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!!