This was our first morning without Bill and we all missed his quiet good humor. Even David admitted that he missed his evening discussions with Bill. The team here appreciated Bill’s work with their Excel files, and they hope he comes back to Uganda soon. We all do, Bill!
The van arrived at 9:00. We climbed in and started our day at once. Once again, the children were very much spaced out and there was only one child per school.
We started the day at King’s College, which is really a secondary school. It was called King’s College because it was on a huge, huge, compound which was owned by the king. There was a 1950’s vintage palace and an impressive gate that we had to enter to get to the school. Grace said she had driven past this place many times, but she had never been inside!
One of our trips involved a long commute out of town on the road to Kasanda. We found a large, old school that was almost in need of repairs. We had driven all the way out here to see Steven, Stan’s sponsored child. We all walked up to the main administration building for one of the major surprises of the trip: the headmaster was a white British man. Steven wasn’t around because, according to the head master, he had simply wandered off that morning. So we had no child to speak with. We used the time to talk with the very friendly young head master. He told us he had come to Uganda to teach and was teaching in a public school when he was suddenly fired for reasons he didn’t completely understand. He packed up to go and had all his reservations in place, but when the day came, he simply didn’t go. He decided God needed him in Uganda for a while longer, and the very next day, he received a call offering him this head master’s job. He said he loved it!
We hadn’t made a lot of progress by lunch time at 2:00, but we’d certainly seen a lot of Kampala’s traffic mess! We decided to eat lunch at Shanghai Restaurant, one of my favorites here. We had a very nice meal for our group as well as Vincent and Grace for $8 each! We sat pm a screened patio and chatted in the cool afternoon breeze after we finished eating.
We continued slowly seeing kids in the afternoon. David was conducting a Bible study at 5:00 so we took him to the church a few minutes before 5:00. We met Michael, Larry’s sponsored child at the church. We first met this boy at his mother’s shop during our first trip to Uganda. He was a small kid who helped his mother by drawing patterns that she could then embroidery. Now, the boy is as tall as I am! He still helps his mother and he’s a good student. We had missed him at school because he was sick, and he was still feeling badly, so we gave him and his mother a lift home.
Steven, the boy who had been missing from the school on Kasanda Road, also came in. He wasn’t very excited to see us, and after he had seen us, I would expect he was a little less excited!
We saw three more kids during David’s study. We arrived at our last school as the kids started home. Vincent found our girl and we talked with her. She was very shy and didn’t say much, but her classmates started streaming by as we were finishing with her and they couldn’t keep quite! They talked and played and carried on for more than 20 minutes. There were no teachers to interfere, so the ones that were interested in us had the chance to interact!
We picked David up when he was finished. We drove back to the hotel and arrived around 8:00. It was only an 11 hour day! We celebrated with snacks in our rooms and our first real time on the Internet since we arrived.
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