Getting Started

Friday, December 21 – Shoes at Kiwatule

When we arrived on Thursday night, we realized we had forgotten our great alarm clock. So I called for a wake-up call. The woman at Reception kept asking me if I wanted a call at exactly 7:00 and I assured her I did. And we got it.

On Thursday night, I called again. This operator didn’t go through the exactly stuff, so our call on Friday came at 7:23!

Breakfast was about the same except that there were “crepes” – very thin chappati with strawberry jam spread on them. They were actually quite good. The French Toast was a different matter, however. Lisa had enjoyed it the day before, but this time it was a bit thicker. It was actually two pieces of yesterday’s toast squnched together with mashed potatoes and onions inside. There were also fish sticks, which were mostly mashed potatoes with a flake or two of fish per stick.

I decided to try an omelet. There were four choices: onions, red bell peppers, green bell peppers, and very hot little peppers. I opted for cheese from the buffet and, since I couldn’t make the lady understand no peppers, the red and green bell peppers. I got the peppers, but no cheese!

Vincent was almost an hour late, which always means the van has been to the car wash. They wash vans inside and out, so there is always a concern on wash days about how wet the seats will be. We’ve seen them from dry to sponge-full. Today wasn’t too bad – just squishy.

The children were due at the church at 9:00. Vincent picked us up at 9:50. This was to be the day for all sponsored children to come in, so we needed to get Bibles for our graduates. We have established a tradition of getting Bibles for our kids when they change levels in school. So we give Bibles when a child moves from Primary to Secondary or from the first level of Secondary to the second, or when they graduate from Secondary. This year, there are 44 kids changing levels, so we needed 44 Bibles. They are simply too heavy to carry in our bags, so Vincent took us to the Uganda Bible Society which we found to be closed for Christmas. The sign said they had closed on Thursday (Decebember 20) for Christmas and would reopen on Tuesday (Christmas Day!).

But one thing was sure, they were closed this day! Vincent talked to the armed guard sitting outside the building. He said he knew where the shopkeeper lived and could call her on Vincent’s phone. A few minutes later, the man announced that the clerk would come and open for us. On the second call ten minutes or so later, the clerk assured us she was in a taxi and on her way.

She arrived about 10:25 and let us in. Vincent found a nice, hard cover, Good News Bible and she quoted us a price of 11,000 shillings each (about $6.50). “That’s a bit high,” I said. “We are ordering 44 Bibles. Can’t you reduce the price?”

“Yes, we have a discount of 10% if your order is 20 Bibles. If it is more, the discount is bigger.”

“We will order 50 then. How much will the discount be?”

She thought for only a moment, grabbed her calculator, pounded in numbers, then turned it toward me. The price was 9,900.
“That’s 10%. You said if we ordered more than 20, the discount would be more.”

She smiled. “Yes, it is much larger. On 20 Bibles, you save only a little. On 50 Bibles, you save much more.”

I gave up!

The Bibles came in boxes of 20. She found three boxes under a table. Vincent dragged out three boxes. “Madam,” Vincent said as he bowed slightly. “You have no open boxes. You do not want to have a have full box sitting here. Can we take a full box as our discount.”

“Yes!,” said the woman without a second’s hesitation. So we ended up with 60 Bibles, needing only 44 for the day. It isn’t as though there is no need for Bibles. The outlying churches have only one or two in each congregation and the kids have only 5 for all the attendance at Saturday School. So they will be used!

Welcome to Uganda!

We could hear the kids singing as soon as we pulled off the road. It seemed a bit louder than usual, but we weren’t prepared for nearly 300 kids sitting inside the tiny church! We took seats at the front of the room and listened to a lot of talk then heard several songs then experienced a rather amazing Christmas play written by John Bosco. It was called “The Struggle” and it began when Mary heard from the angel. It was filled with scenes I had never seen before, like the one where Joseph hit on Mary, but she told him they had to wait. And the one where she tells him she’s pregnant and he goes after her with a machete.

They had carefully hung a series of blue and gold curtains at the front of the church. They had to be pulled and pushed by hand, so there was constant effort to try to let at least part of the audience see what was going on. The acting was amazing, too. The angel, who we recognized as an angel because she was dressed in white and flapped her arms a lot, was a young girl from the program. Apparently, they ran out of actors because she also played King Herod with a hair extender attached to her chin. The extender slipped, so Herod soon looked like a very attractive young woman with a VERY hairy chest!

With no TV, these kids love these plays! But sometime in the second hour, the heat started getting to me. I thought I was going to faint, and Michael almost joined me. I don’t think he realized white people could turn THAT white! “Jim, this has gone on long enough,” he said. “I will go and tell them that they must summarize the rest of it.” The Christmas story was over, so I’m not sure what they might summarize, but I certainly welcomed his efforts!

It ended without Michael’s interference. I hobbled outside and stood in the breeze for a bit. There were so many kids that there was no way to cook lunch, so they bought samosas and a drink for each child. They also bought cookies, compliments of a young lady in Chattanooga who has been saving part of her allowance each week since June so that these kids would have something special to eat at their Christmas lunch. The staff put all this in small paper bags and the kids devoured it all.

But not three of the kids. Lisa and I were too busy to eat, so we didn’t get anything. Three little folks came up to me with their bags and gave me part of their samosas. One even included part of her cookie. They noticed that I hadn’t eaten!

Vincent and Joseph worked very hard to organize everything, but they met with many challenges. First, they decided to have someone go from Kampala to pick up kids in Jinja and bring them to the church. So Grace rode the 100 miles to Jinja and got six kids. She also picked up other kids along the way, so in came the bunch. But no one realized that four of the Jinja kids had never ridden in a car, van, or any other vehicle. All four got car sick, and it spread to every single one of the kids in this van.

Joseph decided it would be good to get the name, age, and shoe size of every child that got shoes. So he developed a form and sat poor Grace at a table to corral the excited kids and get their information. Lisa ended up helping, as did Mark, Evelyn’s sponsored child. Mark is finishing high school this year. He is a boy who has given us much trouble over the years, but he has settled down into a very good young man.

Jacinta, our soon to be university graduate, played a major role in matching kids feet to shoes. And when I realized Lisa couldn’t work as videographer because she was needed at the table with Grace, Samuel, Amy and Mark’s child, manned the video camera. It was his first time to see a video camera, and we did our best to show him what to do. But he shot almost non-stop for all the afternoon and he didn’t run out of tape. When I looked at the camera, it was set on night mode and the focus had been changed. So we will see what we get! But it won’t really matter what’s there. The important thing was our sponsored kids were stepping up to the challenge of helping in the Project!

We saw so many of our kids! And they are really growing quickly! They are well-behaved kids and they are so very thankful for the help we are giving. And they loved the shoes.

So we gave away just under 300 pairs of shoes, 150 in the Project and 150 outside it. We will be struggling in the coming days to catch up with the rest of the sponsored kids, but we will find most of them!

The whole affair was pretty well organized, as organized as 300 very excited kids can be! At the end of it all, we gave out Bibles to the kids who are moving up a level in school. The Bibles were as popular as the shoes!

I was exhausted around 4:00 when the kids started to leave and I hadn’t done anything! The heat was overwhelming under the church’s metal roof, so I couldn’t imagine how those who’d worked all day might feel! We finally walked out to the van past boys grabbing our hands and girls kneeling in the dirt to thank us.

Lisa and I were starving! Joseph and Vincent were the only ones with us, so we decided to eat at Shanghai. Lisa says this is one of her favorite restaurants in the world, and I agree! The food is excellent, but the setting in an old hotel sooths the soul. There are wide porches, and it is often possible to eat on the porch, which we did on this night. The setting is on a hill above Kampala and there is always a breeze. So sitting on this porch in the cool sharing food our friends have never tasted is wonderful. The staff is very understanding and helpful. They seem to enjoy watching people enjoy the food as much as we do!

I ordered squid for Vincent even though it was a bit expensive. He loves eating it and enjoys bragging about having eaten it even more! Every dish was outstanding, and we sat in the growing twilight reliving the day and discussing how we might organize better next time.

Vincent drove us to the hotel around 6:30. We had more Internet trouble, but I finally kept it running long enough to finish three posts.