Thursday December 14 – More children!

The electricity situation at the guesthouse is growing desperate. The generators were running when we returned from our meal last night. Around midnight, they turned them off. Without the fan, it became unbearably hot very quickly. When I finished the blog around 1:40, the power was still off, but it came on before I went to sleep, then off again around 3:00 until we got up. That meant no hot water at all for showers that morning, and with only dirty pants to wear, it made for a difficult start to the day.

The van picked us up at 9:00 and we started across town. It was raining hard this morning, and the sky showed no sign of a break. We had scheduled time at an Internet Café, but I couldn’t find my flash drive so there was no way to move data from my computer to the Café computer. Vincent said he could loan me a drive, so I decided to wait until Friday to update the blog.

So we had a whole day scheduled to visit children! We remained in the Ntinda area for most of the day. We began the day in Agnes’ house. Agnes is a very small girl, with the confidence and demeanor of a Marine drill sergeant. She is an orphan, and she lives in a nice house with a woman who has adopted her to go with several of her own children and several other adoptees. All the children are girls, and even Agnes seemed a bit intimidated by that! She had very little to say, which is very much NOT Agnes!

By the time we finished with Agnes, a group of sponsored kids had arrived and rather than shoot inside, Grace insisted I come outside on a porch to shoot the kids. We must have made quite an impression on this neighborhood: three very tall white men in rain jackets and hoods and two Africans under a bright blue umbrella!

The roads in Ntinda have become a joke. There are so many pot holes, there is no longer a road in many places. The area is very hilly, and this creates horrible logistics problems as deep ruts in narrow tracks up steep hills are almost impassible in the rain. We continued to slip into 4-wheel drive when we needed to, and we did okay, but we slid several times and became stuck once.

As the morning progressed, Jim came up with another famous expression. We drove through an area where garbage lay scattered over a vacant lot and people stirred through it with hoes. The odor of soggy rotting garbage in a state of flux was overpowering, and it continued on for several blocks. “Well,” said Jim, “there’s a bunch a people around here who I bet would pay to work at Bowaters Paper Mill!” So we spent the day identifying people who should be willing to pay handsomely to move to Bowaters! And there were many as the day wore on!!

We soon stopped beside a road lined with wooden shack shops and a tall, distinctive boy walked to the van. He is Odekke Nelson, Gary’s sponsored son. Odekke is entering Senior 5 this January. His English is perfect and he carried himself with self confidence. He is the top student in his class right now, and he wants to be a doctor. I was very impressed with Nelson, but when his father came up, I was equally impressed with him. Nelson is one of seven kids. His two older siblings are both at the university. To keep all these kids in school costs 7 million shillings per term and when Nelson’s father lost his job in 2003, this became impossible. The two university students found help through the university, and we agreed to sponsor Nelson. The father, who is still unemployed, raises all the other fees by collecting up paper at the dumps and selling it for recycling. He kept talking about how proud he was of Nelson, and his every praising word glowed in the boys eyes and smile.

We also met a young girl named Veronica who has announced her intention to leave the program. She was absolutely scared to death of me when I tried to talk to her, and something in her story didn’t sound right. She said that we had moved her to a new school but she didn’t want to move so her brothers had agreed to pay her fees. She wouldn’t answer questions about their speed of payment, or about how things were going for her. We added her to our list to check on later.

Vincent took us to a terribly expensive Internet Café/coffee shop for lunch. We basically snacked in the pastel colored room that could have been at home anywhere in America. We talked about some sort of recognition for students graduating into secondary school and for students graduating secondary school. We decided Bibles would be a good thing for both groups but with 45 moving from primary to secondary school and another 6 graduating high school, the cost of buying all nice Bibles was prohibitive. So we decided to buy nicer Bibles for secondary graduates and paperback Bibles for the others. Jon also decided he would like to buy soccer balls for the kids.

So after lunch, we walked through the shopping center where we were eating to a large store called GAME. We bought 3 soccer balls, tennis balls, and ping pong balls. The soccer balls would remain at the church, but the others would be distributed to kids as we drove around.

We then drove across town to a religious books store where we found Bibles starting at $8! While $15 for the senior graduates seemed reasonable, the $8 price tag for the younger group wasn’t practical. We drove back across town to Bible House, a store that sold only Bibles. Prices weren’t much different here, however. We gave up on Bibles after wasting more than an hour!

Back to visiting kids! We worked our way back to Ntinda and visiting again. This time, however, instead of finding five to as many as ten kids when we stopped, we found only two or three. We didn’t get to enter any homes today, but we were able to see more than 30 kids.

Jon had Vincent to stop the van near a group of kids who were playing soccer with a tiny blackened ball of some sort. Jon talked to the group for a minute, then threw them a bright tennis ball. I wasn’t in position to film, so you will miss the young boy who retrieved the ball jumping up and down with delight, and the whole crew squealing with delight. We left them meeting as a group to discuss how they would manage playing with their new ball.

Our last visit took us through a very rough looking area. The street was a muddy mess and much wider than most of the streets in Ntinda. A mosque stood in the middle of the street, which was lined with all sorts of tiny shacks where almost anything imaginable was being sold. The left overs from cutting up fresh tilapia from Lake Victoria placed much of this area firmly in the would pay to move to Bowaters camp!

There was a very strange feeling here, and Grace confirmed that this area was, in fact, one of the very worst for crime in all of Uganda. No one smiled or waved to us as we drove through. We found our two children and talked with them on the street. Their father was supposed to join us, but he didn’t. We asked how we had found these children since they lived far from Ntinda and Grace said she had contacted a teacher at one of the schools. The teacher told her these two were very good students, but in very difficult situations that would probably make continuing school beyond the first few years impossible. So we agreed to sponsor them.

On the way back, I mentioned to Vincent that I was thirsty and would like to stop at a service station for a cold soda. He was taking us back home via Kololo, which is an incredibly nice hill where many of the wealthiest in Kampala live. He continued winding through the city, then asked if we still wanted a drink. We all said we did.

A while later, Vincent turned into a parking lot and proceeded to park the van in front of a large Chinese restaurant. When I asked him what we were doing, he said it would be a good place to buy drinks. It was also about dinner time, so it appears he thought we would buy Chinese for everyone again. We told him to find a service station. He muttered for a while, but he soon found one and we all bought drinks.

The traffic outside our guesthouse was, once again, completely stopped. We waited for a few minutes, then climbed out and walked to our driveway. Once again, traffic started to move as soon as we touched the ground, so Vincent pulled in before we could get there.

We stopped at the dining room and put in our orders, then climbed the hill to our rooms. Both Jim and I had our laundry! I, however, didn’t have a towel.

Our dinner was very good once again, and very reasonably priced. We retired to our rooms after dinner for (hopefully) a restful night.