Monday June 11: A Very Hectic Day

It was Bill’s last day in Uganda. We started at 9:00 like most days, but this one had a quick wrinkle. Joseph handed me his phone a few minutes after we started the van. It was British Air and they would only speak with Ray. They said they had our bag and Ray told them we would pick it up at the airport that night when we took Bill out.

We spent the morning pushing on with the kids. The start of the second week is when a bit of frustration tends to set in. We found 217 kids in the first week, but this was because we went to the big schools which have a lot of our kids. In the second week, we end up going to schools that are far apart to see only one or two kids, so the count, which was building at an astronomical rate in the first week, slows to a crawl in the second week.

This was our day to see the kids on the east side of town – the sprawling, very poor area along Jinja Road. This is the area where Michael lives and he knows it very well so we spent the day with Michael as our guide. Grace stayed at church along with Joseph. Bill spent the day with them working with Excel on their new computer.

This area is a maze of tiny dirt roads and Vincent doesn’t know it as well as other parts of town. As I said, much of the area is very poor and there is a large Muslim population. It is also incredibly beautiful. Much of the area is high up on a hill at the edge of Kampala where rural meets urban. The views of the undeveloped valley and swamp and the rolling hills in the distance are breathtaking!

One of our first stops was at a small school housed in buildings that would be questionable for farm animals. The child we visited, however, was very happy in her school and after she had her mosquito net, she was anxious to rejoin her classmates. Suddenly, the whole student body came past us with kids laughing and smiling and waving. They moved onto a huge open field and formed a tremendous circle. It was gym class and the kids began a complex chasing game. We watched for fifteen minutes, and it was still going strong when we left. The kids were yelling and laughing and having a blast.

Just before lunchtime, we drove up to the gates of a gigantic Muslim school. In land area, this was the biggest school we saw on the entire trip. There were at least eight separate buildings which included primary and secondary schools and dorms. At Christmas, Jim, Jon, and I met two Muslim twin boys who had recently lost their mother. Their father had been dead for a while, so they were completely alone. Michael heard about these boys through a teacher who lived in the community. She had taken the boys into her home, but she was a widow and couldn’t afford their school fees. When we found the boys at Christmas, they didn’t think they would be able to go back to school in January and they had a hard time believing that a group of Christians in America no less would help them return for the winter term.

The parents of these boys had struggled with schooling all their lives and one of the boys is in Senior 3 while the other is in Senior 1. We met the S3 brother near the gate. He was a completely changed young man! He was so happy to see us that he ran to meet the van. He pumped our hands and repeated the African handshake over and over again. His first question was, “Where’s Jim?” I told him Jim would visit again before too long.

The boy makes excellent grades and his English is perfect. He wanted to tell us everything about his school. We finally got him settled enough to walk the several hundred yards to the back of the property where his S1 brother was in class. We waited for him while he found the brother. This boy also glowed, though he was a bit more shy than his brother. After a few minutes, he grabbed my hand and asked if I would go and meet his teachers. He led me up a hill to a room with a sign telling everyone but teachers to stay out. He looked in twice, then grabbed my hand and led me in. He stood beside me and said not a word as a room full of Muslim teachers, several in flowing Arab robes, glared at me without a word. I stood there waiting for them to say something. When it was obvious that they weren’t going to, I said,” Hello, I’m here to visit this young man and his twin brother. I am from America, and we run a program that sponsors school fees for children who cannot otherwise afford to go to school. This young man and his brother are orphans and we learned of their problems during a visit in December. We are honored to have the opportunity to support them in this place.”

There was absolute dead silence as every person in the room looked at me. No one smiled. Finally, a man sitting near the front said, “You are welcome.” That was all. No one else said anything, so I thanked the man and backed out of the room.

When we were outside, I looked at the boy. He was glowing, apparently very proud to show off this representative of his sponsor. I thanked him for letting me meet his teachers and he smiled. I would later learn that Al Queda had set off a suicide bomb in Nairobi that day in a Western hotel. It made the hole experience even more unreal.

We saw 13 kids before 3:00 with two the largest number at any given school. Before we left, we pulled into Michael’s neighborhood. He wanted us to meet his father. I met his mother and sisters in December, but none of us had met his father, a retired secretary at a school we’d visited. We visited for a minute and made pictures, then went on to Michael’s house a little further down the hill. Michael has the last house on the dirt track, so his back porch looks off into the incredible valley.

At Christmas, I had taught a lot about money and savings. Michael had written to me a couple of weeks before the trip saying that he had listened. He owns his home, so he owes no rent. He decided that he would pay himself rent and save the money. He then took the money and bought bricks, then had a two room building built. Although the roof isn’t in place yet, Michael will soon be the proud owner of a building that he can either rent out or use as the starting place for the school his wife, Mabel, hopes to open once she finishes her Educational Administration Certificate. He was very pleased with the result of his first attempt to save!

Michael had another thing to show us. With a loan from the Project, Michael and his family finally had electricity for the very first time. “It will let my children work on their books at night,” Michael told me in his email announcing he had joined the electric age. His connection was ten days old when we visited.

We left Michael’s house and drove to the church. We hadn’t had time for lunch, but it was so late that we would never be able to eat lunch and dinner both. So we picked up Bill and drove to the hotel. David brought out power bars, and we all ate one to hold us over until dinner. Bill went up and gathered up his clothes.

We left the hotel at 4:30. David was scheduled to speak at church at 5:00. Bill’s flight left at 10:30 so we wanted to have him at the airport by 8:30. We figured if we could get David by 6:00, there would be plenty of time to eat along the way.

While David conducted a Bible study, I took Bill back to the van. Bill had been in Uganda for a week, but had not had the chance to visit a Ugandan at home. I had asked Vincent if we could go visit a sponsored child’s home in the area while David talked. Grace had just the place.

We drove the short distance to Najeera, another of these areas at the very end of Kampala. We wound around narrow dirt trails for about 15 minutes, then pulled up at a house I knew well. The woman who lived here is one of my favorite people in Uganda. She spent her early life as a witchdoctor before finding Christ through our old clinic. She is absolutely, totally full of energy and although she speaks no English at all, she is a delight to be near.

She was peeling vegetables when we pulled up but she leaped up as soon as she knew I was there. She screamed and hugged me over and over, then she grabbed Bill. Her house was built up a bit to avoid the flooding that plagues Najeera. There was a four inch step then a 17 inch step in order to get onto her back porch. She leaped up first then helped all the rest of us climb up. We entered a tiny room with four upholstered chairs and nothing else. A piece of paper thin linoleum lay at one end of the room, but it didn’t cover half the floor. We sat down and the lady asked us all kinds of questions through Vincent and Grace as interpreters.

Suddenly, she jumped up and went out the door. She leaped off the porch and ran down the street. She came back a moment later carrying a bunch of bananas. She put them on her plane coffee table and motioned for us to eat them. They were the sweetest bananas I’ve ever tasted.

We made her picture along with her daughter and grandchildren. When we started to leave, she reached up top of a crate standing in the corner and took down a green and beige sleeping mat. She handed it to Bill.

Bill took it as though it were scalding hot. “What do I do?” he whispered.

“I guess you take it,” I said. “It would hurt her feelings if you didn’t.”

“How could I take a gift from her? She has nothing.”

“I know,” I said, remembering how I felt two trips ago when she brought me a beautiful cover for mine and Lisa’s bed a few trips ago, “but she wants you to know how important this Project is to her. Her grandkids will probably have to sleep on the same mat tonight, but she wants you to know how important this is to her.”

Bill didn’t say a word as we drove back to the church.

David was finishing preaching as we pulled up. We quickly loaded the van and started across town to Garden City for a last Indian dinner. As we approached the mall, Vincent told us he was worried that we would be late if we stopped to eat now even though it was barely 6:00. We decided we could eat at a hotel near the airport.

The worse ride of my life began as we turned onto Entebbe Road. An ambulance came screaming down the middle of the road. Traffic on both sides parted a bit to give it room. And a dozen other vehicles squeezed in behind it into the small hole in traffic it created. Within a few minutes, it was obvious that the ambulance was en route to a major accident that had all traffic on Entebbe Road blocked in both directions.

Vincent started calculating and figured out that he could swing over to a parallel road. He doubled back on Entebbe Road and chose a fairly open cross street. But the parallel road was equally blocked. He tried again and found a heavily congested road, but one that was at least moving a little bit.

We finally merged back into Entebbe Road. Either the accident had been cleared or we were beyond it. It appeared to be the latter because there wasn’t much traffic. That changed within seconds however. A motorcade came up the middle of the road. It consisted of at least a dozen slow-moving cars. Vincent said it was the vice president. Traffic froze once again until the motorcade was well past.

After than, we remained very congested all the way to the edge of Entebbe when our side of the road was suddenly blocked by a sign pointing to the other side of the road. It said DIVERSION. A lower sign read HALF ROAD CLOSED. The signs meant exactly what they said. One half of a two lane road was closed for paving and we were expected to merge into the speeding, oncoming traffic. Vincent sat for a minute, then tried to ease in, a very disconcerting thing when you are merging with traffic streaming straight toward you. He inched in, but almost immediately, was forced onto the median by a large bus. He tried again and was forced off by a transfer truck.

He spotted a place to turn and we inched our way toward it. When he reached it, he swung across the oncoming rush and turned up a steep hill into downtown Entebbe. We drove slowly through the city along with a few other cars. But as we headed alone to the airport, it appeared Vincent had found a short cut no one else had thought of.

Bill wasn’t late for check in, but he certainly wasn’t early. Our drive had taken much more than two hours. Bill said his goodbyes. He found that he couldn’t fit in the sleeping mat without folding it, so he asked us to bring it for him. He was stopped after security and his bag searched. He waited for a long time for an agent, then again while the agent worked on his boarding pass, but he finally cleared through to Immigration. We lost site of him at that point.

Meanwhile, Ray, Lisa, and Joseph went downstairs to talk to the BA luggage folks. Lisa came back in a few minutes. They wouldn’t let any of them enter the ARRIVALS area without first going to the main security office in the DEPARTURE area. And they said since it was Ray’s bag, only he could go in. So Ray went to the security office alone while we watched Bill. We finally sent half of us downstairs in case Ray came out of ARRIVALS while the rest of us waited until Bill disappeared, then joined the others at ARRIVALS.

It took quite a long time, but Ray finally appeared at the ARRIVALS door carrying our bag! He said he’d had a bit of trouble. First, he’d thrown away his claim form, which they insisted they needed to see. He convinced them that the baggage claim form was enough. And it turned out that the bag had my name and not Ray’s on it. It was checked by Ray, but it had my name on it, and the Ugandan luggage people couldn’t understand that at all. But he kept arguing with them, and they finally let him have the bag!

We stopped for fuel for the van at a station in the airport grounds. Ron started gathering up peanut butter and bread for a late-night sandwich. I told him we were still going to a restaurant so he wouldn’t need any of that. We got back in the van and took off. There was now a lot of traffic coming toward the airport, so the head-on merging was very difficult. Finally, Vincent cut off onto a paved road. It was absolutely pitch dark and the road soon turned to mud. There were people walking all around, and there were at least three other vehicles with us. After about ten minutes, Vincent turned into a very muddy side road and stopped. He was lost, and there were five vehicles following him! They dutifully lined up behind Vincent making turning around impossible. After a few minutes, they realized he wasn’t going anywhere and they all turned around, leaving us out on this terribly dark road with a group of pedestrians. Vincent turned around and retraced his steps to the main road. We eased our way against the traffic, cutting very often to avoid an oncoming vehicle.

After we got away from Entebbe, the road opened up and we had no traffic all the way back to the city. We hurried to our hotel and said our goodnights. We met in Indian Summer a few minutes later for a late dinner. David, Lisa, and I split a bread basket while Ron ate a full meal.

We got to our rooms again a few minutes before 11:00. It was much too late for the Internet!