’ve done to spread things out, it appears that shoes are a benefit of church membership here. It’s not as though these kids didn’t need shoes, but it would be nice if some of them were used in the community. Instead, we seemed to have the kids in the church and their cousins.
I looked up from the shoes and saw Jimmy Semitala at the back of the room. Jimmy was one of our first sponsored kids. He was attending a Muslim school and had refused to go for prayers. So the school allowed him to wait under a shade tree in the yard during prayers, and Jimmy was using this as a time to preach to the other kids! He was doing well in school, but it turned out he did not have a P7 certificate. He had gone to school that year, but his father didn’t pay the registration fee so Jimmy was denied entrance to the test. His father later bought a P7 certificate with someone else’s name on it, so when Jimmy entered S4, he changed his name. But he came to Vincent and told him the trouble. When Vincent approached the school, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They threw Jimmy out, which made Jimmy mad at everyone and he dropped out of sight for a while.
Now, he’s back as the youth leader at the church. He works a little at whatever he can find, but when he saw me, he wanted to talk. He agreed to go and sit for his P7 this year, and he asked if we would allow him to start a technical course in computers. He said he knew of jobs in Kampala if he had computer skills, and the school would let him start while he sits for P7. So he could get one of his two computer years behind him while waiting to complete his exam, and the school is fine with this. I told Jimmy I would talk to his sponsors and see if they are willing to help him.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to late teens, and these kids really needed shoes! Most were barefoot. Many wore torn and tattered clothes. Most of the kids were very thin. The first time we came to Kassanda, there was a boy who got one brown and one black shoe. When I asked him about his shoes, he said, “Sir, there are no others like these!” I tried to explain there was, in fact, the mirror image of his pair right there in the stack, but he wouldn’t believe me. He did believe, however, when they made him exchange the black one for another brown!
Today, the same thing happened and I believe it was the same boy! He got two black ones this time, but they were totally different styles. They had to almost wrestle one of the shoes from him!
It took more than an hour to get the shoes out. We had brought a number of other things, including plastic necklaces, bracelets, and rings. We were out of boy toys except for a few ping pong balls, but the boys liked the rings, so all went well. We had brought Bibles from America, and Pastor Faith had decided she wanted to give Bibles to children who had passed P7 and those who had passed S4. There were four of the former and one of the latter. They had me make the presentation and take photos of each recipient. Then, we awarded them one of the soccer balls Jon had bought. We brought them balls a couple of years ago, but it seems the boys burst theirs, then lost the girl’s ball. So this ball was given to the girls!
Finally, we were down to the half ton of school supplies that we had bought. “Elder Jim, you should find a comfortable seat,” said Joseph as he opened the bag filled with pencils, pens, crayons, and rulers. I sat down at the back of the church with a group of little kids that were scared to death of me and picked on them while Joseph, Michael, and Grace asked incredibly silly questions in English to test the kids. Every kid knew every answer, so it was a group of waving, squealing (by Ugandan standards, anyway. They really aren’t all that loud!) kids trying to win a single pencil or pen.
This did go on for a while! Finally, Grace got the bag from Joseph and grabbed what was left. She hurried through the crowd passing out what was left to whoever was closest at hand!
So we were finally finished. As we walked to the van, Joseph told me they wanted me to visit the homes of two of the elders and Pastor Faith. So we loaded the van with several extras and drove to the main road and across the street to Elder Michael’s house. Michael is in the army. His home is in the barracks. He lives in two rooms with his wife, five children, and youngest sister, who is 8 (the same age as his third child). Michael has fought in the war in northern Uganda. He told us today that he is being sent to the Sudan next month. He will be in Darfour.
We entered his house and sat in a concrete floored room with several nice chairs. There weren’t enough chairs, however, so Grace had to sit in the floor. I made her take my seat. “Why are you doing this?” asked Joseph.
“In America, it would be rude for a man to take a chair and let a woman sit on the floor. So I want Grace to have my seat.” This created a storm of laughter!
Finally, Joseph said, “Now she will be even more stubborn!”
As I sat on the mat in the corner, I saw something white scurrying across the floor. It was some kind of winged insect that was in a hurry to get under something. A few minutes later, a much more serious black bug came out of nowhere. He seemed to have a stinger, and possibly, pinchers, or else he was a cockroach. In any event, I was sitting on the mat he probably came out of!
Michael served us fruit: popo’s and pineapple. The pineapple was wonderful and the popo edible. Michael has five kids. He had his daughter and sister sing several songs to us, including one about telephoning Jesus every day. Then, he had each child present his/herself. They stood at attention before us and announced their names, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their school’s name, their class in school, and their ranking in the class.
Everyone wanted their picture taken, so we went outside. Michael noticed that every one of his children had taken off their shoes and socks and were running around barefoot. He yelled at them in Luganda, so we had to wait for each child to find both shoes and both socks. While I was waiting, an elderly lady who smelled strongly of alcohol came around the end of the house. She kept talking to me very loudly in Luganda. I finally told Michael’s wife that I didn’t understand. “She is simply greeting you,” she whispered.
So I shook the ladies hand and asked how she was doing. She hit me with another string of Luganda. I looked at Michael’s wife. “She wants you to take her picture.” So I focused and got a decent photo of her. When I showed it to her, she laughed and laughed!
Finally, the kids were ready. Michael lined everyone up, then had his kids to kneel down so that I couldn’t have shot their shoes if I wanted to. But once everyone was set, I snapped away! And they were pleased with the results. I hope I can send Michael one of these prints before he is deployed next month.
Then we all got in the van again and drove down the road a mile or so to another elder’s house. She lived behind the medical center, a two room cinder block structure with an ambulance parked outside. Her house was quite nice and she didn’t seem at all excited about our visit. We met her two children, then I made pictures. Then we were ready for Pastor Faith.
Her house was only a few doors down. It, too, was nice by Kampala standards. It was home-made brick, but it stood high off the ground and had concrete floors. The metal roof was at least 10 feet above the floor, and there were a number of places where light was shining through it. We sat on a couch and several chairs. Grace gave me the one she had taken because she said it was taller and I would be more comfortable!
Pastor Faith and several young girls started brining out food. A man came around with a can of water and poured it on my hands. There wasn’t any soap. They brought each of us a bowl with part of the chicken I’d seen at church in it. It was submerged in a thick dark soup. There was a bowl of matoke, sweet potato, greens, rice, and cassava root. I decided to be a vegetarian since in only three days, I will be taking my flight home. I ate a slice of sweet potato, some cassava, and some of the greens, which were a bit gritty. Some of the folks ate with their hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to observe closely before. They took gobs of the matoke and dipped it in the chicken broth and ate it. Sometimes, they got pieces of chicken with it. They ate everything very well with their hands. After the meal, someone brought the water can back around. There was soap this time!
Neither Pastor Faith nor the girls who served would eat at the table with us. They stayed behind a curtain in the middle of the room. She called through the curtain to participate in the conversation, but she wouldn’t come out!
When we were finished, we went outside for pictures. There was a very old woman standing beside the house. She was barefoot and her eyes were glazed over with cataracts. She was holding a HUGE stick. It was considerably longer than I am tall and it was about 3 inches in diameter. Pastor Faith said something to the woman and she through the stick away with a very loud comment. Faith said, “My grandmother says she will walk to her picture on her own.” The old woman wouldn’t even let one of her great grandchildren help her!
“How old is she,” I whispered to Faith.
“She is seventy-eight years,” she said.
The grandmother took the center of the picture with Faith beside her and her great grandchildren surrounding her. She held her head high as I snapped the picture, but she wouldn’t smile. I asked if I could make a picture of Faith and her grandmother, and this really pleased the old lady. But just as I prepared to shoot, a late arriving great grandson appeared. His great grandmother nabbed him by the arm and jerked him into the picture with a shouted order. The boy turned and faced the camera. He didn’t smile either!
I showed Faith the pictures and she said something to her grandmother who cracked a huge grin. She had no more than four teeth. As we headed for the van, I looked back. A great grandson was walking beside her at either arm. Both were behind her ready to catch her if she stumbled, but both knew better than to help her!
When I got in the van, I noticed we had added a young man with a bit of luggage. He sat the luggage in the very back of the van and it took up two seats. People KEPT piling in, and I counted as they all got out. We had 17 in our 14 passenger van with two of the seats taken up with luggage! It was a nasal extravaganza I will not soon forget!!
We dropped people here and there, except for the boy who came all the way back to Kampala with us. Vincent flew back in record time, but as we reached the outskirts of Kampala, we also found the traffic! Everyone was returning home from their villages. The traffic moved smoothly, however, and the lack of boda bodas and pedestrians prevented any backups at all.
Joseph escorted me to my room. We talked for a few minutes about the rest of the trip, then he left me around 6:00. I looked at my IM and found that Lisa had been online waiting for me. I thought it said she was there, so I waited for her until after dark. We finally chatted for a while, then I decided to go down to eat.
There was a schedule in the lobby saying that tonight was grill night in the garden. I have eaten there on grill night several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I started into the garden. A waiter came up to me. “I wanted to see what is available tonight,” I said.
He more or less stepped in front of me. “There is a buffet set up inside, sir. There is nothing out here at all for you to eat. Just some small things that would be of no interest to you. You must go to the buffet.”
I started to step around the guy, but he was holding up his hand in a stop gesture. I decided that being the only white person in the garden did not lend itself to making a scene with a rude waiter, so I went inside to the buffet. Something was going on because this staff, which is usually very attentive, didn’t acknowledge my presence, so after a minute, I stepped around them and walked over to the buffet. They had the same fish they’d been serving since I got here and a huge steak and kidney pie. I quickly decided I wasn’t THAT hungry!
So I returned to my room and IM’d with Lisa while I ate cheese and crackers, potato chips, and three small bananas.
There are only two more full days left and I’m feeling very depressed about all the things I haven’t gotten done. I have another conference tomorrow night at the church on money management, and a meeting with one of the college students in the early afternoon. I’m also going to do a bit of auditing. But time is slipping away!!
Vincent reported that Priscilla was feeling much better. He had found ice and put it in the plastic bag I gave him. He said between the ice and the medicine, she wasn’t hurting today. He said she was telling everyone about riding the elevator. It amazed her to be so high! My room is on the second floor, which is the third floor for us Americans because the ground floor here is 0. He said she seemed much happier this morning. He also said she is normally a very talkative little girl, but she is afraid of me!
There was still no one in the city! We flew through round-a-bouts that had been parking lots all last week. Still, most pedestrians were remaining on the sidewalks, or waiting patiently for an opportunity to jaywalk. We didn’t even come close to running over a boda boda!
The world changed as soon as we left the round-a-bout. The jungle started almost at once. The drive is incredible. It follows a low ridge line that is just high enough to provide decent views of the sweeping valley and taller hills. There is a whole rainbow full of greens in this jungle, with occasional red or yellow or purple flowers thrown in for spectacular contrast. This is farm country, so the road is lined with small stalls selling a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The homes are about the same as in Kampala’s slums, a lot of home-made brick and plenty of mud walled huts.
The story, however, is the road itself. The sides have flaked away until there is barely a whole lane of pavement left! And what IS left is filled with potholes, which leads to a strange story. When he was here, Jim would sing about how much he hated the potholes. I never heard him call them pottieholes, but somehow, they did. So every time we hit one, one of them would start singing about pottieholes! It made for a very odd day because we were in potholes more often than we weren’t!! And these were crack your head on the ceiling holes because Vincent WOULD NOT slow down unless he saw a true axel breaker.
For all the years we’ve been going to Kassanda, there has been a road project here. It is now complete, which means after you go through about 10 miles of this destroyed roadbed, there is a decent road with a bit less erosion (but still plenty) and far fewer potholes. This also means every driver has the opportunity to tempt fate and absolutely FLY through this lovely jungle.
After an hour of this fun, we were pulled over by a military unit. Vincent pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. Two uniformed me came to my window and talked to me. They spoke in a friendly way, but their faces showed no friendliness at all. Finally, one of them opened the back door and said something to Vincent. The other one asked me if I minded giving this man a ride. They slammed the door and the smelly man and his very large gun sat beside Joseph as we drove on down the highway (at a much slower rate of speed!). The man didn’t say a word for the fifteen minutes he rode with us. Vincent suddenly swerved into a wide dirt road and stopped. The man climbed out. He almost thanked us!
It turns out this was the road to Kassanda, so Vincent plowed ahead on this wide, somewhat maintained road. The maintenance soon ended and we were riding on a washboard filled with pottieholes! The game became to go as fast as we could swerving from shoulder to shoulder at will in order to avoid leaving the oil pan in one of these caverns. The really interesting thing is that oncoming traffic was doing exactly the same thing! So not only were we jarring our teeth out and suffocating in the red dust, we appeared to be in constant danger of a head on crash because either we or the oncoming car were on the wrong side of the road, still going as fast as possible. When someone decided to pass, it became almost comical! There would be three cars out of place all at the same time with no particular indication of which direction any of them might choose to go next!
After nearly an hour of this, we reached the tiny village of Kassanda. This is a very remote place! The road we followed is apparently the only way in and it passes through a swamp that often floods the road. The round-a-bout has a four foot tall pile of dirt that has grown over with grass. It’s about six feet in diameter. We went around the circle and headed out of the market area along a better road. The sign for Kassanda EPC was on our right.
We arrived right at 11:00. There were about a dozen kids there waiting for us and Elder Michael, a military officer who has spent a lot of time in Northern Uganda. He and Joseph talked for a while, then Joseph turned to me. “The pastor has told everyone to come at midday, not 11:00 as we told her. I have asked Michael, ‘Don’t you know that we are white now? We follow the clock, not the sky.’”
In any event, we decided to go see their new land! A church in North Carolina donated the money to help them last January. At the time, they were having trouble with a land lord who was telling them to move or he would seize their church. He even let his daughter start a small school inside the church and told the church they couldn’t stop it. The church installed doors and locks and DID stop it, and that made the landlord even more angry. So I delivered the money for them to buy the new land. A year later, they haven’t moved. They said the landlord backed off because he was elected to Parliament. He was using them as a way to show the Muslim majority in the area that he would stand up to Christians. Once elected, he has left them alone with the understanding that they will move “soon.” The new land is properly recorded and the only hold up is that they can’t move until they have an approved toilet on the site. They are raising the money for one now, and have begun digging!
We drove back to the round-a-bout and turned out opposite the way we came in. Within 300 yards of the round-a-bout, we turned down another track that looked much more like a place for goats to run than vans to drive! Vincent, of course, wasn’t phased by this. He headed straight down the steep track. At least it was dry today!
Suddenly, I recognized the place. We were pulling into the secondary school where we first met Irene. Irene was a beautiful young girl, the lead singer in the choir, and an excellent student. She planned on becoming a nurse, and we were ready to help her do it. But she disappeared as she graduated from high school. She was an orphan, and apparently, an uncle sold her to someone to be a wife. We’ve never seen her again, and neither has anyone in the church.
We parked in the school yard, and the head master came out to greet us. He took us through his garden to a field planted in corn. He led us through the nearly finished stalks to a point behind a small building. The purchased land started here. We walked the length of the building, then a bit further and he said this was another marker. Then we turned through the corn field. They call it maize here, and that’s a great name for this field, though the spelling slightly off. We were in a maze! The corn wasn’t laid out in any pattern I could imagine. Our leader kept ducking between corn stalks, in one direction, then another. Suddenly he stopped and started sweeping his foot across the ground. “I know the marker is here somewhere,” he said. He kept looking in a widening circle, but he had no luck. Elder Michael began helping him and so did Joseph. I tried to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for so someone had to look again everywhere I went.
After a few minutes, the headmaster said, “I knew it was here. It is here.” He pulled back the grass and pointed to a pineapple plant. They had planted a pineapple plant at the corner marker. Sure enough, there was a marker at the base of it. The fourth marker was easy to find from there. The land slopes a bit down toward the school. It is presently covered in corn that is about to be finished. It appears they will be able to move as soon as they get the toilet built. I tried to videotape the plot, but between the corn and all the guys trying to get in the shot, I don’t think I did very well. It never fails, if you get out a video camera or still camera, people will walk in front of you so that they will be in your picture! This has nothing to do with age. Young and old both enojoy this. I don’t know why one would want their backsides in the middle of an otherwise great shot, but Ugandans seem to desire this above most other things! They never say a word, they just block your shot then go on until you’re ready to shoot again!
We drove back to the church and found a few more kids there, but still no pastor. Another elder had come and she said she had been told midday. In African time, that could be anywhere from 11:00 until 2:00! So we sat down and the kids sang every song they knew. Then they sang a couple of them again. Then Joseph talked, then I talked, then Pastor Faith came in. She ran to me and shook my hand. “I am so, so, sorry,” she said. “I was trying to cook, but my son is so sick. I had to stop cooking and take him to the hospital. I want you to come to my house to eat after we are finished here.”
I knew it would be useless to ask what was wrong with the child so I asked if he was going to be okay (thinking that if he was going to be okay, there would be hope for me if I caught it from the cook!). She only said, “Ah, he is sleeping now.”
We had 100 pairs of shoes to distribute. Again, things were highly organized. They called out names three at a time and the kids came up. Despite all we’ve done to spread things out, it appears that shoes are a benefit of church membership here. It’s not as though these kids didn’t need shoes, but it would be nice if some of them were used in the community. Instead, we seemed to have the kids in the church and their cousins.
I looked up from the shoes and saw Jimmy Semitala at the back of the room. Jimmy was one of our first sponsored kids. He was attending a Muslim school and had refused to go for prayers. So the school allowed him to wait under a shade tree in the yard during prayers, and Jimmy was using this as a time to preach to the other kids! He was doing well in school, but it turned out he did not have a P7 certificate. He had gone to school that year, but his father didn’t pay the registration fee so Jimmy was denied entrance to the test. His father later bought a P7 certificate with someone else’s name on it, so when Jimmy entered S4, he changed his name. But he came to Vincent and told him the trouble. When Vincent approached the school, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They threw Jimmy out, which made Jimmy mad at everyone and he dropped out of sight for a while.
Now, he’s back as the youth leader at the church. He works a little at whatever he can find, but when he saw me, he wanted to talk. He agreed to go and sit for his P7 this year, and he asked if we would allow him to start a technical course in computers. He said he knew of jobs in Kampala if he had computer skills, and the school would let him start while he sits for P7. So he could get one of his two computer years behind him while waiting to complete his exam, and the school is fine with this. I told Jimmy I would talk to his sponsors and see if they are willing to help him.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to late teens, and these kids really needed shoes! Most were barefoot. Many wore torn and tattered clothes. Most of the kids were very thin. The first time we came to Kassanda, there was a boy who got one brown and one black shoe. When I asked him about his shoes, he said, “Sir, there are no others like these!” I tried to explain there was, in fact, the mirror image of his pair right there in the stack, but he wouldn’t believe me. He did believe, however, when they made him exchange the black one for another brown!
Today, the same thing happened and I believe it was the same boy! He got two black ones this time, but they were totally different styles. They had to almost wrestle one of the shoes from him!
It took more than an hour to get the shoes out. We had brought a number of other things, including plastic necklaces, bracelets, and rings. We were out of boy toys except for a few ping pong balls, but the boys liked the rings, so all went well. We had brought Bibles from America, and Pastor Faith had decided she wanted to give Bibles to children who had passed P7 and those who had passed S4. There were four of the former and one of the latter. They had me make the presentation and take photos of each recipient. Then, we awarded them one of the soccer balls Jon had bought. We brought them balls a couple of years ago, but it seems the boys burst theirs, then lost the girl’s ball. So this ball was given to the girls!
Finally, we were down to the half ton of school supplies that we had bought. “Elder Jim, you should find a comfortable seat,” said Joseph as he opened the bag filled with pencils, pens, crayons, and rulers. I sat down at the back of the church with a group of little kids that were scared to death of me and picked on them while Joseph, Michael, and Grace asked incredibly silly questions in English to test the kids. Every kid knew every answer, so it was a group of waving, squealing (by Ugandan standards, anyway. They really aren’t all that loud!) kids trying to win a single pencil or pen.
This did go on for a while! Finally, Grace got the bag from Joseph and grabbed what was left. She hurried through the crowd passing out what was left to whoever was closest at hand!
So we were finally finished. As we walked to the van, Joseph told me they wanted me to visit the homes of two of the elders and Pastor Faith. So we loaded the van with several extras and drove to the main road and across the street to Elder Michael’s house. Michael is in the army. His home is in the barracks. He lives in two rooms with his wife, five children, and youngest sister, who is 8 (the same age as his third child). Michael has fought in the war in northern Uganda. He told us today that he is being sent to the Sudan next month. He will be in Darfour.
We entered his house and sat in a concrete floored room with several nice chairs. There weren’t enough chairs, however, so Grace had to sit in the floor. I made her take my seat. “Why are you doing this?” asked Joseph.
“In America, it would be rude for a man to take a chair and let a woman sit on the floor. So I want Grace to have my seat.” This created a storm of laughter!
Finally, Joseph said, “Now she will be even more stubborn!”
As I sat on the mat in the corner, I saw something white scurrying across the floor. It was some kind of winged insect that was in a hurry to get under something. A few minutes later, a much more serious black bug came out of nowhere. He seemed to have a stinger, and possibly, pinchers, or else he was a cockroach. In any event, I was sitting on the mat he probably came out of!
Michael served us fruit: popo’s and pineapple. The pineapple was wonderful and the popo edible. Michael has five kids. He had his daughter and sister sing several songs to us, including one about telephoning Jesus every day. Then, he had each child present his/herself. They stood at attention before us and announced their names, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their school’s name, their class in school, and their ranking in the class.
Everyone wanted their picture taken, so we went outside. Michael noticed that every one of his children had taken off their shoes and socks and were running around barefoot. He yelled at them in Luganda, so we had to wait for each child to find both shoes and both socks. While I was waiting, an elderly lady who smelled strongly of alcohol came around the end of the house. She kept talking to me very loudly in Luganda. I finally told Michael’s wife that I didn’t understand. “She is simply greeting you,” she whispered.
So I shook the ladies hand and asked how she was doing. She hit me with another string of Luganda. I looked at Michael’s wife. “She wants you to take her picture.” So I focused and got a decent photo of her. When I showed it to her, she laughed and laughed!
Finally, the kids were ready. Michael lined everyone up, then had his kids to kneel down so that I couldn’t have shot their shoes if I wanted to. But once everyone was set, I snapped away! And they were pleased with the results. I hope I can send Michael one of these prints before he is deployed next month.
Then we all got in the van again and drove down the road a mile or so to another elder’s house. She lived behind the medical center, a two room cinder block structure with an ambulance parked outside. Her house was quite nice and she didn’t seem at all excited about our visit. We met her two children, then I made pictures. Then we were ready for Pastor Faith.
Her house was only a few doors down. It, too, was nice by Kampala standards. It was home-made brick, but it stood high off the ground and had concrete floors. The metal roof was at least 10 feet above the floor, and there were a number of places where light was shining through it. We sat on a couch and several chairs. Grace gave me the one she had taken because she said it was taller and I would be more comfortable!
Pastor Faith and several young girls started brining out food. A man came around with a can of water and poured it on my hands. There wasn’t any soap. They brought each of us a bowl with part of the chicken I’d seen at church in it. It was submerged in a thick dark soup. There was a bowl of matoke, sweet potato, greens, rice, and cassava root. I decided to be a vegetarian since in only three days, I will be taking my flight home. I ate a slice of sweet potato, some cassava, and some of the greens, which were a bit gritty. Some of the folks ate with their hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to observe closely before. They took gobs of the matoke and dipped it in the chicken broth and ate it. Sometimes, they got pieces of chicken with it. They ate everything very well with their hands. After the meal, someone brought the water can back around. There was soap this time!
Neither Pastor Faith nor the girls who served would eat at the table with us. They stayed behind a curtain in the middle of the room. She called through the curtain to participate in the conversation, but she wouldn’t come out!
When we were finished, we went outside for pictures. There was a very old woman standing beside the house. She was barefoot and her eyes were glazed over with cataracts. She was holding a HUGE stick. It was considerably longer than I am tall and it was about 3 inches in diameter. Pastor Faith said something to the woman and she through the stick away with a very loud comment. Faith said, “My grandmother says she will walk to her picture on her own.” The old woman wouldn’t even let one of her great grandchildren help her!
“How old is she,” I whispered to Faith.
“She is seventy-eight years,” she said.
The grandmother took the center of the picture with Faith beside her and her great grandchildren surrounding her. She held her head high as I snapped the picture, but she wouldn’t smile. I asked if I could make a picture of Faith and her grandmother, and this really pleased the old lady. But just as I prepared to shoot, a late arriving great grandson appeared. His great grandmother nabbed him by the arm and jerked him into the picture with a shouted order. The boy turned and faced the camera. He didn’t smile either!
I showed Faith the pictures and she said something to her grandmother who cracked a huge grin. She had no more than four teeth. As we headed for the van, I looked back. A great grandson was walking beside her at either arm. Both were behind her ready to catch her if she stumbled, but both knew better than to help her!
When I got in the van, I noticed we had added a young man with a bit of luggage. He sat the luggage in the very back of the van and it took up two seats. People KEPT piling in, and I counted as they all got out. We had 17 in our 14 passenger van with two of the seats taken up with luggage! It was a nasal extravaganza I will not soon forget!!
We dropped people here and there, except for the boy who came all the way back to Kampala with us. Vincent flew back in record time, but as we reached the outskirts of Kampala, we also found the traffic! Everyone was returning home from their villages. The traffic moved smoothly, however, and the lack of boda bodas and pedestrians prevented any backups at all.
Joseph escorted me to my room. We talked for a few minutes about the rest of the trip, then he left me around 6:00. I looked at my IM and found that Lisa had been online waiting for me. I thought it said she was there, so I waited for her until after dark. We finally chatted for a while, then I decided to go down to eat.
There was a schedule in the lobby saying that tonight was grill night in the garden. I have eaten there on grill night several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I started into the garden. A waiter came up to me. “I wanted to see what is available tonight,” I said.
He more or less stepped in front of me. “There is a buffet set up inside, sir. There is nothing out here at all for you to eat. Just some small things that would be of no interest to you. You must go to the buffet.”
I started to step around the guy, but he was holding up his hand in a stop gesture. I decided that being the only white person in the garden did not lend itself to making a scene with a rude waiter, so I went inside to the buffet. Something was going on because this staff, which is usually very attentive, didn’t acknowledge my presence, so after a minute, I stepped around them and walked over to the buffet. They had the same fish they’d been serving since I got here and a huge steak and kidney pie. I quickly decided I wasn’t THAT hungry!
So I returned to my room and IM’d with Lisa while I ate cheese and crackers, potato chips, and three small bananas.
There are only two more full days left and I’m feeling very depressed about all the things I haven’t gotten done. I have another conference tomorrow night at the church on money management, and a meeting with one of the college students in the early afternoon. I’m also going to do a bit of auditing. But time is slipping away!!
Tuesday, December 26 Kassanda
Today, they arrived about 20 minutes early! I understand that though, because our destination was Kassanda, which is a very long way from anywhere! The trip begins with a drive through town, then out of town as though we were going to Mpigi. But at the very outskirts of the city suburbs, there is a round-a-bout and we turned northwest instead of southwest. We were on the road to Kassanda!
Vincent reported that Priscilla was feeling much better. He had found ice and put it in the plastic bag I gave him. He said between the ice and the medicine, she wasn’t hurting today. He said she was telling everyone about riding the elevator. It amazed her to be so high! My room is on the second floor, which is the third floor for us Americans because the ground floor here is 0. He said she seemed much happier this morning. He also said she is normally a very talkative little girl, but she is afraid of me!
There was still no one in the city! We flew through round-a-bouts that had been parking lots all last week. Still, most pedestrians were remaining on the sidewalks, or waiting patiently for an opportunity to jaywalk. We didn’t even come close to running over a boda boda!
The world changed as soon as we left the round-a-bout. The jungle started almost at once. The drive is incredible. It follows a low ridge line that is just high enough to provide decent views of the sweeping valley and taller hills. There is a whole rainbow full of greens in this jungle, with occasional red or yellow or purple flowers thrown in for spectacular contrast. This is farm country, so the road is lined with small stalls selling a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The homes are about the same as in Kampala’s slums, a lot of home-made brick and plenty of mud walled huts.
The story, however, is the road itself. The sides have flaked away until there is barely a whole lane of pavement left! And what IS left is filled with potholes, which leads to a strange story. When he was here, Jim would sing about how much he hated the potholes. I never heard him call them pottieholes, but somehow, they did. So every time we hit one, one of them would start singing about pottieholes! It made for a very odd day because we were in potholes more often than we weren’t!! And these were crack your head on the ceiling holes because Vincent WOULD NOT slow down unless he saw a true axel breaker.
For all the years we’ve been going to Kassanda, there has been a road project here. It is now complete, which means after you go through about 10 miles of this destroyed roadbed, there is a decent road with a bit less erosion (but still plenty) and far fewer potholes. This also means every driver has the opportunity to tempt fate and absolutely FLY through this lovely jungle.
After an hour of this fun, we were pulled over by a military unit. Vincent pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. Two uniformed me came to my window and talked to me. They spoke in a friendly way, but their faces showed no friendliness at all. Finally, one of them opened the back door and said something to Vincent. The other one asked me if I minded giving this man a ride. They slammed the door and the smelly man and his very large gun sat beside Joseph as we drove on down the highway (at a much slower rate of speed!). The man didn’t say a word for the fifteen minutes he rode with us. Vincent suddenly swerved into a wide dirt road and stopped. The man climbed out. He almost thanked us!
It turns out this was the road to Kassanda, so Vincent plowed ahead on this wide, somewhat maintained road. The maintenance soon ended and we were riding on a washboard filled with pottieholes! The game became to go as fast as we could swerving from shoulder to shoulder at will in order to avoid leaving the oil pan in one of these caverns. The really interesting thing is that oncoming traffic was doing exactly the same thing! So not only were we jarring our teeth out and suffocating in the red dust, we appeared to be in constant danger of a head on crash because either we or the oncoming car were on the wrong side of the road, still going as fast as possible. When someone decided to pass, it became almost comical! There would be three cars out of place all at the same time with no particular indication of which direction any of them might choose to go next!
After nearly an hour of this, we reached the tiny village of Kassanda. This is a very remote place! The road we followed is apparently the only way in and it passes through a swamp that often floods the road. The round-a-bout has a four foot tall pile of dirt that has grown over with grass. It’s about six feet in diameter. We went around the circle and headed out of the market area along a better road. The sign for Kassanda EPC was on our right.
We arrived right at 11:00. There were about a dozen kids there waiting for us and Elder Michael, a military officer who has spent a lot of time in Northern Uganda. He and Joseph talked for a while, then Joseph turned to me. “The pastor has told everyone to come at midday, not 11:00 as we told her. I have asked Michael, ‘Don’t you know that we are white now? We follow the clock, not the sky.’”
In any event, we decided to go see their new land! A church in North Carolina donated the money to help them last January. At the time, they were having trouble with a land lord who was telling them to move or he would seize their church. He even let his daughter start a small school inside the church and told the church they couldn’t stop it. The church installed doors and locks and DID stop it, and that made the landlord even more angry. So I delivered the money for them to buy the new land. A year later, they haven’t moved. They said the landlord backed off because he was elected to Parliament. He was using them as a way to show the Muslim majority in the area that he would stand up to Christians. Once elected, he has left them alone with the understanding that they will move “soon.” The new land is properly recorded and the only hold up is that they can’t move until they have an approved toilet on the site. They are raising the money for one now, and have begun digging!
We drove back to the round-a-bout and turned out opposite the way we came in. Within 300 yards of the round-a-bout, we turned down another track that looked much more like a place for goats to run than vans to drive! Vincent, of course, wasn’t phased by this. He headed straight down the steep track. At least it was dry today!
Suddenly, I recognized the place. We were pulling into the secondary school where we first met Irene. Irene was a beautiful young girl, the lead singer in the choir, and an excellent student. She planned on becoming a nurse, and we were ready to help her do it. But she disappeared as she graduated from high school. She was an orphan, and apparently, an uncle sold her to someone to be a wife. We’ve never seen her again, and neither has anyone in the church.
We parked in the school yard, and the head master came out to greet us. He took us through his garden to a field planted in corn. He led us through the nearly finished stalks to a point behind a small building. The purchased land started here. We walked the length of the building, then a bit further and he said this was another marker. Then we turned through the corn field. They call it maize here, and that’s a great name for this field, though the spelling slightly off. We were in a maze! The corn wasn’t laid out in any pattern I could imagine. Our leader kept ducking between corn stalks, in one direction, then another. Suddenly he stopped and started sweeping his foot across the ground. “I know the marker is here somewhere,” he said. He kept looking in a widening circle, but he had no luck. Elder Michael began helping him and so did Joseph. I tried to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for so someone had to look again everywhere I went.
After a few minutes, the headmaster said, “I knew it was here. It is here.” He pulled back the grass and pointed to a pineapple plant. They had planted a pineapple plant at the corner marker. Sure enough, there was a marker at the base of it. The fourth marker was easy to find from there. The land slopes a bit down toward the school. It is presently covered in corn that is about to be finished. It appears they will be able to move as soon as they get the toilet built. I tried to videotape the plot, but between the corn and all the guys trying to get in the shot, I don’t think I did very well. It never fails, if you get out a video camera or still camera, people will walk in front of you so that they will be in your picture! This has nothing to do with age. Young and old both enojoy this. I don’t know why one would want their backsides in the middle of an otherwise great shot, but Ugandans seem to desire this above most other things! They never say a word, they just block your shot then go on until you’re ready to shoot again!
We drove back to the church and found a few more kids there, but still no pastor. Another elder had come and she said she had been told midday. In African time, that could be anywhere from 11:00 until 2:00! So we sat down and the kids sang every song they knew. Then they sang a couple of them again. Then Joseph talked, then I talked, then Pastor Faith came in. She ran to me and shook my hand. “I am so, so, sorry,” she said. “I was trying to cook, but my son is so sick. I had to stop cooking and take him to the hospital. I want you to come to my house to eat after we are finished here.”
I knew it would be useless to ask what was wrong with the child so I asked if he was going to be okay (thinking that if he was going to be okay, there would be hope for me if I caught it from the cook!). She only said, “Ah, he is sleeping now.”
We had 100 pairs of shoes to distribute. Again, things were highly organized. They called out names three at a time and the kids came up. Despite all we’ve done to spread things out, it appears that shoes are a benefit of church membership here. It’s not as though these kids didn’t need shoes, but it would be nice if some of them were used in the community. Instead, we seemed to have the kids in the church and their cousins.
I looked up from the shoes and saw Jimmy Semitala at the back of the room. Jimmy was one of our first sponsored kids. He was attending a Muslim school and had refused to go for prayers. So the school allowed him to wait under a shade tree in the yard during prayers, and Jimmy was using this as a time to preach to the other kids! He was doing well in school, but it turned out he did not have a P7 certificate. He had gone to school that year, but his father didn’t pay the registration fee so Jimmy was denied entrance to the test. His father later bought a P7 certificate with someone else’s name on it, so when Jimmy entered S4, he changed his name. But he came to Vincent and told him the trouble. When Vincent approached the school, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They threw Jimmy out, which made Jimmy mad at everyone and he dropped out of sight for a while.
Now, he’s back as the youth leader at the church. He works a little at whatever he can find, but when he saw me, he wanted to talk. He agreed to go and sit for his P7 this year, and he asked if we would allow him to start a technical course in computers. He said he knew of jobs in Kampala if he had computer skills, and the school would let him start while he sits for P7. So he could get one of his two computer years behind him while waiting to complete his exam, and the school is fine with this. I told Jimmy I would talk to his sponsors and see if they are willing to help him.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to late teens, and these kids really needed shoes! Most were barefoot. Many wore torn and tattered clothes. Most of the kids were very thin. The first time we came to Kassanda, there was a boy who got one brown and one black shoe. When I asked him about his shoes, he said, “Sir, there are no others like these!” I tried to explain there was, in fact, the mirror image of his pair right there in the stack, but he wouldn’t believe me. He did believe, however, when they made him exchange the black one for another brown!
Today, the same thing happened and I believe it was the same boy! He got two black ones this time, but they were totally different styles. They had to almost wrestle one of the shoes from him!
It took more than an hour to get the shoes out. We had brought a number of other things, including plastic necklaces, bracelets, and rings. We were out of boy toys except for a few ping pong balls, but the boys liked the rings, so all went well. We had brought Bibles from America, and Pastor Faith had decided she wanted to give Bibles to children who had passed P7 and those who had passed S4. There were four of the former and one of the latter. They had me make the presentation and take photos of each recipient. Then, we awarded them one of the soccer balls Jon had bought. We brought them balls a couple of years ago, but it seems the boys burst theirs, then lost the girl’s ball. So this ball was given to the girls!
Finally, we were down to the half ton of school supplies that we had bought. “Elder Jim, you should find a comfortable seat,” said Joseph as he opened the bag filled with pencils, pens, crayons, and rulers. I sat down at the back of the church with a group of little kids that were scared to death of me and picked on them while Joseph, Michael, and Grace asked incredibly silly questions in English to test the kids. Every kid knew every answer, so it was a group of waving, squealing (by Ugandan standards, anyway. They really aren’t all that loud!) kids trying to win a single pencil or pen.
This did go on for a while! Finally, Grace got the bag from Joseph and grabbed what was left. She hurried through the crowd passing out what was left to whoever was closest at hand!
So we were finally finished. As we walked to the van, Joseph told me they wanted me to visit the homes of two of the elders and Pastor Faith. So we loaded the van with several extras and drove to the main road and across the street to Elder Michael’s house. Michael is in the army. His home is in the barracks. He lives in two rooms with his wife, five children, and youngest sister, who is 8 (the same age as his third child). Michael has fought in the war in northern Uganda. He told us today that he is being sent to the Sudan next month. He will be in Darfour.
We entered his house and sat in a concrete floored room with several nice chairs. There weren’t enough chairs, however, so Grace had to sit in the floor. I made her take my seat. “Why are you doing this?” asked Joseph.
“In America, it would be rude for a man to take a chair and let a woman sit on the floor. So I want Grace to have my seat.” This created a storm of laughter!
Finally, Joseph said, “Now she will be even more stubborn!”
As I sat on the mat in the corner, I saw something white scurrying across the floor. It was some kind of winged insect that was in a hurry to get under something. A few minutes later, a much more serious black bug came out of nowhere. He seemed to have a stinger, and possibly, pinchers, or else he was a cockroach. In any event, I was sitting on the mat he probably came out of!
Michael served us fruit: popo’s and pineapple. The pineapple was wonderful and the popo edible. Michael has five kids. He had his daughter and sister sing several songs to us, including one about telephoning Jesus every day. Then, he had each child present his/herself. They stood at attention before us and announced their names, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their school’s name, their class in school, and their ranking in the class.
Everyone wanted their picture taken, so we went outside. Michael noticed that every one of his children had taken off their shoes and socks and were running around barefoot. He yelled at them in Luganda, so we had to wait for each child to find both shoes and both socks. While I was waiting, an elderly lady who smelled strongly of alcohol came around the end of the house. She kept talking to me very loudly in Luganda. I finally told Michael’s wife that I didn’t understand. “She is simply greeting you,” she whispered.
So I shook the ladies hand and asked how she was doing. She hit me with another string of Luganda. I looked at Michael’s wife. “She wants you to take her picture.” So I focused and got a decent photo of her. When I showed it to her, she laughed and laughed!
Finally, the kids were ready. Michael lined everyone up, then had his kids to kneel down so that I couldn’t have shot their shoes if I wanted to. But once everyone was set, I snapped away! And they were pleased with the results. I hope I can send Michael one of these prints before he is deployed next month.
Then we all got in the van again and drove down the road a mile or so to another elder’s house. She lived behind the medical center, a two room cinder block structure with an ambulance parked outside. Her house was quite nice and she didn’t seem at all excited about our visit. We met her two children, then I made pictures. Then we were ready for Pastor Faith.
Her house was only a few doors down. It, too, was nice by Kampala standards. It was home-made brick, but it stood high off the ground and had concrete floors. The metal roof was at least 10 feet above the floor, and there were a number of places where light was shining through it. We sat on a couch and several chairs. Grace gave me the one she had taken because she said it was taller and I would be more comfortable!
Pastor Faith and several young girls started brining out food. A man came around with a can of water and poured it on my hands. There wasn’t any soap. They brought each of us a bowl with part of the chicken I’d seen at church in it. It was submerged in a thick dark soup. There was a bowl of matoke, sweet potato, greens, rice, and cassava root. I decided to be a vegetarian since in only three days, I will be taking my flight home. I ate a slice of sweet potato, some cassava, and some of the greens, which were a bit gritty. Some of the folks ate with their hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to observe closely before. They took gobs of the matoke and dipped it in the chicken broth and ate it. Sometimes, they got pieces of chicken with it. They ate everything very well with their hands. After the meal, someone brought the water can back around. There was soap this time!
Neither Pastor Faith nor the girls who served would eat at the table with us. They stayed behind a curtain in the middle of the room. She called through the curtain to participate in the conversation, but she wouldn’t come out!
When we were finished, we went outside for pictures. There was a very old woman standing beside the house. She was barefoot and her eyes were glazed over with cataracts. She was holding a HUGE stick. It was considerably longer than I am tall and it was about 3 inches in diameter. Pastor Faith said something to the woman and she through the stick away with a very loud comment. Faith said, “My grandmother says she will walk to her picture on her own.” The old woman wouldn’t even let one of her great grandchildren help her!
“How old is she,” I whispered to Faith.
“She is seventy-eight years,” she said.
The grandmother took the center of the picture with Faith beside her and her great grandchildren surrounding her. She held her head high as I snapped the picture, but she wouldn’t smile. I asked if I could make a picture of Faith and her grandmother, and this really pleased the old lady. But just as I prepared to shoot, a late arriving great grandson appeared. His great grandmother nabbed him by the arm and jerked him into the picture with a shouted order. The boy turned and faced the camera. He didn’t smile either!
I showed Faith the pictures and she said something to her grandmother who cracked a huge grin. She had no more than four teeth. As we headed for the van, I looked back. A great grandson was walking beside her at either arm. Both were behind her ready to catch her if she stumbled, but both knew better than to help her!
When I got in the van, I noticed we had added a young man with a bit of luggage. He sat the luggage in the very back of the van and it took up two seats. People KEPT piling in, and I counted as they all got out. We had 17 in our 14 passenger van with two of the seats taken up with luggage! It was a nasal extravaganza I will not soon forget!!
We dropped people here and there, except for the boy who came all the way back to Kampala with us. Vincent flew back in record time, but as we reached the outskirts of Kampala, we also found the traffic! Everyone was returning home from their villages. The traffic moved smoothly, however, and the lack of boda bodas and pedestrians prevented any backups at all.
Joseph escorted me to my room. We talked for a few minutes about the rest of the trip, then he left me around 6:00. I looked at my IM and found that Lisa had been online waiting for me. I thought it said she was there, so I waited for her until after dark. We finally chatted for a while, then I decided to go down to eat.
There was a schedule in the lobby saying that tonight was grill night in the garden. I have eaten there on grill night several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I started into the garden. A waiter came up to me. “I wanted to see what is available tonight,” I said.
He more or less stepped in front of me. “There is a buffet set up inside, sir. There is nothing out here at all for you to eat. Just some small things that would be of no interest to you. You must go to the buffet.”
I started to step around the guy, but he was holding up his hand in a stop gesture. I decided that being the only white person in the garden did not lend itself to making a scene with a rude waiter, so I went inside to the buffet. Something was going on because this staff, which is usually very attentive, didn’t acknowledge my presence, so after a minute, I stepped around them and walked over to the buffet. They had the same fish they’d been serving since I got here and a huge steak and kidney pie. I quickly decided I wasn’t THAT hungry!
So I returned to my room and IM’d with Lisa while I ate cheese and crackers, potato chips, and three small bananas.
There are only two more full days left and I’m feeling very depressed about all the things I haven’t gotten done. I have another conference tomorrow night at the church on money management, and a meeting with one of the college students in the early afternoon. I’m also going to do a bit of auditing. But time is slipping away!!
Vincent reported that Priscilla was feeling much better. He had found ice and put it in the plastic bag I gave him. He said between the ice and the medicine, she wasn’t hurting today. He said she was telling everyone about riding the elevator. It amazed her to be so high! My room is on the second floor, which is the third floor for us Americans because the ground floor here is 0. He said she seemed much happier this morning. He also said she is normally a very talkative little girl, but she is afraid of me!
There was still no one in the city! We flew through round-a-bouts that had been parking lots all last week. Still, most pedestrians were remaining on the sidewalks, or waiting patiently for an opportunity to jaywalk. We didn’t even come close to running over a boda boda!
The world changed as soon as we left the round-a-bout. The jungle started almost at once. The drive is incredible. It follows a low ridge line that is just high enough to provide decent views of the sweeping valley and taller hills. There is a whole rainbow full of greens in this jungle, with occasional red or yellow or purple flowers thrown in for spectacular contrast. This is farm country, so the road is lined with small stalls selling a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. The homes are about the same as in Kampala’s slums, a lot of home-made brick and plenty of mud walled huts.
The story, however, is the road itself. The sides have flaked away until there is barely a whole lane of pavement left! And what IS left is filled with potholes, which leads to a strange story. When he was here, Jim would sing about how much he hated the potholes. I never heard him call them pottieholes, but somehow, they did. So every time we hit one, one of them would start singing about pottieholes! It made for a very odd day because we were in potholes more often than we weren’t!! And these were crack your head on the ceiling holes because Vincent WOULD NOT slow down unless he saw a true axel breaker.
For all the years we’ve been going to Kassanda, there has been a road project here. It is now complete, which means after you go through about 10 miles of this destroyed roadbed, there is a decent road with a bit less erosion (but still plenty) and far fewer potholes. This also means every driver has the opportunity to tempt fate and absolutely FLY through this lovely jungle.
After an hour of this fun, we were pulled over by a military unit. Vincent pulled the van off the road and killed the engine. Two uniformed me came to my window and talked to me. They spoke in a friendly way, but their faces showed no friendliness at all. Finally, one of them opened the back door and said something to Vincent. The other one asked me if I minded giving this man a ride. They slammed the door and the smelly man and his very large gun sat beside Joseph as we drove on down the highway (at a much slower rate of speed!). The man didn’t say a word for the fifteen minutes he rode with us. Vincent suddenly swerved into a wide dirt road and stopped. The man climbed out. He almost thanked us!
It turns out this was the road to Kassanda, so Vincent plowed ahead on this wide, somewhat maintained road. The maintenance soon ended and we were riding on a washboard filled with pottieholes! The game became to go as fast as we could swerving from shoulder to shoulder at will in order to avoid leaving the oil pan in one of these caverns. The really interesting thing is that oncoming traffic was doing exactly the same thing! So not only were we jarring our teeth out and suffocating in the red dust, we appeared to be in constant danger of a head on crash because either we or the oncoming car were on the wrong side of the road, still going as fast as possible. When someone decided to pass, it became almost comical! There would be three cars out of place all at the same time with no particular indication of which direction any of them might choose to go next!
After nearly an hour of this, we reached the tiny village of Kassanda. This is a very remote place! The road we followed is apparently the only way in and it passes through a swamp that often floods the road. The round-a-bout has a four foot tall pile of dirt that has grown over with grass. It’s about six feet in diameter. We went around the circle and headed out of the market area along a better road. The sign for Kassanda EPC was on our right.
We arrived right at 11:00. There were about a dozen kids there waiting for us and Elder Michael, a military officer who has spent a lot of time in Northern Uganda. He and Joseph talked for a while, then Joseph turned to me. “The pastor has told everyone to come at midday, not 11:00 as we told her. I have asked Michael, ‘Don’t you know that we are white now? We follow the clock, not the sky.’”
In any event, we decided to go see their new land! A church in North Carolina donated the money to help them last January. At the time, they were having trouble with a land lord who was telling them to move or he would seize their church. He even let his daughter start a small school inside the church and told the church they couldn’t stop it. The church installed doors and locks and DID stop it, and that made the landlord even more angry. So I delivered the money for them to buy the new land. A year later, they haven’t moved. They said the landlord backed off because he was elected to Parliament. He was using them as a way to show the Muslim majority in the area that he would stand up to Christians. Once elected, he has left them alone with the understanding that they will move “soon.” The new land is properly recorded and the only hold up is that they can’t move until they have an approved toilet on the site. They are raising the money for one now, and have begun digging!
We drove back to the round-a-bout and turned out opposite the way we came in. Within 300 yards of the round-a-bout, we turned down another track that looked much more like a place for goats to run than vans to drive! Vincent, of course, wasn’t phased by this. He headed straight down the steep track. At least it was dry today!
Suddenly, I recognized the place. We were pulling into the secondary school where we first met Irene. Irene was a beautiful young girl, the lead singer in the choir, and an excellent student. She planned on becoming a nurse, and we were ready to help her do it. But she disappeared as she graduated from high school. She was an orphan, and apparently, an uncle sold her to someone to be a wife. We’ve never seen her again, and neither has anyone in the church.
We parked in the school yard, and the head master came out to greet us. He took us through his garden to a field planted in corn. He led us through the nearly finished stalks to a point behind a small building. The purchased land started here. We walked the length of the building, then a bit further and he said this was another marker. Then we turned through the corn field. They call it maize here, and that’s a great name for this field, though the spelling slightly off. We were in a maze! The corn wasn’t laid out in any pattern I could imagine. Our leader kept ducking between corn stalks, in one direction, then another. Suddenly he stopped and started sweeping his foot across the ground. “I know the marker is here somewhere,” he said. He kept looking in a widening circle, but he had no luck. Elder Michael began helping him and so did Joseph. I tried to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for so someone had to look again everywhere I went.
After a few minutes, the headmaster said, “I knew it was here. It is here.” He pulled back the grass and pointed to a pineapple plant. They had planted a pineapple plant at the corner marker. Sure enough, there was a marker at the base of it. The fourth marker was easy to find from there. The land slopes a bit down toward the school. It is presently covered in corn that is about to be finished. It appears they will be able to move as soon as they get the toilet built. I tried to videotape the plot, but between the corn and all the guys trying to get in the shot, I don’t think I did very well. It never fails, if you get out a video camera or still camera, people will walk in front of you so that they will be in your picture! This has nothing to do with age. Young and old both enojoy this. I don’t know why one would want their backsides in the middle of an otherwise great shot, but Ugandans seem to desire this above most other things! They never say a word, they just block your shot then go on until you’re ready to shoot again!
We drove back to the church and found a few more kids there, but still no pastor. Another elder had come and she said she had been told midday. In African time, that could be anywhere from 11:00 until 2:00! So we sat down and the kids sang every song they knew. Then they sang a couple of them again. Then Joseph talked, then I talked, then Pastor Faith came in. She ran to me and shook my hand. “I am so, so, sorry,” she said. “I was trying to cook, but my son is so sick. I had to stop cooking and take him to the hospital. I want you to come to my house to eat after we are finished here.”
I knew it would be useless to ask what was wrong with the child so I asked if he was going to be okay (thinking that if he was going to be okay, there would be hope for me if I caught it from the cook!). She only said, “Ah, he is sleeping now.”
We had 100 pairs of shoes to distribute. Again, things were highly organized. They called out names three at a time and the kids came up. Despite all we’ve done to spread things out, it appears that shoes are a benefit of church membership here. It’s not as though these kids didn’t need shoes, but it would be nice if some of them were used in the community. Instead, we seemed to have the kids in the church and their cousins.
I looked up from the shoes and saw Jimmy Semitala at the back of the room. Jimmy was one of our first sponsored kids. He was attending a Muslim school and had refused to go for prayers. So the school allowed him to wait under a shade tree in the yard during prayers, and Jimmy was using this as a time to preach to the other kids! He was doing well in school, but it turned out he did not have a P7 certificate. He had gone to school that year, but his father didn’t pay the registration fee so Jimmy was denied entrance to the test. His father later bought a P7 certificate with someone else’s name on it, so when Jimmy entered S4, he changed his name. But he came to Vincent and told him the trouble. When Vincent approached the school, they wouldn’t cooperate at all. They threw Jimmy out, which made Jimmy mad at everyone and he dropped out of sight for a while.
Now, he’s back as the youth leader at the church. He works a little at whatever he can find, but when he saw me, he wanted to talk. He agreed to go and sit for his P7 this year, and he asked if we would allow him to start a technical course in computers. He said he knew of jobs in Kampala if he had computer skills, and the school would let him start while he sits for P7. So he could get one of his two computer years behind him while waiting to complete his exam, and the school is fine with this. I told Jimmy I would talk to his sponsors and see if they are willing to help him.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to late teens, and these kids really needed shoes! Most were barefoot. Many wore torn and tattered clothes. Most of the kids were very thin. The first time we came to Kassanda, there was a boy who got one brown and one black shoe. When I asked him about his shoes, he said, “Sir, there are no others like these!” I tried to explain there was, in fact, the mirror image of his pair right there in the stack, but he wouldn’t believe me. He did believe, however, when they made him exchange the black one for another brown!
Today, the same thing happened and I believe it was the same boy! He got two black ones this time, but they were totally different styles. They had to almost wrestle one of the shoes from him!
It took more than an hour to get the shoes out. We had brought a number of other things, including plastic necklaces, bracelets, and rings. We were out of boy toys except for a few ping pong balls, but the boys liked the rings, so all went well. We had brought Bibles from America, and Pastor Faith had decided she wanted to give Bibles to children who had passed P7 and those who had passed S4. There were four of the former and one of the latter. They had me make the presentation and take photos of each recipient. Then, we awarded them one of the soccer balls Jon had bought. We brought them balls a couple of years ago, but it seems the boys burst theirs, then lost the girl’s ball. So this ball was given to the girls!
Finally, we were down to the half ton of school supplies that we had bought. “Elder Jim, you should find a comfortable seat,” said Joseph as he opened the bag filled with pencils, pens, crayons, and rulers. I sat down at the back of the church with a group of little kids that were scared to death of me and picked on them while Joseph, Michael, and Grace asked incredibly silly questions in English to test the kids. Every kid knew every answer, so it was a group of waving, squealing (by Ugandan standards, anyway. They really aren’t all that loud!) kids trying to win a single pencil or pen.
This did go on for a while! Finally, Grace got the bag from Joseph and grabbed what was left. She hurried through the crowd passing out what was left to whoever was closest at hand!
So we were finally finished. As we walked to the van, Joseph told me they wanted me to visit the homes of two of the elders and Pastor Faith. So we loaded the van with several extras and drove to the main road and across the street to Elder Michael’s house. Michael is in the army. His home is in the barracks. He lives in two rooms with his wife, five children, and youngest sister, who is 8 (the same age as his third child). Michael has fought in the war in northern Uganda. He told us today that he is being sent to the Sudan next month. He will be in Darfour.
We entered his house and sat in a concrete floored room with several nice chairs. There weren’t enough chairs, however, so Grace had to sit in the floor. I made her take my seat. “Why are you doing this?” asked Joseph.
“In America, it would be rude for a man to take a chair and let a woman sit on the floor. So I want Grace to have my seat.” This created a storm of laughter!
Finally, Joseph said, “Now she will be even more stubborn!”
As I sat on the mat in the corner, I saw something white scurrying across the floor. It was some kind of winged insect that was in a hurry to get under something. A few minutes later, a much more serious black bug came out of nowhere. He seemed to have a stinger, and possibly, pinchers, or else he was a cockroach. In any event, I was sitting on the mat he probably came out of!
Michael served us fruit: popo’s and pineapple. The pineapple was wonderful and the popo edible. Michael has five kids. He had his daughter and sister sing several songs to us, including one about telephoning Jesus every day. Then, he had each child present his/herself. They stood at attention before us and announced their names, their father’s name, their mother’s name, their school’s name, their class in school, and their ranking in the class.
Everyone wanted their picture taken, so we went outside. Michael noticed that every one of his children had taken off their shoes and socks and were running around barefoot. He yelled at them in Luganda, so we had to wait for each child to find both shoes and both socks. While I was waiting, an elderly lady who smelled strongly of alcohol came around the end of the house. She kept talking to me very loudly in Luganda. I finally told Michael’s wife that I didn’t understand. “She is simply greeting you,” she whispered.
So I shook the ladies hand and asked how she was doing. She hit me with another string of Luganda. I looked at Michael’s wife. “She wants you to take her picture.” So I focused and got a decent photo of her. When I showed it to her, she laughed and laughed!
Finally, the kids were ready. Michael lined everyone up, then had his kids to kneel down so that I couldn’t have shot their shoes if I wanted to. But once everyone was set, I snapped away! And they were pleased with the results. I hope I can send Michael one of these prints before he is deployed next month.
Then we all got in the van again and drove down the road a mile or so to another elder’s house. She lived behind the medical center, a two room cinder block structure with an ambulance parked outside. Her house was quite nice and she didn’t seem at all excited about our visit. We met her two children, then I made pictures. Then we were ready for Pastor Faith.
Her house was only a few doors down. It, too, was nice by Kampala standards. It was home-made brick, but it stood high off the ground and had concrete floors. The metal roof was at least 10 feet above the floor, and there were a number of places where light was shining through it. We sat on a couch and several chairs. Grace gave me the one she had taken because she said it was taller and I would be more comfortable!
Pastor Faith and several young girls started brining out food. A man came around with a can of water and poured it on my hands. There wasn’t any soap. They brought each of us a bowl with part of the chicken I’d seen at church in it. It was submerged in a thick dark soup. There was a bowl of matoke, sweet potato, greens, rice, and cassava root. I decided to be a vegetarian since in only three days, I will be taking my flight home. I ate a slice of sweet potato, some cassava, and some of the greens, which were a bit gritty. Some of the folks ate with their hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to observe closely before. They took gobs of the matoke and dipped it in the chicken broth and ate it. Sometimes, they got pieces of chicken with it. They ate everything very well with their hands. After the meal, someone brought the water can back around. There was soap this time!
Neither Pastor Faith nor the girls who served would eat at the table with us. They stayed behind a curtain in the middle of the room. She called through the curtain to participate in the conversation, but she wouldn’t come out!
When we were finished, we went outside for pictures. There was a very old woman standing beside the house. She was barefoot and her eyes were glazed over with cataracts. She was holding a HUGE stick. It was considerably longer than I am tall and it was about 3 inches in diameter. Pastor Faith said something to the woman and she through the stick away with a very loud comment. Faith said, “My grandmother says she will walk to her picture on her own.” The old woman wouldn’t even let one of her great grandchildren help her!
“How old is she,” I whispered to Faith.
“She is seventy-eight years,” she said.
The grandmother took the center of the picture with Faith beside her and her great grandchildren surrounding her. She held her head high as I snapped the picture, but she wouldn’t smile. I asked if I could make a picture of Faith and her grandmother, and this really pleased the old lady. But just as I prepared to shoot, a late arriving great grandson appeared. His great grandmother nabbed him by the arm and jerked him into the picture with a shouted order. The boy turned and faced the camera. He didn’t smile either!
I showed Faith the pictures and she said something to her grandmother who cracked a huge grin. She had no more than four teeth. As we headed for the van, I looked back. A great grandson was walking beside her at either arm. Both were behind her ready to catch her if she stumbled, but both knew better than to help her!
When I got in the van, I noticed we had added a young man with a bit of luggage. He sat the luggage in the very back of the van and it took up two seats. People KEPT piling in, and I counted as they all got out. We had 17 in our 14 passenger van with two of the seats taken up with luggage! It was a nasal extravaganza I will not soon forget!!
We dropped people here and there, except for the boy who came all the way back to Kampala with us. Vincent flew back in record time, but as we reached the outskirts of Kampala, we also found the traffic! Everyone was returning home from their villages. The traffic moved smoothly, however, and the lack of boda bodas and pedestrians prevented any backups at all.
Joseph escorted me to my room. We talked for a few minutes about the rest of the trip, then he left me around 6:00. I looked at my IM and found that Lisa had been online waiting for me. I thought it said she was there, so I waited for her until after dark. We finally chatted for a while, then I decided to go down to eat.
There was a schedule in the lobby saying that tonight was grill night in the garden. I have eaten there on grill night several times and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I started into the garden. A waiter came up to me. “I wanted to see what is available tonight,” I said.
He more or less stepped in front of me. “There is a buffet set up inside, sir. There is nothing out here at all for you to eat. Just some small things that would be of no interest to you. You must go to the buffet.”
I started to step around the guy, but he was holding up his hand in a stop gesture. I decided that being the only white person in the garden did not lend itself to making a scene with a rude waiter, so I went inside to the buffet. Something was going on because this staff, which is usually very attentive, didn’t acknowledge my presence, so after a minute, I stepped around them and walked over to the buffet. They had the same fish they’d been serving since I got here and a huge steak and kidney pie. I quickly decided I wasn’t THAT hungry!
So I returned to my room and IM’d with Lisa while I ate cheese and crackers, potato chips, and three small bananas.
There are only two more full days left and I’m feeling very depressed about all the things I haven’t gotten done. I have another conference tomorrow night at the church on money management, and a meeting with one of the college students in the early afternoon. I’m also going to do a bit of auditing. But time is slipping away!!
Monday, December 25, 2006
Monday, December 25 Merry Christmas from Uganda!
The sun is setting here. Christmas is almost done! That means it almost time to call home so that I can get everyone at Christmas lunch!
I guess it won’t surprise anyone that the day didn’t go as I had planned! I expected a quiet day, that I would walk to Garden City for lunch, and otherwise, catch up on some computer work.
I did get to sleep until 8:30! That was very nice. And we kept power all night so the air conditioner stayed on. I wandered down to breakfast about 8:45. They had real coffee, not instant, this morning. And the potatoes were bright red (not sure why). The lady who cleans the room was waiting for me when I returned from breakfast. “Sir, do you want to help my family have a merry Christmas?” She has done well, so I gave her a tip.
While I was eating, Vincent called. Patricia had stayed at his house last night. She had slept very little because of the pain in her arm. He wanted to take her to see a doctor. Yesterday, he had started to the doctor, then decided not to go because there wasn’t all that much swelling. But he was concerned and I knew this meant he wanted me to pay. So I told him to go ahead and take her, then went back to my breakfast.
But a few minutes later, I called him back and asked if he wanted me to go with him. He seemed very relieved and said that he did. So I finished breakfast and Vincent and Priscilla came and got me in the van. Priscilla’s hair has extenders that make spikes sticking out in all directions. These seem to have been in place for a very long time because they look filthy. She had on a clean bright yellow dress with white flowers on it. The hem on the dress was out and so it was ragged. She had on her Project shoes and socks. She was holding one wrist with the other hand and she wouldn’t talk to me at all! I asked her to show me her wrist. She is so tiny. At 8, I could easily put my thumb and finger around the swollen wrist. She could move it and her fingers, but she had very little grip and there was a lot more swelling at the base of her thumb and on her forearm.
The streets of Kampala were deserted! There were very few cars or taxis, no boda bodas at all, and few pedestrians. And, most amazingly, the few pedestrians that were out were walking on the sidewalks! Must be some kind of unusual Christmas tradition. On the day we celebrate His birth, when there are few cars on the road and not a very good chance of being run over, all pedestrians will walk on the sidewalk like law abiding sane people rather than in the street like jaywalking maniacs and no one will dart between cars while they are stopped!!
The doctor was close by. It is called The Surgery and this is the place Phil Proctor recommended to us. The doctors are all British. They have a small compound on the side of a hill in an aging upscale area. We parked in a large lot with only a few other cars. We had to go up stairs to get to the entrance. Priscilla was limping noticeably, but I couldn’t tell the source of her problem.
The Ugandan woman inside was very efficient and nice in a very efficient way. She collected 60,000 shillings from me (about $35) as a deposit on the visit. Vincent had to fill out paperwork, but not as much as is typical for a new patient in the US. There was another white man in the waiting room talking with an Indian man. And there was a Ugandan man with very bad teeth. In a few minutes, his mother came out of the patient room. She was dressed in a beautiful golden traditional gown. Both her teeth were also sticking out strangely.
We didn’t have to wait long at all. A nurse called Priscilla’s name and she and Vincent walked down a short hall, then down a stairs. I waited, but it was a very short wait. During that time, though, I saw one of the doctors, a very tall young British woman. A Ugandan nurse brought a file to her, and they looked at it together. It sounded very professional.
Priscilla was two steps ahead of Vincent coming up the stairs. They handed a form to the receptionist and she called me over. “The charge is only 21,000,” she said. We had an emergency room visit on Christmas morning for less than $15!
The doctor said she was just badly bruised. She said there could be a cracked bone, but she wanted Priscilla to give it until Thursday. If she was still hurting, she should come back. She also checked out the cut in Priscilla’s head. I was hoping she would clean out the mess, but she only checked it and said it wasn’t infected. Vincent said he asked, but they couldn’t find a reason for the limp.
When I went up to get my change, I explained to the lady about our Project and asked if the doctors would consider giving us a discount if we used them for our children. “At that many kids, I’m sure we can arrange something,” said the receptionist. “We could set up an account, then give discounts against it based on how much you use us. I’m sure the doctors will be happy to do this. But you will need to come back in two weeks time because our administrator is on holiday.”
This could solve a major problem for us! We have no standardization in our health care, and that lets some of the problems slip through the cracks. So anything that would help us get consistency in treatment for some of these kids would be great. This is also the doctor that is working with Vincent to control his TB.
As we walked back to the hotel, I noticed that Priscilla had moved up very closely beside me. She didn’t take my hand, but I could hardly walk for her! They took me back to the hotel, and I asked Vincent if he had access to ice. He said he might but he wasn’t sure, so I brought them up to my room. Priscilla had never seen an elevator. She grabbed Vincent’s hand with her good one and squeezed as we rode up two floors. She was also amazed by the hotel room with carpet on the floors and bad wall paper. I didn’t have ice, but I had an almost frozen bottle of water. Vincent rolled it up and down her sore arm. She never said a word, but she winced as the bottle went over her forearm. I had her grip the bottle and that really hurt her, but she was a trooper, she never cried at all. I poured her a large class of mango juice and she drank every drop. I had very little else, but I did find her a mint.
I walked down with them. The down elevator really got her! She grabbed at both of us!! I took her out to see the pool, but she had no idea what it was. She wasn’t even sure after Vincent explained to her. Given the amount of gunk in the pool, I’m not sure that most Americans wouldn’t wonder about the purpose of this huge container of stagnant water!
I asked Vincent if Priscilla had gotten anything at all for Christmas. He said Agatha, his wife, was hoping to get her something yesterday. I asked him to call and make sure, but Agatha hadn’t had enough money left to buy anything. So I told Vincent I would come with them and buy something for her. I asked what she wanted and he said a dress.
So we down to the market. It wasn’t nearly as dead as the streets downtown, but it was all but deserted compared with Saturday! But the stalls Vincent knew were all closed, so we went to Garden City. All but one of these stores was also closed. We found two dresses left there, but they weren’t very nice. Priscilla would have loved either of them, but Vincent and I thought she needed something nicer.
So we went to lunch at the Food Court. There is an Indian place in the Court that I’ve never tried. With two of the kiosks closed today, I decided to try that one, but I didn’t have any idea what the items on the menu might be! The waiter was minimally helpful, but after several questions, he finally said, ‘I will make special for you. You can try many things.”
So I went back to my table. Since my stomach wasn’t feeling great, I ordered a mango laahsi without thinking that it also has homemade yoghurt! It was very good but sour.
Vincent ordered fish with gravy, rice, and peas. Priscilla wanted chips (French fries). She ate about half the huge plate and took the rest with her. I got her to try a bite of my Indian food. One of the things was a doza, a HUGE piece of paper thin bread rolled up. It was spicy, but not too much so and I dipped it in dal for her. She tried it, but apparently didn’t like it. She wouldn’t eat anything else from me.
I’m not sure what some of the other things were. I had coconut chutney, which I recognized and enjoyed. There was something that could have been potatoes died yellow with hunks of green on top and it was also good. The rice was fine. There was a dark brown doughnut shaped thing that quite spicy, and a white blob that looked like dough someone forgot to cook. It had no taste, but it was good in the hot sauce! On bottom was a thing like a thin crust pizza. I have no idea what any of the things on it might have been. The reds were much redder than tomato sauce and the green things were too green to be real. It was my least favorite, but Vincent liked it.
After lunch, Priscilla walked very close to me. She wouldn’t take my hand, but she leaned on me a lot. When we got to the first floor, we saw that the escalator was running. She couldn’t wait to get on it. It isn’t Vincent’s favorite thing, so he waited for us, but Priscilla all but pushed me to go faster to take her on it. She held my hand with both of hers at first, then put one on the rail like the other kids were doing. She was grinning from ear to ear when we got to the top.
They took me back to the hotel and this time, they left me there. “She had Christmas she will not forget,” said Vincent as he pulled away. I wish she could forget the hurt and the fact that her mother beat her. I hope she did forget about all that for a while. But I don’t think Vincent appreciates that it is a Christmas I will never forget either!
I took a nap when I got upstairs, then another one. I wasn’t really sick, but I must be very nearly exhausted! I didn’t feel like going out or doing anything but read a little and sleep. I talked to my parents a little before lunch, then Lisa’s parents. Then to Lisa, and to everyone at her parents’ house for Christmas, but I ran out of minutes long before I was finished talking to everyone.
I ate dinner at the buffet. Against my better judgment, I had French onion soup, but I resisted the temptation to indulge in the very wilted salad. I skipped the matoki and had boiled potatoes and cooked carrots instead. I have never eaten steak or anything like it in Uganda, but tonight, they had steak and gravy. The steaks were small and not even ½ inch thick, so I got two along with two small pieces of fried fish.
The potatoes were as good as always, and the carrots had no taste at all. The beef must have been hanging in one of the stalls on the street for a few days too long. It was tender enough to cut with a machete or very sharp sword. It was a little bit gritty, probably the ubiquitous Ugandan spice, red dust. There was a hint of ginger in the gravy, which Ugandans don’t typically use, so I hope the taste was intentionally included. I’m pretty sure this was the same fish I had at breakfast the other morning!
There were tons of deserts. I got a tart with white filling and white grapes on top. The filling wasn’t sweet and the tart was too thick. I also had more crème caramel, but it was left over and even though soaked with a watery caramel sauce, it was very dry. But there was pineapple upside down cake and it was superb.
Now, less you expect me to come home the size of Lookout Mountain, I only took tastes of each, but I do believe I’m gaining weight here. They cook a lot with butter, and starch is, by far, the major dietary component. If you can stay away from matoki and posho and the traditional sauces that go over them, the food here can be quite good!
Back to the room and back to bed. Kassanda tomorrow, the farthest place we go in the Project.
CHRISTMAS IN UGANDA
I wanted to take a minute to write about this. Things are different this year than two years ago. The Christmas lights downtown are missing this year, and I miss them! I’ve seen a few more fake Christmas trees and no one selling branches from big trees for Christmas decoration.
Very few Ugandans decorate at Christmas. Vincent has a tiny table-top tree, but I don’t think any of the others do. Some stores have trees. The hotel here has one decorated with the Christmas cards they’ve received. The hotel at the guesthouse also had a fake tree with simple ornaments.
At Christmas you see more mannequins modeling clothing at the stalls around town. Some will have more than a dozen lined up out front. They are ALWAYS note book paper white! It is so odd to see incredible African colors on snow-white dummies! And the other day, one of the shops had one of these mannequins standing out front without a top! Now THAT was a sight!
The most important gifts at Christmas are clothes. It appears that for many families, this is THE clothing shopping time. You see very few toys. There are some soccer balls and such, but few dolls and cars and play things.
There are also some of the most bizarre things around that you can imagine. People walk the streets selling things. Sometimes, they have a few items that they wave at passing cars. Others have bicycles. A bicycle is a beast of burden in Uganda. It is truly beyond belief what Ugandans can stack on a bike. Some merchants have displays on their bikes that tower more than seven feet tall. These bike merchants might have anything from mops and brooms to toys to spatulas and kitchen utensils to clothing to food. You see them everywhere pushing their bikes on these horrible roads, calling out there wares to whoever might be interested. The walkers are the most interesting. Their retail philosophy is based on availability where and when the customer wants. They are usually specialty retailers. The other day in a round-a-bout, I saw a newspaper seller, a man selling battery cables and rabbit ears for a TV (when less than 1/3 of Kampala has electricity!). Another had huge blow-up plastic Santas.
Christmas is still a time for family here. When you ask the kids what they are doing for Christmas, eating and seeing family always come before any thought of a gift at all. Some want to eat pork for Christmas, some chicken. The rich have turkey, the poor only matoke. But they all have each other.
I’m finally getting the hang of one thing. It doesn’t matter who you are talking to or about what, you MUST say hello and how are you before you start your business. If you just start into things, people look at you either as though you are from Mars or as though they hope to have the opportunity to really mess things up for you in some way. So it’s, “Hello, how are you?” first whether you are checking out at a shop, addressing the bell hop, or talking to an official.
So my challenge has been where to put Merry Christmas. Should I send my wishes before asking how someone is, or do I find out if all is well before sending Christmas cheer? After two Christmases here, I have no idea. As long as you get both in, the folks here seem pretty happy. They’re pretty happy anyway, no matter what I do or how bad things are for them. Even though Priscilla never did get comfortable enough to talk this morning, she never lost her smile!
And I have no idea what the protocol might be for blogging either! So whether my wishes for you should have come before my post or at the end, at least I am including them!
May you and yours have the merriest of Christmases and the happiest of new year’s.
I guess it won’t surprise anyone that the day didn’t go as I had planned! I expected a quiet day, that I would walk to Garden City for lunch, and otherwise, catch up on some computer work.
I did get to sleep until 8:30! That was very nice. And we kept power all night so the air conditioner stayed on. I wandered down to breakfast about 8:45. They had real coffee, not instant, this morning. And the potatoes were bright red (not sure why). The lady who cleans the room was waiting for me when I returned from breakfast. “Sir, do you want to help my family have a merry Christmas?” She has done well, so I gave her a tip.
While I was eating, Vincent called. Patricia had stayed at his house last night. She had slept very little because of the pain in her arm. He wanted to take her to see a doctor. Yesterday, he had started to the doctor, then decided not to go because there wasn’t all that much swelling. But he was concerned and I knew this meant he wanted me to pay. So I told him to go ahead and take her, then went back to my breakfast.
But a few minutes later, I called him back and asked if he wanted me to go with him. He seemed very relieved and said that he did. So I finished breakfast and Vincent and Priscilla came and got me in the van. Priscilla’s hair has extenders that make spikes sticking out in all directions. These seem to have been in place for a very long time because they look filthy. She had on a clean bright yellow dress with white flowers on it. The hem on the dress was out and so it was ragged. She had on her Project shoes and socks. She was holding one wrist with the other hand and she wouldn’t talk to me at all! I asked her to show me her wrist. She is so tiny. At 8, I could easily put my thumb and finger around the swollen wrist. She could move it and her fingers, but she had very little grip and there was a lot more swelling at the base of her thumb and on her forearm.
The streets of Kampala were deserted! There were very few cars or taxis, no boda bodas at all, and few pedestrians. And, most amazingly, the few pedestrians that were out were walking on the sidewalks! Must be some kind of unusual Christmas tradition. On the day we celebrate His birth, when there are few cars on the road and not a very good chance of being run over, all pedestrians will walk on the sidewalk like law abiding sane people rather than in the street like jaywalking maniacs and no one will dart between cars while they are stopped!!
The doctor was close by. It is called The Surgery and this is the place Phil Proctor recommended to us. The doctors are all British. They have a small compound on the side of a hill in an aging upscale area. We parked in a large lot with only a few other cars. We had to go up stairs to get to the entrance. Priscilla was limping noticeably, but I couldn’t tell the source of her problem.
The Ugandan woman inside was very efficient and nice in a very efficient way. She collected 60,000 shillings from me (about $35) as a deposit on the visit. Vincent had to fill out paperwork, but not as much as is typical for a new patient in the US. There was another white man in the waiting room talking with an Indian man. And there was a Ugandan man with very bad teeth. In a few minutes, his mother came out of the patient room. She was dressed in a beautiful golden traditional gown. Both her teeth were also sticking out strangely.
We didn’t have to wait long at all. A nurse called Priscilla’s name and she and Vincent walked down a short hall, then down a stairs. I waited, but it was a very short wait. During that time, though, I saw one of the doctors, a very tall young British woman. A Ugandan nurse brought a file to her, and they looked at it together. It sounded very professional.
Priscilla was two steps ahead of Vincent coming up the stairs. They handed a form to the receptionist and she called me over. “The charge is only 21,000,” she said. We had an emergency room visit on Christmas morning for less than $15!
The doctor said she was just badly bruised. She said there could be a cracked bone, but she wanted Priscilla to give it until Thursday. If she was still hurting, she should come back. She also checked out the cut in Priscilla’s head. I was hoping she would clean out the mess, but she only checked it and said it wasn’t infected. Vincent said he asked, but they couldn’t find a reason for the limp.
When I went up to get my change, I explained to the lady about our Project and asked if the doctors would consider giving us a discount if we used them for our children. “At that many kids, I’m sure we can arrange something,” said the receptionist. “We could set up an account, then give discounts against it based on how much you use us. I’m sure the doctors will be happy to do this. But you will need to come back in two weeks time because our administrator is on holiday.”
This could solve a major problem for us! We have no standardization in our health care, and that lets some of the problems slip through the cracks. So anything that would help us get consistency in treatment for some of these kids would be great. This is also the doctor that is working with Vincent to control his TB.
As we walked back to the hotel, I noticed that Priscilla had moved up very closely beside me. She didn’t take my hand, but I could hardly walk for her! They took me back to the hotel, and I asked Vincent if he had access to ice. He said he might but he wasn’t sure, so I brought them up to my room. Priscilla had never seen an elevator. She grabbed Vincent’s hand with her good one and squeezed as we rode up two floors. She was also amazed by the hotel room with carpet on the floors and bad wall paper. I didn’t have ice, but I had an almost frozen bottle of water. Vincent rolled it up and down her sore arm. She never said a word, but she winced as the bottle went over her forearm. I had her grip the bottle and that really hurt her, but she was a trooper, she never cried at all. I poured her a large class of mango juice and she drank every drop. I had very little else, but I did find her a mint.
I walked down with them. The down elevator really got her! She grabbed at both of us!! I took her out to see the pool, but she had no idea what it was. She wasn’t even sure after Vincent explained to her. Given the amount of gunk in the pool, I’m not sure that most Americans wouldn’t wonder about the purpose of this huge container of stagnant water!
I asked Vincent if Priscilla had gotten anything at all for Christmas. He said Agatha, his wife, was hoping to get her something yesterday. I asked him to call and make sure, but Agatha hadn’t had enough money left to buy anything. So I told Vincent I would come with them and buy something for her. I asked what she wanted and he said a dress.
So we down to the market. It wasn’t nearly as dead as the streets downtown, but it was all but deserted compared with Saturday! But the stalls Vincent knew were all closed, so we went to Garden City. All but one of these stores was also closed. We found two dresses left there, but they weren’t very nice. Priscilla would have loved either of them, but Vincent and I thought she needed something nicer.
So we went to lunch at the Food Court. There is an Indian place in the Court that I’ve never tried. With two of the kiosks closed today, I decided to try that one, but I didn’t have any idea what the items on the menu might be! The waiter was minimally helpful, but after several questions, he finally said, ‘I will make special for you. You can try many things.”
So I went back to my table. Since my stomach wasn’t feeling great, I ordered a mango laahsi without thinking that it also has homemade yoghurt! It was very good but sour.
Vincent ordered fish with gravy, rice, and peas. Priscilla wanted chips (French fries). She ate about half the huge plate and took the rest with her. I got her to try a bite of my Indian food. One of the things was a doza, a HUGE piece of paper thin bread rolled up. It was spicy, but not too much so and I dipped it in dal for her. She tried it, but apparently didn’t like it. She wouldn’t eat anything else from me.
I’m not sure what some of the other things were. I had coconut chutney, which I recognized and enjoyed. There was something that could have been potatoes died yellow with hunks of green on top and it was also good. The rice was fine. There was a dark brown doughnut shaped thing that quite spicy, and a white blob that looked like dough someone forgot to cook. It had no taste, but it was good in the hot sauce! On bottom was a thing like a thin crust pizza. I have no idea what any of the things on it might have been. The reds were much redder than tomato sauce and the green things were too green to be real. It was my least favorite, but Vincent liked it.
After lunch, Priscilla walked very close to me. She wouldn’t take my hand, but she leaned on me a lot. When we got to the first floor, we saw that the escalator was running. She couldn’t wait to get on it. It isn’t Vincent’s favorite thing, so he waited for us, but Priscilla all but pushed me to go faster to take her on it. She held my hand with both of hers at first, then put one on the rail like the other kids were doing. She was grinning from ear to ear when we got to the top.
They took me back to the hotel and this time, they left me there. “She had Christmas she will not forget,” said Vincent as he pulled away. I wish she could forget the hurt and the fact that her mother beat her. I hope she did forget about all that for a while. But I don’t think Vincent appreciates that it is a Christmas I will never forget either!
I took a nap when I got upstairs, then another one. I wasn’t really sick, but I must be very nearly exhausted! I didn’t feel like going out or doing anything but read a little and sleep. I talked to my parents a little before lunch, then Lisa’s parents. Then to Lisa, and to everyone at her parents’ house for Christmas, but I ran out of minutes long before I was finished talking to everyone.
I ate dinner at the buffet. Against my better judgment, I had French onion soup, but I resisted the temptation to indulge in the very wilted salad. I skipped the matoki and had boiled potatoes and cooked carrots instead. I have never eaten steak or anything like it in Uganda, but tonight, they had steak and gravy. The steaks were small and not even ½ inch thick, so I got two along with two small pieces of fried fish.
The potatoes were as good as always, and the carrots had no taste at all. The beef must have been hanging in one of the stalls on the street for a few days too long. It was tender enough to cut with a machete or very sharp sword. It was a little bit gritty, probably the ubiquitous Ugandan spice, red dust. There was a hint of ginger in the gravy, which Ugandans don’t typically use, so I hope the taste was intentionally included. I’m pretty sure this was the same fish I had at breakfast the other morning!
There were tons of deserts. I got a tart with white filling and white grapes on top. The filling wasn’t sweet and the tart was too thick. I also had more crème caramel, but it was left over and even though soaked with a watery caramel sauce, it was very dry. But there was pineapple upside down cake and it was superb.
Now, less you expect me to come home the size of Lookout Mountain, I only took tastes of each, but I do believe I’m gaining weight here. They cook a lot with butter, and starch is, by far, the major dietary component. If you can stay away from matoki and posho and the traditional sauces that go over them, the food here can be quite good!
Back to the room and back to bed. Kassanda tomorrow, the farthest place we go in the Project.
CHRISTMAS IN UGANDA
I wanted to take a minute to write about this. Things are different this year than two years ago. The Christmas lights downtown are missing this year, and I miss them! I’ve seen a few more fake Christmas trees and no one selling branches from big trees for Christmas decoration.
Very few Ugandans decorate at Christmas. Vincent has a tiny table-top tree, but I don’t think any of the others do. Some stores have trees. The hotel here has one decorated with the Christmas cards they’ve received. The hotel at the guesthouse also had a fake tree with simple ornaments.
At Christmas you see more mannequins modeling clothing at the stalls around town. Some will have more than a dozen lined up out front. They are ALWAYS note book paper white! It is so odd to see incredible African colors on snow-white dummies! And the other day, one of the shops had one of these mannequins standing out front without a top! Now THAT was a sight!
The most important gifts at Christmas are clothes. It appears that for many families, this is THE clothing shopping time. You see very few toys. There are some soccer balls and such, but few dolls and cars and play things.
There are also some of the most bizarre things around that you can imagine. People walk the streets selling things. Sometimes, they have a few items that they wave at passing cars. Others have bicycles. A bicycle is a beast of burden in Uganda. It is truly beyond belief what Ugandans can stack on a bike. Some merchants have displays on their bikes that tower more than seven feet tall. These bike merchants might have anything from mops and brooms to toys to spatulas and kitchen utensils to clothing to food. You see them everywhere pushing their bikes on these horrible roads, calling out there wares to whoever might be interested. The walkers are the most interesting. Their retail philosophy is based on availability where and when the customer wants. They are usually specialty retailers. The other day in a round-a-bout, I saw a newspaper seller, a man selling battery cables and rabbit ears for a TV (when less than 1/3 of Kampala has electricity!). Another had huge blow-up plastic Santas.
Christmas is still a time for family here. When you ask the kids what they are doing for Christmas, eating and seeing family always come before any thought of a gift at all. Some want to eat pork for Christmas, some chicken. The rich have turkey, the poor only matoke. But they all have each other.
I’m finally getting the hang of one thing. It doesn’t matter who you are talking to or about what, you MUST say hello and how are you before you start your business. If you just start into things, people look at you either as though you are from Mars or as though they hope to have the opportunity to really mess things up for you in some way. So it’s, “Hello, how are you?” first whether you are checking out at a shop, addressing the bell hop, or talking to an official.
So my challenge has been where to put Merry Christmas. Should I send my wishes before asking how someone is, or do I find out if all is well before sending Christmas cheer? After two Christmases here, I have no idea. As long as you get both in, the folks here seem pretty happy. They’re pretty happy anyway, no matter what I do or how bad things are for them. Even though Priscilla never did get comfortable enough to talk this morning, she never lost her smile!
And I have no idea what the protocol might be for blogging either! So whether my wishes for you should have come before my post or at the end, at least I am including them!
May you and yours have the merriest of Christmases and the happiest of new year’s.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Sunday, December 24: Church and a Long Afternoon!
I stayed up much too late working on what I was going to say this morning. But I made it down to the buffet in plenty of time to eat. There were fried fish pieces this morning, and that might seem a bit strange, but it was actually quite good!
Vincent arrived at 9:30. As we drove, he told me a difficult story. One of our children, a first grader, had come to town to get her shoes yesterday. She had been living with relatives in a faraway suburb since her father died. Her mother now has AIDS, and the girl hadn’t seen her in some time. So she took her new shoes and went to her mother’s house to show her, and she was excited about spending Christmas at home.
The story isn’t completely clear, but the girl showed up at Vincent’s house in hysterics. She said her mother had gotten mad at her for a reason that isn’t clear, and severely beat her with one of the shoes. The girl’s head was cut where she was hit with something else, and one of her arms was badly swollen. Vincent took her to the hospital, but the arm was only sprained and badly bruised. She spent the night at Vincent’s house, and she was at church when we got there. She even sang with a kid’s group, but she was moving slowly. It looked to me like she had some rib damage.
Apparently, there isn’t anything we can do, other than keep her away from her mother. Vincent will find a way to do that.
The service went well, but the number of people there was off sharply. The tradition here is like ours, everyone goes home to be with their families. Almost no one here is a native of Kampala. They all come from the villages around, so starting yesterday, there was a mass exodus to the villages. And today, much of the congregation was gone. Even though it was a small group, they were very attentive. Joseph asked me to talk about money because some of the congregation are having problems. So I did. Mark acted as my translator and he did well. It seemed to go well, and they’ve asked me to do more on Wednesday night. After the service, Joseph asked for all the officers and those working in the church to stay back and meet with me. I talked with them for a while, trying to encourage them in their works.
We had a COMPLETELY full van after church. I think the 14 seats had a total of 17 people in them! We first had to pick up shoes for Mpigi. We had delivered 75 pairs during our first week, so we needed to take them 25 pairs more. One of the ladies was going that way to see her family, so she volunteered to take the shoes hidden in a sugar bag in an overcrowded taxi. We took her to the taxi stand, which is a full block completely filled with taxis. And we dropped all the others off at various places as we went.
Joseph asked me if I was ready to go to the hotel, and I told him that would be fine. I knew they all had things to do with their families. So they left me at the hotel and we agreed to meet at 9:00 on Tuesday to take shoes to Kassanda. Vincent called a few minutes later to see if I was ready to go to church at Namerembe Cathedral, but it wasn’t even 2:00 and the service didn’t start until 5:00 so I told him to go on with his family and I’d take a taxi to the cathedral.
I came up to the room and rested for a few minutes. I’d watched carefully as we drove in from church and I was sure I could walk to Garden City Mall for lunch. It looked as though the properties actually adjoined, but there wasn’t a gate behind the swimming pool. I found a bell hop and he told me I would have to walk on the road, which would make it a much longer walk. But I was hungry and not interested in the hotel buffet, so I started out. A taxi driver immediately stopped me and we talked about him taking me to cathedral. We set a tentative time, but he told me I would need to call to confirm.
Centennial Park lies beside the hotel, so I decided to take a short cut even though the hotel folks told me there was only one entrance into the park. But there appeared to be a lot of flowers there, so I cut through. There was a sign for a new Indian restaurant coming soon, and then, a sign for a Turkish restaurant that was open. I love Turkish food, so I walked up.
A well dressed young Ugandan woman came up and asked if I wanted to eat. I was the only customer, and I learned that they had only opened the day before. In fact, only half the menu was available. I ordered to kabobs and a yoghurt, cucumber, and mint concoction made from homemade yoghurt. I took a seat, and a few minutes later, the young woman joined me. Her English was absolutely perfect, and she had no trouble understanding me at all. I learned that her husband is from New York and her mother was an English Literature teacher at the university.
A little later, she came back and asked me if I would like to wait in an area out back. There were comfortable chairs and cushions under a tent out back, so I followed her out there and sat down. She took another seat, and I spent nearly two hours talking with her, the Turkish owner, and a Turkish man and his two beautiful little children. The owner spoke very little English, but he gestured a lot and was very pleased that I loved his food. The other man spoke better English and he was even more interesting. He told us he had worked as a cook in Turkish restaurants in Saudi Arabia and the Sudan.
,
While I was waiting for my food, she told me the restaurant was having some start-up pains. She said the chef was very experienced, but last week, he invited her to try a chicken kabob and she ended up with severe food poisoning. I also learned that they were having trouble getting the wood they needed for the grill, so they were burning the waste wood a nearby construction site.
The woman had studied and practiced law, but she said the Ugandan system was so corrupt that she quit! Her husband majored in graphic design in college in the US, so she entered his business handling the books and developing marketing plans for clients all over Uganda. The business is still in its earliest stages, so she is working at restaurants to keep money coming in for their daughter. One of her clients is a nonprofit here that looks for sponsors for children in Uganda who can’t afford to go to school. She said she had gotten sucked into the program once she was forced to look at the true needs of the kids in Uganda and now, she spends most of her time working with it. She said they are not working with younger kids, only secondary and university. But she said the need in primary school was also huge. It was fascinating to hear the perspective of a highly educated young Ugandan. She is very frustrated with her country and feel that there must be changes or the structure will collapse.
The staff kept coming out to ask questions. She’s dealing with a staff of totally untrained people and her work covered everything from how to tie a tie for the man who was seating people to how to check a bathroom to how to arrange things on a plate to make them more appealing. She said it was unbelievable how many people had come in looking for jobs. She told me about a man who works from early morning until late at night as a security guard in a large store here. He is paid 50,000 shillings per month which is less than $30. She said he has at least three kids and a wife and she can’t imagine where they could live on that money, but it is considered a good job in Kampala. She also told me about a skilled electrician who had helped set up the restaurant. He told her he would work as a cleaner if she would hire him because he needed regular work.
When it finally arrived, the food was wonderful! I ate while the woman smoked and drank coffee, the owner asked how I liked it, and the other Turkish man told us about his kids!!
She finally asked me if I was Christian and I told her yes. It was odd to sit in a totally Muslim facility talking to a woman about faith. She wasn’t Muslim. She was an atheist, and she was very interested in understanding why I would fool with the church. Our conversation was interrupted when the Turkish man came back. We could see his little girl in an adjacent playground. The girl is about ten, and she was jumping on a trampoline with a tiny Ugandan girl. The man told us his son was having trouble at school because one of the black kids told him he would cut his throat if he came back. I thanked everyone and left.
I hope to go back one evening to find out more about this program. I have a card, but I would like to hear more before I talk to the woman who runs it.
Someone kept calling me on the phone, but I didn’t have any air time so I couldn’t talk. Rather than walking on to Garden City, I crossed the road and went into a very nice convenience store. They had phone cards, and they had ice cream. I haven’t been eating ice cream here, but I decided if the homemade yoghurt didn’t kill me, the ice cream should be fine!
So I went back to my room and sat on the balcony and ate my strawberry/vanilla ice cream! It was wonderful and a perfect end to the spiced kabobs! I came in and lay down for a minute. The next thing I knew it was a few minutes after 5:00 and I had missed the church service. So I read for a bit, then went down to the business center to print out my e-ticket. I had a terrible fright last night when I couldn’t find my itinerary on the Delta web site. But I finally realized I had entered an O in my reservation number rather than a zero. With e-tickets here, you have to have a printout or the airport doesn’t believe you have reservation. So instead of a ticket, you have to have a paper “e-ticket.” Progress, huh?
I got the page printed, but I also needed to print a report Grace had given me to review. She gave it to me on a floppy and the new computers in the Business Center have no floppy drives. The man there took me to an office in the hotel, however, and let me copy the disk onto my flash drive.
On the way up to the room, the young bellhop who had gotten the fan for me came up to talk. “So you are alone at Christmas?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“No, I am off,” he said, “but I have a problem. My pockets are light and I can’t afford to go home to the village to see my family. I will volunteer to work tomorrow. Maybe I can raise money to go home later.”
“I hope you can,” I said, and I went up to my room. But as I went, I started thinking about what we had talked about in church, about using our resources to meet true needs. I’m sure this kid didn’t have the money mostly because of partying, but still, it IS Christmas. I went back downstairs, but he was gone from his post. I walked through the lobby, but he was no where to be found. I went out and saw him walking into the Business Center. I followed him in and told him I needed to see him.
He tried to tell me it would cost him 30,000 shillings to go home.
“You could go to Kenya for 30,000 shillings,” I said. “I can’t help with that.”
“No, no. I don’t mean it will cost that much for travel. That is what I would need to have something to take to my family. I can’t go with nothing. It will cost me 15,000 round trip for the travel.”
“I’m willing to give you 10,000. Will that help.”
The man grabbed my arm. “I can get home with that. I will worry about the rest of it then.”
I gave him the bill, and he shook my hand again. “You will not see me here tomorrow! I will tell them now that I have a way to go home. Thank you!”
No need for two of us to miss Christmas!
“Christmas with the Kranks” is on tonight. I can’t imagine what Ugandans must think of us if they watch things like that! The cable tv is most interesting! I turned on a station as a movie went off. There was a note on the screen saying the next movie would start in 15 minutes. Suddenly, the screen went dark, then an African woman dressed in skins and covered in tattoos was standing outside a mud hut asking her mother where her father had gone. The station never did come back! There is some kind of Africa channel running there with terrible acting and incomprehensible plots. The movie channel is nowhere to be found, but they added another one further up the dial with the Kranks! I had thought I was losing my mind: I would go to a channel expecting a movie and find a soccer game. But now I know for sure that they change what’s on the channels. Very strange!!
Vincent arrived at 9:30. As we drove, he told me a difficult story. One of our children, a first grader, had come to town to get her shoes yesterday. She had been living with relatives in a faraway suburb since her father died. Her mother now has AIDS, and the girl hadn’t seen her in some time. So she took her new shoes and went to her mother’s house to show her, and she was excited about spending Christmas at home.
The story isn’t completely clear, but the girl showed up at Vincent’s house in hysterics. She said her mother had gotten mad at her for a reason that isn’t clear, and severely beat her with one of the shoes. The girl’s head was cut where she was hit with something else, and one of her arms was badly swollen. Vincent took her to the hospital, but the arm was only sprained and badly bruised. She spent the night at Vincent’s house, and she was at church when we got there. She even sang with a kid’s group, but she was moving slowly. It looked to me like she had some rib damage.
Apparently, there isn’t anything we can do, other than keep her away from her mother. Vincent will find a way to do that.
The service went well, but the number of people there was off sharply. The tradition here is like ours, everyone goes home to be with their families. Almost no one here is a native of Kampala. They all come from the villages around, so starting yesterday, there was a mass exodus to the villages. And today, much of the congregation was gone. Even though it was a small group, they were very attentive. Joseph asked me to talk about money because some of the congregation are having problems. So I did. Mark acted as my translator and he did well. It seemed to go well, and they’ve asked me to do more on Wednesday night. After the service, Joseph asked for all the officers and those working in the church to stay back and meet with me. I talked with them for a while, trying to encourage them in their works.
We had a COMPLETELY full van after church. I think the 14 seats had a total of 17 people in them! We first had to pick up shoes for Mpigi. We had delivered 75 pairs during our first week, so we needed to take them 25 pairs more. One of the ladies was going that way to see her family, so she volunteered to take the shoes hidden in a sugar bag in an overcrowded taxi. We took her to the taxi stand, which is a full block completely filled with taxis. And we dropped all the others off at various places as we went.
Joseph asked me if I was ready to go to the hotel, and I told him that would be fine. I knew they all had things to do with their families. So they left me at the hotel and we agreed to meet at 9:00 on Tuesday to take shoes to Kassanda. Vincent called a few minutes later to see if I was ready to go to church at Namerembe Cathedral, but it wasn’t even 2:00 and the service didn’t start until 5:00 so I told him to go on with his family and I’d take a taxi to the cathedral.
I came up to the room and rested for a few minutes. I’d watched carefully as we drove in from church and I was sure I could walk to Garden City Mall for lunch. It looked as though the properties actually adjoined, but there wasn’t a gate behind the swimming pool. I found a bell hop and he told me I would have to walk on the road, which would make it a much longer walk. But I was hungry and not interested in the hotel buffet, so I started out. A taxi driver immediately stopped me and we talked about him taking me to cathedral. We set a tentative time, but he told me I would need to call to confirm.
Centennial Park lies beside the hotel, so I decided to take a short cut even though the hotel folks told me there was only one entrance into the park. But there appeared to be a lot of flowers there, so I cut through. There was a sign for a new Indian restaurant coming soon, and then, a sign for a Turkish restaurant that was open. I love Turkish food, so I walked up.
A well dressed young Ugandan woman came up and asked if I wanted to eat. I was the only customer, and I learned that they had only opened the day before. In fact, only half the menu was available. I ordered to kabobs and a yoghurt, cucumber, and mint concoction made from homemade yoghurt. I took a seat, and a few minutes later, the young woman joined me. Her English was absolutely perfect, and she had no trouble understanding me at all. I learned that her husband is from New York and her mother was an English Literature teacher at the university.
A little later, she came back and asked me if I would like to wait in an area out back. There were comfortable chairs and cushions under a tent out back, so I followed her out there and sat down. She took another seat, and I spent nearly two hours talking with her, the Turkish owner, and a Turkish man and his two beautiful little children. The owner spoke very little English, but he gestured a lot and was very pleased that I loved his food. The other man spoke better English and he was even more interesting. He told us he had worked as a cook in Turkish restaurants in Saudi Arabia and the Sudan.
,
While I was waiting for my food, she told me the restaurant was having some start-up pains. She said the chef was very experienced, but last week, he invited her to try a chicken kabob and she ended up with severe food poisoning. I also learned that they were having trouble getting the wood they needed for the grill, so they were burning the waste wood a nearby construction site.
The woman had studied and practiced law, but she said the Ugandan system was so corrupt that she quit! Her husband majored in graphic design in college in the US, so she entered his business handling the books and developing marketing plans for clients all over Uganda. The business is still in its earliest stages, so she is working at restaurants to keep money coming in for their daughter. One of her clients is a nonprofit here that looks for sponsors for children in Uganda who can’t afford to go to school. She said she had gotten sucked into the program once she was forced to look at the true needs of the kids in Uganda and now, she spends most of her time working with it. She said they are not working with younger kids, only secondary and university. But she said the need in primary school was also huge. It was fascinating to hear the perspective of a highly educated young Ugandan. She is very frustrated with her country and feel that there must be changes or the structure will collapse.
The staff kept coming out to ask questions. She’s dealing with a staff of totally untrained people and her work covered everything from how to tie a tie for the man who was seating people to how to check a bathroom to how to arrange things on a plate to make them more appealing. She said it was unbelievable how many people had come in looking for jobs. She told me about a man who works from early morning until late at night as a security guard in a large store here. He is paid 50,000 shillings per month which is less than $30. She said he has at least three kids and a wife and she can’t imagine where they could live on that money, but it is considered a good job in Kampala. She also told me about a skilled electrician who had helped set up the restaurant. He told her he would work as a cleaner if she would hire him because he needed regular work.
When it finally arrived, the food was wonderful! I ate while the woman smoked and drank coffee, the owner asked how I liked it, and the other Turkish man told us about his kids!!
She finally asked me if I was Christian and I told her yes. It was odd to sit in a totally Muslim facility talking to a woman about faith. She wasn’t Muslim. She was an atheist, and she was very interested in understanding why I would fool with the church. Our conversation was interrupted when the Turkish man came back. We could see his little girl in an adjacent playground. The girl is about ten, and she was jumping on a trampoline with a tiny Ugandan girl. The man told us his son was having trouble at school because one of the black kids told him he would cut his throat if he came back. I thanked everyone and left.
I hope to go back one evening to find out more about this program. I have a card, but I would like to hear more before I talk to the woman who runs it.
Someone kept calling me on the phone, but I didn’t have any air time so I couldn’t talk. Rather than walking on to Garden City, I crossed the road and went into a very nice convenience store. They had phone cards, and they had ice cream. I haven’t been eating ice cream here, but I decided if the homemade yoghurt didn’t kill me, the ice cream should be fine!
So I went back to my room and sat on the balcony and ate my strawberry/vanilla ice cream! It was wonderful and a perfect end to the spiced kabobs! I came in and lay down for a minute. The next thing I knew it was a few minutes after 5:00 and I had missed the church service. So I read for a bit, then went down to the business center to print out my e-ticket. I had a terrible fright last night when I couldn’t find my itinerary on the Delta web site. But I finally realized I had entered an O in my reservation number rather than a zero. With e-tickets here, you have to have a printout or the airport doesn’t believe you have reservation. So instead of a ticket, you have to have a paper “e-ticket.” Progress, huh?
I got the page printed, but I also needed to print a report Grace had given me to review. She gave it to me on a floppy and the new computers in the Business Center have no floppy drives. The man there took me to an office in the hotel, however, and let me copy the disk onto my flash drive.
On the way up to the room, the young bellhop who had gotten the fan for me came up to talk. “So you are alone at Christmas?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“No, I am off,” he said, “but I have a problem. My pockets are light and I can’t afford to go home to the village to see my family. I will volunteer to work tomorrow. Maybe I can raise money to go home later.”
“I hope you can,” I said, and I went up to my room. But as I went, I started thinking about what we had talked about in church, about using our resources to meet true needs. I’m sure this kid didn’t have the money mostly because of partying, but still, it IS Christmas. I went back downstairs, but he was gone from his post. I walked through the lobby, but he was no where to be found. I went out and saw him walking into the Business Center. I followed him in and told him I needed to see him.
He tried to tell me it would cost him 30,000 shillings to go home.
“You could go to Kenya for 30,000 shillings,” I said. “I can’t help with that.”
“No, no. I don’t mean it will cost that much for travel. That is what I would need to have something to take to my family. I can’t go with nothing. It will cost me 15,000 round trip for the travel.”
“I’m willing to give you 10,000. Will that help.”
The man grabbed my arm. “I can get home with that. I will worry about the rest of it then.”
I gave him the bill, and he shook my hand again. “You will not see me here tomorrow! I will tell them now that I have a way to go home. Thank you!”
No need for two of us to miss Christmas!
“Christmas with the Kranks” is on tonight. I can’t imagine what Ugandans must think of us if they watch things like that! The cable tv is most interesting! I turned on a station as a movie went off. There was a note on the screen saying the next movie would start in 15 minutes. Suddenly, the screen went dark, then an African woman dressed in skins and covered in tattoos was standing outside a mud hut asking her mother where her father had gone. The station never did come back! There is some kind of Africa channel running there with terrible acting and incomprehensible plots. The movie channel is nowhere to be found, but they added another one further up the dial with the Kranks! I had thought I was losing my mind: I would go to a channel expecting a movie and find a soccer game. But now I know for sure that they change what’s on the channels. Very strange!!
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Saturday December 23: Shoes for Sponsored Children
Sometimes, you can’t win for losing. The air felt wonderful last night, until a brief (as in 30 second) power failure around 11:00. The air conditioner wouldn’t come back on no matter what. We have small remote control units to work the micro air units which are located above the sliding glass balcony windows, but mine would do nothing at all. I even climbed up in a chair and tried to find a reset button, but there wasn’t one.
So I went to bed with no air, no fan, and no way to open the window. I had run the air on max until it failed, so it was really cold in the room, so I slept okay until early morning. It still wouldn’t come on.
I went down to the desk first thing this morning. I needed to get the air fixed and I needed to drop off my laundry. They told me I had to take the laundry to Housekeeping one floor up (first floor. The ground floor here is 0). And they sent a bell hop up with me to check on my air unit. When we got to the room, there was a green light flashing on the air unit. It hadn’t been there at all last night. He grabbed the remote and the air came on!
“Okay, so you are fine.”
“But why wouldn’t it come on last night?”
“Oh, the power was off and we were on generator. We do not allow the air conditioners to run when we are on generator. Too expensive.”
So I have an air conditioner, but most of the time, it won’t work! And after power comes back on, it has to be reset by hand. The bell hop promised to get me a fan.
I went to breakfast. It was even better than I remember. There was a man cooking omelets, a strange kind of fruit cake, pineapple and water melon, two kinds of juice, and a hot bar of sausage, potatoes, baked beans, and scrambled eggs. There was even cereal, but only instant coffee, and the spoon in it looked as though it had been used to serve honey!
They were due at 9:00 and showed up at 8:50. Everyone was anxious about the shoes! We drove to Joseph’s house where 525 pairs of shoes and 600 pairs of socks were stacked in boxes at the end of the kids’ six bunk beds. We took about 250 pairs out to the van and headed for church.
The crowd wasn’t nearly as large as last week, but there were still more than 125 kids there for their shoes. They waited patiently through a lesson, then I spoke about the meaning of Christmas, then the process of passing out shoes began. It was amazing! Grace called out three names at a time, and the kids came up. A group of teens helped them find the right shoes and Mebel passed out socks. It was an incredibly well organized system, although it took two hours to pass out the shoes.
I wondered if it would be any different with me here alone, and it was. The kids instantly warmed up to me. There was no hesitation anywhere, at least among the little ones. They were all grinning and vying for my attention as soon as I walked in the room. Getting shoes probably had a lot to do with it! It’s a huge deal here! Many of these kids would not get new shoes once a year were it not for us. They would rely on used shoes from one of the stalls downtown, and live in fear of being sent home if they made it to school because their shoes didn’t look smart enough.
I spent a long time talking with Jacinta, our first university student. She has finished her first year as a business major at the university. I talked with her about the classes she has taken and the ones she will take soon. She is planning to major in computers or accounting. She is doing well, though she failed one course first term when she contracted typhoid and fought it for nearly three months. She kept going to school, but she fell behind in one class and will have to make it up next year. Jacinta is a beautiful young woman. Her father is dead and her mother doesn’t work because she has a house full of kids. Jacinta lives with them and takes a taxi to school each morning, a cost of about 33 cents each way. The project helps with this when her mother can’t. Apparently, there are times when there is no food at home at all.
She is working with the younger kids in the Project on every Saturday that she can. The kids really look up to her, and she is very patient with them. As the first person from this particular area to go to university, she understands the importance of her success and she accepts this responsibility. Dan and Lisa, you would be very proud of her! She has given me her new phone number for you, and she said that she always looks for a letter from you, although she knows you may be too busy to write. She said she wished she could get pictures and letters from time to time.
I also met with Mark, the young man who has caused us so much trouble of late. He will finish school next December, so I was encouraging him to start planning now for university. It isn’t clear that his grades will allow him to continue, but we will work with him to find a technical program if that is the case.
Harriet, the Headmistress at Bright Futures Academy, came to see us today. Her school has grown to 80 students! She was far from friendly, but she was at least cordial! Florence also came by, and she was as happy and carefree as ever. She invited me to Christmas dinner at her house, but understood when I explained shy I couldn’t make it.
I also had a chance to talk with Joseph at some length about the trip to the tombs. He told me Michael and Vincent would not go into the tomb because they required us to take off our shoes. They said that would be showing respect to a false god, so they could not participate. I asked why he went in, and he said he was complying with a rule, no respecting a god. He said he wasn’t there to worship, but to learn history. We had a long talk about motives and how they are often as important if not more so in determining sin than actions! He understood that it would be wrong for Vincent and Michael to enter the tombs feeling as they do, and it would be wrong for him to criticize their beliefs. But he also understood that our going in was fine, and that it would be wrong for Vincent and Michael to criticize us.
We finally finished and cleaned up the mess in the church. We had a lot of shoes left over, which we expected. We also were off on our estimates for some of the sizes so some of the kids won’t get their shoes until next week. But the shoe store has agreed to accept exchanges through next Saturday, so we will be fine. We’ll make sure the shoes for Kassanda are okay on Tuesday, then they’ll exchange sizes to balance out all that’s needed. Then, they’ll carry the leftover shoes into the community to poor kids in the church and outside the church who need shoes.
We climbed in the van and took the remaining shoes back to Joseph’s house, then we delivered several church members to various stops. We were near a pizza place, so Vincent took us there for lunch. Mamba Point is a small place. The tables are set in a garden under a thatched roof structure modeled after old fashioned Ugandan homes. We ordered two large pizzas with ham, cheese and mushrooms. It came about 20 minutes later. The crust was very thin and the pizza was loaded with toothpick sized pieces of ham, excellent cheese, a little tomato sauce, and large pieces of basil. It was one of the best pizzas I’ve ever eaten!
It was nearly 4:00 and there were no kids in town to see, so Vincent took us out to an agricultural research farm that was only a little ways from the guesthouse. We got through the gate, but could find only one man, who said the place was closed for Christmas. We drove back to Kampala through an Islamic community where many people were buying food from very colorful food stalls. This market was much more orderly than the one downtown, and the shoppers in Arab attire gave the market a completely different look and feel.
We returned to the hotel a little after 5:00. I had found a photo of a squid on the Internet, so I showed it to all of them. Michael was rather appalled, but he had to admit it tasted great. I found a picture of a shrimp, but couldn’t convince Michael it was equally good. He also wanted to see a crab, so I found a blue crab and it scared him. He said he would never eat that, and his reaction was the same to a picture of escargot!
My laundry wasn’t in the room and the Internet was barely working. But the air came on when I pushed the remote control, so it is now freezing in here, in preparation for the failure to come soon.
I do have a balcony with a view of the parking lot. It’s a very narrow balcony, hardly wide enough for two chairs, but I enjoyed sitting out there in the late afternoon, listening to the cars coming in for both the weddings getting ready to start downstairs. Then the mosquitoes started buzzing, so I came in. I called my family. They are celebrating Christmas today due to scheduling conflicts there. I am not! I got to talk to everyone for at least a minute, then I ran out of time on my phone. Of course, they are out of phone cards downstairs!
I went downstairs and found that a bit has changed at the hotel dining room! There is a huge new menu that includes a few Chinese things as well as a bit of Indian. And prices have risen with the variety. By a lot. The buffet didn’t look great, but I decided to go that way instead. I expected it to be cheaper, but I was wrong! Still, it was only $10 with water. It started with mushroom soup and bread which a waitress served me. Then I man served me matoki, and he listened when I told him I only wanted a little. I put groundnut sauces on it, and it hardly tasted like mud at all. I ate pasta instead of chunks of fatty “meat” or chicken stew. And of course there were potatoes and rice. So it was a pure starch buffet!
They had also added deserts, and in typical African style, they weren’t being touched. I had a bit of crème caramel and mixed fruit. Not bad for under $10!!
I walked around and looked at the outdoor wedding. It is by the beautiful pool, and it was beautifully lit and very tastefully and elegantly decorated in white with small white lights. There was another of the terribly obnoxious non-stop MC’s and a lot of people enjoying themselves. The hotel has opened a new wing for parties and conferences. It is very nicely done, and heavily used. I also stopped to see my computer friend to thank him again for helping me last night after his work day ended.
I came back to the room to work on my lesson for tomorrow, but I got distracted by, of all things, “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!” How odd: Jonnie Depp as I’m not sure what with a lot of midgets and terrible children right in the middle of Africa!
And my laundry came. The lady called and brought it up at 8:55. It was supposed to be here by 5:00 but since there were two 5’s in the time it arrived, that is probably better here!
I MUST get to work. It is late already!
So I went to bed with no air, no fan, and no way to open the window. I had run the air on max until it failed, so it was really cold in the room, so I slept okay until early morning. It still wouldn’t come on.
I went down to the desk first thing this morning. I needed to get the air fixed and I needed to drop off my laundry. They told me I had to take the laundry to Housekeeping one floor up (first floor. The ground floor here is 0). And they sent a bell hop up with me to check on my air unit. When we got to the room, there was a green light flashing on the air unit. It hadn’t been there at all last night. He grabbed the remote and the air came on!
“Okay, so you are fine.”
“But why wouldn’t it come on last night?”
“Oh, the power was off and we were on generator. We do not allow the air conditioners to run when we are on generator. Too expensive.”
So I have an air conditioner, but most of the time, it won’t work! And after power comes back on, it has to be reset by hand. The bell hop promised to get me a fan.
I went to breakfast. It was even better than I remember. There was a man cooking omelets, a strange kind of fruit cake, pineapple and water melon, two kinds of juice, and a hot bar of sausage, potatoes, baked beans, and scrambled eggs. There was even cereal, but only instant coffee, and the spoon in it looked as though it had been used to serve honey!
They were due at 9:00 and showed up at 8:50. Everyone was anxious about the shoes! We drove to Joseph’s house where 525 pairs of shoes and 600 pairs of socks were stacked in boxes at the end of the kids’ six bunk beds. We took about 250 pairs out to the van and headed for church.
The crowd wasn’t nearly as large as last week, but there were still more than 125 kids there for their shoes. They waited patiently through a lesson, then I spoke about the meaning of Christmas, then the process of passing out shoes began. It was amazing! Grace called out three names at a time, and the kids came up. A group of teens helped them find the right shoes and Mebel passed out socks. It was an incredibly well organized system, although it took two hours to pass out the shoes.
I wondered if it would be any different with me here alone, and it was. The kids instantly warmed up to me. There was no hesitation anywhere, at least among the little ones. They were all grinning and vying for my attention as soon as I walked in the room. Getting shoes probably had a lot to do with it! It’s a huge deal here! Many of these kids would not get new shoes once a year were it not for us. They would rely on used shoes from one of the stalls downtown, and live in fear of being sent home if they made it to school because their shoes didn’t look smart enough.
I spent a long time talking with Jacinta, our first university student. She has finished her first year as a business major at the university. I talked with her about the classes she has taken and the ones she will take soon. She is planning to major in computers or accounting. She is doing well, though she failed one course first term when she contracted typhoid and fought it for nearly three months. She kept going to school, but she fell behind in one class and will have to make it up next year. Jacinta is a beautiful young woman. Her father is dead and her mother doesn’t work because she has a house full of kids. Jacinta lives with them and takes a taxi to school each morning, a cost of about 33 cents each way. The project helps with this when her mother can’t. Apparently, there are times when there is no food at home at all.
She is working with the younger kids in the Project on every Saturday that she can. The kids really look up to her, and she is very patient with them. As the first person from this particular area to go to university, she understands the importance of her success and she accepts this responsibility. Dan and Lisa, you would be very proud of her! She has given me her new phone number for you, and she said that she always looks for a letter from you, although she knows you may be too busy to write. She said she wished she could get pictures and letters from time to time.
I also met with Mark, the young man who has caused us so much trouble of late. He will finish school next December, so I was encouraging him to start planning now for university. It isn’t clear that his grades will allow him to continue, but we will work with him to find a technical program if that is the case.
Harriet, the Headmistress at Bright Futures Academy, came to see us today. Her school has grown to 80 students! She was far from friendly, but she was at least cordial! Florence also came by, and she was as happy and carefree as ever. She invited me to Christmas dinner at her house, but understood when I explained shy I couldn’t make it.
I also had a chance to talk with Joseph at some length about the trip to the tombs. He told me Michael and Vincent would not go into the tomb because they required us to take off our shoes. They said that would be showing respect to a false god, so they could not participate. I asked why he went in, and he said he was complying with a rule, no respecting a god. He said he wasn’t there to worship, but to learn history. We had a long talk about motives and how they are often as important if not more so in determining sin than actions! He understood that it would be wrong for Vincent and Michael to enter the tombs feeling as they do, and it would be wrong for him to criticize their beliefs. But he also understood that our going in was fine, and that it would be wrong for Vincent and Michael to criticize us.
We finally finished and cleaned up the mess in the church. We had a lot of shoes left over, which we expected. We also were off on our estimates for some of the sizes so some of the kids won’t get their shoes until next week. But the shoe store has agreed to accept exchanges through next Saturday, so we will be fine. We’ll make sure the shoes for Kassanda are okay on Tuesday, then they’ll exchange sizes to balance out all that’s needed. Then, they’ll carry the leftover shoes into the community to poor kids in the church and outside the church who need shoes.
We climbed in the van and took the remaining shoes back to Joseph’s house, then we delivered several church members to various stops. We were near a pizza place, so Vincent took us there for lunch. Mamba Point is a small place. The tables are set in a garden under a thatched roof structure modeled after old fashioned Ugandan homes. We ordered two large pizzas with ham, cheese and mushrooms. It came about 20 minutes later. The crust was very thin and the pizza was loaded with toothpick sized pieces of ham, excellent cheese, a little tomato sauce, and large pieces of basil. It was one of the best pizzas I’ve ever eaten!
It was nearly 4:00 and there were no kids in town to see, so Vincent took us out to an agricultural research farm that was only a little ways from the guesthouse. We got through the gate, but could find only one man, who said the place was closed for Christmas. We drove back to Kampala through an Islamic community where many people were buying food from very colorful food stalls. This market was much more orderly than the one downtown, and the shoppers in Arab attire gave the market a completely different look and feel.
We returned to the hotel a little after 5:00. I had found a photo of a squid on the Internet, so I showed it to all of them. Michael was rather appalled, but he had to admit it tasted great. I found a picture of a shrimp, but couldn’t convince Michael it was equally good. He also wanted to see a crab, so I found a blue crab and it scared him. He said he would never eat that, and his reaction was the same to a picture of escargot!
My laundry wasn’t in the room and the Internet was barely working. But the air came on when I pushed the remote control, so it is now freezing in here, in preparation for the failure to come soon.
I do have a balcony with a view of the parking lot. It’s a very narrow balcony, hardly wide enough for two chairs, but I enjoyed sitting out there in the late afternoon, listening to the cars coming in for both the weddings getting ready to start downstairs. Then the mosquitoes started buzzing, so I came in. I called my family. They are celebrating Christmas today due to scheduling conflicts there. I am not! I got to talk to everyone for at least a minute, then I ran out of time on my phone. Of course, they are out of phone cards downstairs!
I went downstairs and found that a bit has changed at the hotel dining room! There is a huge new menu that includes a few Chinese things as well as a bit of Indian. And prices have risen with the variety. By a lot. The buffet didn’t look great, but I decided to go that way instead. I expected it to be cheaper, but I was wrong! Still, it was only $10 with water. It started with mushroom soup and bread which a waitress served me. Then I man served me matoki, and he listened when I told him I only wanted a little. I put groundnut sauces on it, and it hardly tasted like mud at all. I ate pasta instead of chunks of fatty “meat” or chicken stew. And of course there were potatoes and rice. So it was a pure starch buffet!
They had also added deserts, and in typical African style, they weren’t being touched. I had a bit of crème caramel and mixed fruit. Not bad for under $10!!
I walked around and looked at the outdoor wedding. It is by the beautiful pool, and it was beautifully lit and very tastefully and elegantly decorated in white with small white lights. There was another of the terribly obnoxious non-stop MC’s and a lot of people enjoying themselves. The hotel has opened a new wing for parties and conferences. It is very nicely done, and heavily used. I also stopped to see my computer friend to thank him again for helping me last night after his work day ended.
I came back to the room to work on my lesson for tomorrow, but I got distracted by, of all things, “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!” How odd: Jonnie Depp as I’m not sure what with a lot of midgets and terrible children right in the middle of Africa!
And my laundry came. The lady called and brought it up at 8:55. It was supposed to be here by 5:00 but since there were two 5’s in the time it arrived, that is probably better here!
I MUST get to work. It is late already!
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