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.
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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!!