Shoes for Christmas

Saturday, December 22: Shoes Around Kampala

We almost overslept, so we ate quickly. We were ready when Vincent arrived a few minutes after nine. Our plan was to distribute many pairs of shoes, and we started at the church where several kids had gathered. These kids had missed the event the day before and all were sponsored children. We found their sizes in the boxes in the back of the van and quickly handed them out.

We left Kiwatule and began one of the most amazing days of my life. We were going into two areas we’d never visited. According to Joseph, both were terribly poor areas with many kids who desperately needed help.

So we headed across Kampala deeper and deeper in the ghetto. The roads grew steadily more rutted until they were almost impassable. In fact, it took four wheel drive to get us up the last little hill and into the Discipleship Worship Church where Jeffrey is pastor. The structure was larger than Kiwatule, but the walls and roof were made of papyrus and you could see through both the walls and the ceiling.

Pastor Jeffrey had organized more than 100 kids in his church. They were singing as we pulled up. A dance group awaited us as we arrived and their shaking back sides escorted us to our seats. Small kids beat drums as these young ladies moved in ways most humans would never dream of moving!

Then a couple of children’s groups sang. The accompaniment was drums but there were microphones which was a very strange and unpleasant blend of old and new. I spoke for a few minutes. Then chaos ensued!

These kids apparently weren’t used to organization, so there was pushing and shoving and it took a lot to maintain a semblance of order. Joseph and Vincent had a great plan, and it eventually worked. They split the kids by age so that they were only working out of one huge shoe box at a time. The others had to wait, but it took constant vigilance to keep the right group coming onto the stage to get shoes.

After about an hour, Pastor Jeffrey told the kids who had shoes to leave. They did, and apparently told everyone they knew we were really giving away shoes. And we learned a hard lesson. We have long read that the median age in Uganda is 14.9 years. We’ve thought we understood this when every family we met had a half-dozen kids. And we thought we had seen enough poverty to understand the depth of the need here.

But after Jeffrey sent the shoed kids out, we were inundated by more and more kids slipping in to get shoes. Jeffrey simply wouldn’t man the door to keep them out, until finally we had to insist that the doors be kept shut. Lisa moved outside to make pictures. She ended up squatting down with a drove of kids around her. She was having to show them how to lace and tie their new shoes.

We had allocated 100 pairs of shoes to this place and left it with the Pastor to control the crowd. Jeffrey hadn’t done this, and there were more than 150 left with no shoes when we ran out. And there were still kids trying to get in.

The number of desperately poor kids in Uganda is staggering. I had never realized how many or how bad until I stood in that church and watched the place fill with filthy, shoeless children. It was very hard to leave with kids without shoes, but we had no choice. We’ve talked about it a lot in the last few days. It would be impossible to fulfill all the needs here. So we two choices. We can look at the need, know we can’t meet it, and give up. Or we can make the best possible use of the resources God gives us to meet all the needs we can. We’ve elected the later!

I was asleep within 5 minutes of climbing in the van! I remember Lisa asking about lunch, then asking again. I don’t think I ever answered.

I woke up with the van in a lot behind a Shell station. We were beside a large block building and everyone was getting out. I climbed out too, and saw a huge sign announcing Fast Food Italian Restaurant. The front of the building was glass and we could see a number of plastic tables inside. There were two serving areas. One had gelato items listed above it. To the right was a cafeteria hot table behind a glass cover with a cash register at the end.

We walked in and I went to the cash register. Vincent told me we placed our orders on the other side where the ice cream menu hung overhead. We walked over and looked at a very promising menu with lasagna, catteloni, and many kinds of pizza. But as I looked, I noticed that of the three gelato machines, only one had anything in it and whether this one was functional wasn’t clear.

So when Lisa ordered baked pizza and they told her there was only meat pizza, I really wasn’t surprised. Nor was I surprised when they had all the African dishes (gizzards, fish and chips, vegetable curry). And by the time I got up there to order cateloni, I had already started looking at options before the clerk told me there was no pasta except something on the cafeteria table. I walked over and looked at an odd-shaped pasta with pieces of red on it. Nothing else on the menu looked the least bit interesting, so I took that. “You must take another,” said the clerk.

“Another what?” I asked.

“You must take another.”

A voice from behind me took up the refrain. “You must take another.”

“Another what?”

“You MUST take another,” but this time, the clerk pointed behind me.

I turned around a grinning man behind the counter said, “You must take another.” I walked to him. Lisa was already standing there. The two of them worked out that he meant another dish. There was a platter of green vegetables at the front of the counter. I love some of the African greens, so I chose that, then paid the bill.

Grace and Joseph wanted to eat outside, so I followed Grace across the front of the building to a grove of trees with picnic tables underneath. It was incredibly cool in this shade and there was a fresh breeze that felt wonderful. We found a table and sat down. There were two of the strangest colored cats I’ve ever seen stalking the picnic area. Both were gray with orange splotches and a few black stripes. “They are wild,” said Grace. I started to reach for one of the cats, but quick thoughts of rabbis and AIDS made me pull away.

Lisa and the others came out with the food a few minutes later. Joseph’s gizzards looked disgusting, dark brown chunks in red tomato sauce. The other dishes looked okay, and mine actually looked interesting. There wasn’t really any sauce on my pasta, only pieces of red that might have been dried tomato. It tasted okay, even if it wasn’t very warm. And it was heavily seasoned with what one of our helpers used to call Ugandan special spice – the dark red dust that coats everything. It was evident here in the jolting grit that punctuated most bites. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as the green vegetable, which tasted a bit like spinach, but must have grown on a beach because there was only a little more green than sand! Still, believe it or not, lunch really hit the spot, and before I knew it, my dish was clean!

We all reboarded the van and drove to an area I had never seen. Luzira is an area south of Kampala on Lake Victoria. It is known for a very large prison which we passed as Joseph told us where we were. “I didn’t know there were this many bad people in Uganda,” I said as I looked at a huge building which soared at least six stories above the multiple layers of razor wire. But for all that Ugandan prison might bring to mind, the facility was reasonably new and quite well kept. The prison stood about two blocks from the road and backed up to Lake Victoria.

We turned away from the prison and the lake and climbed a hill on a dirt road that grew steadily worse. It quickly became a narrow, rutted track among hovels of mud and, occasionally, homemade bricks. As we drove past small vegetable stands with meager product offerings, children began noticing the Mazungu in the van (they couldn’t see Lisa, who was sitting in the middle of the middle row) and running away shouting our arrival. As we continued deeper into the slum, there were more and more and more kids, all running before the van, shouting “Mazungu, Mazungu, Mazungu,” at the top of their lungs. The throng charged through a narrow door in a large papyrus-walled shack, the Kiromba Evangelistic Church of the Lord.

“They are waiting for you,” whispered Michael.

We walked into a roomful of kids. They were terribly thin and dressed in dirty clothes. Most had on plastic flip flops from another shoe project. One small boy held his left elbow with his right hand as he moved through the crowd. We learned that the left arm had been broken and not set properly. Now he could hardly move it.

They were sitting reasonably quietly, but their numbers resulted in a disconcerting buzz. The pastor, a man we’d met on one of our early trips, moved about the mass trying to keep order. He seemed nervous. A small group of girls tried to get the kids to sing to their electric music choruses. Finally, the group sang a few songs on their own. I took a seat in the middle of the group. The kids tried to move as far from me as possible, but they gradually came back. These kids were touchers – in a few minutes, I had two tiny hands on each arm and one on each knee.

I found Joseph. “There is a problem,” he said nervously. “We have forgotten one box of shoes. I have called. John will bring them to us.”

We were across Kampala from Joseph’s house, so I wasn’t surprised that it took some time. When the music was over and the shoes hadn’t arrived, Joseph sent Vincent out in the van to look for John. The crowd continued to grow. I found the pastor and told him we needed to control the crowd size. He didn’t say a word. He walked away to try to settle down a group of overly active boys.

Finally, Joseph started organizing the group into younger and older kids. They wouldn’t cooperate. They wanted shoes. With the help of all the others, he finally got them broken up. He started calling a group forward. They charged the front of the church and it took several minutes to restore order.

John arrived a little while later with the remaining shoes, but it was obvious that there were far more children than shoes remaining. I tried again to get someone interested in stopping the kids from coming in, then finally went to the door myself. But I wasn’t very effective in communicating why the kids couldn’t come in. I finally gave up.

Lisa worked again at helping the kids lace their shoes, which put her in the middle of a group of younger kids. While she was working, a boy of fourteen came dancing buy. When she asked him what he was so happy about, he held up his socks. Although he had managed to attend school for eight years, he’d never had the socks the school wanted him to have. Now, he had them!

A group of mothers had gathered at the back of the building. They came forward as the numbers started to run down. They were loud and obnoxious, demanding shoes for their children. When the last shoe was gone, there were more than 300 kids still in the building waiting for shoes. We began moving toward the door as these kids and their moms yelled. The pastor tried to silence them, but they simply turned their anger toward him. We hurried out, and he followed us. He was most appreciative, but the crowd behind wasn’t. We pulled away, still to shouts from the kids, but these shouts weren’t happy ones!

As we drove back toward the prison, Joseph explained that these were kids that had escaped from the north. Many were actually part of the night children, the kids that were forced to go into Gulu, a city in the north, and to sleep in the open in order to be protected from kidnap by the police. “There are hundreds and hundreds of these children living in this area,” Joseph said. “We do what we can.”

The van was subdued as we came back to the main road. Joseph had Vincent to turn away from Kampala. We drove a short distance to the point where the road ended. We found a parking spot beside a line of shops and climbed out. We were at Kampala’s commercial port, complete with a rail siding for trains that hardly run and ferry docks for ferries that often don’t run. We walked into a huge open area where trucks could be loaded or unloaded from the ferries or the rail cars. Lake Victoria stretched before us. There was a wonderful breeze that smelled wonderfully fresh. We walked out to the edge of the water and watched small but sturdy and very deep canoe-like boats moving along the water. The open lake was blocked by a large island about 200 yards from shore and the boats seemed to be headed in the general direction of these islands. “We must go out there,” said John, the church member who had tried to bring us the shoes. “There are crocodiles and big snakes on that island.”

I, of course, was ready to go. Lisa had a fit, as did most of the others. I finally agreed that since we needed to hurry to church, we should forgo a trip to the islands, but I made them all promise that we would go out there before we left this time!

Vincent drove us back to the church where we found several people waiting. This was an important night for Joseph. He had set up a community Christmas service where I would talk about Christmas, then the church would host tea and bread for all the members. Members had been asked to bring friends, but there were very few people there as the service began. Joseph said that many of the congregation had already gone to the villages to be with families.

I spoke for a bit and the number grew steadily until we had about 25 adults and 20 kids there. I had come up with a bright idea: in the church in Africa, there is a major problem with pastors trying to set themselves up as kings. In one of my last emails before leaving the States, I had suggested to Joseph that we change things a bit – that he and his elders should serve tea and bread to the congregation.

On this night, Joseph was the only church officer present, so he announced that he and I would serve everyone. When the service was over, we took our places at a table at the back of the church where the ladies had set up tea and sandwiches of butter and jam. There were also bananas. We found in a hurry that I knew nothing about making Ugandan tea! I kept getting too much (as in a cup full) or too little (as in not a cup full) milk. Joseph quickly took over tea duty and I served the sandwiches and the bananas. His congregation absolutely loved being served by us. Several of the ladies came back more than once, and some of the kids got three sandwiches. It took me a while to realize that it was probably all that some of the kids had eaten that day. And it was dinner for the whole congregation.

We ran out of food about an hour after we started. Vincent took us back to the hotel. We were totally exhausted, but we were also hungry so we went down to the restaurant again. The bar tender came up to seat us and we asked to sit inside. He took us to a table and left us one menu, the Thai-Chinese-Indian menu. When the same waitress came out, she took the menu and told us there was none of this food. We ordered grilled meat – I got beef kabobs and Lisa ordered garlic steak made from the entire garlic supply of Uganda. The food was delicious after a very moving day.

Sunday, December 23: Church

Sundays are always the same for our teams in Uganda. We go to church, we eat fish, and we rest a bit. This Sunday was pretty much the same, but as badly as we needed the last piece, our hosts had other plans!

The day started breakfast. The buffet was up to its usual standard. We were ready when Vincent arrived at 10:00. On most trips, we had gone to both the 9:00 early service and the 10:30 later one. With church ending around 1:00, it made for a long day!

We haven’t been invited to the early service in the last two trips. The early service is their praise service, which means there is a lot of jumping and a lot of dancing. I pointed out that the moves the leaders were making on Sunday morning were no different from the moves being made at bars all over Kampala on Saturday nights. When I asked why it was different on Sunday morning, it was suggested that I didn’t need to come to early service any more. It isn’t anything I’ve missed.

So we arrived just after the 10:30 service began. We took seats in the second row. The choir sang two wonderful songs in Luganda then Dan spoke a bit. He thanked us for bringing shoes to these kids, saying we didn’t know how important it was for them. When they started to get their son up for church, they found that he had slept in his shoes!

He asked me to repeat my message from the night before because many had missed it. Knowing that the length of my comments would have no bearing on the length of Joseph’s sermon, I summarized rather aggressively, but still made the point that Christmas was a time to think about giving to Jesus rather than about what we might get.

Joseph then spoke for a while. He did a great job, and held it to about 40 minutes. After church, we visited with the members for a long while, then made our way to the van. Lydia stopped us along the way to say that she couldn’t come with us. She and Joseph celebrated their 10th anniversary on the previous Thursday and they had planned a reception at their house for the church. With the death of Michael’s father, they were unable to hold the event then, so they had rescheduled for Sunday night. She would have to stay home and get ready for the reception.

The rest of us climbed into the van and Vincent drove us through town to Gaba Beach, another port on Lake Victoria just south of the city. I was asleep within minutes of leaving the church, but I woke up when he turned off the paved road and into the narrow, winding alleyways of the market place at Gaba Beach. As always, cows and goats stood in the way and we had to wait for them to move.

Vincent pulled up to the gate outside the parking lot and a man came out. They spoke quietly for a minute, then they became a bit louder. Vincent pointed to the gate and said something rather loudly. The man backed away and went through a door in the gate. A few minutes later, he came out with another man, who immediately began arguing with Vincent, who, completely out of character for him, became steadily more animated. Finally, the man turned away and sulked away. The first man came back and Vincent handed him 1,500 shillings. The gate opened and we pulled in.

“He was telling me that we must pay per person for using the facilities. I told him we were coming to bring him business. We should pay for parking but not for the facilities because we were only eating.”

With that behind us, we found a parking spot and walked across a large yard to a table on an elevated platform near the edge of Lake Victoria. We sat in the cool breeze watching the fisherman and ferries go by. One of our previous trips had come just after a ferry had capsized and several people had drowned. On that trip, every single person riding the ferries had worn life preservers. We didn’t see a single preserver this time.

Our food came quickly. My missing gallbladder made the very thought of one of the huge, greasy fish impossible. I ate wonderful Ugandan French fries while everyone else ate gigantic fish. I did sample Lisa’s fish and I agreed with the consensus that it was much better than the fish we’d eaten the previous summer.

It was a great time to be with our friends. There was no talk of shoes or schools, nothing about the church. Just talk about America and Uganda. We had to give updates on every single team member that had ever visited Uganda with us. We laughed and joked and enjoyed a wonderful afternoon.

I went to sleep in the van once again and woke up at the hotel. It was about two hours before time to go to Joseph’s house for the reception, so Lisa and I went up to the room to rest. I was too tired to blog, but I didn’t want to sleep. Tanner and Hannah, two of my younger friends back home, sent me to Uganda with the DVD’s for the complete third season of “Lost,” a guilty pleasure Tanner introduced me to last year. Instead of blogging or napping, I got in two episodes before the van returned!

It didn’t take long to drive to Joseph’s house, not because traffic was light (it was amazingly heavy with people heading by taxi to the villages) but because Vincent knows every short cut in Kampala! The reception had shrunken from church-wide to officers and spouses only. Michael and Dan were already there. Mabel was with Michael, but Robinah, the mother of a six month old, had decided to go on home. Grace was there along with a few women from the church, but it wasn’t the 25-30 we had expected.

We watched a cooking show on Joseph’s tv while the final touches were put on dinner. It was a Ugandan show where an Indian chef was preparing a Chinese beef dish! There were no measurements given and not even all the ingredients. The guy would start shoveling something into the dish. The reporter would ask and he would seem angry as he snapped out some answer. The resulting dish was far from appetizing, but the attractive young reporter gushed on and on about how wonderful it was. It was one of those surreal Ugandan moments – Ugandan and American adults sitting in the dark with Joseph’s young sons glued to the set as an Indian cooked Chinese!

Before he could start his second dish, Michael turned off the television. “We are here to honor Joseph and Lydia,” he said. “We could enjoy the cooking show, but it is important that we celebrate them. Last year, I celebrated my tenth anniversary with Mabel and my father talked there about his marriage to my mother. It was very wonderful.” Michael almost broke down as he remembered. “I want us to start by telling about our own marriages, the things that were good and the things that have been challenging. Then Joseph and Lydia will tell us about their time together.”

I struggled, but I stayed awake for each piece! The comments were very interesting, and it was immediately evident to all that marriages have much in common no matter where they are located. Things work when committed people work at making it work!

After a while, Lydia and the ladies from church brought in plates of fried chicken, cole slaw, and fries. I won’t eat mayonnaise here, so certainly not in Uganda, but the chicken and chips were excellent!

Lydia made a few comments about being married to Joseph, then Joseph spoke for half an hour. Finally, he asked Lydia to bring out their cake. There was small white cake with purple ribbon details sitting on a table by the window. They sat the cake on the coffee table and Lydia attacked it with a butcher knife! When she’d finished there were no slices, just small chunks of cake and icing, often not connected. They passed the plate around and everyone dug out a bit and ate it. It was a brown spice cake, a bit dry, but not bad. And the icing was delicious, sweet and thick with a hint of a tropical fruit thrown in.

When the cake was gone, it was time to open gifts. In our time of dealing with Joseph, he has never asked us for anything, but when he and Vincent got into an argument about using the Project’s camera to make pictures at Baby Lisa’s third birthday party, he asked me to get him a camera. I found a great little Nikon on clearance at Circuit City. It was so good that I got Lisa one like it! They were incredibly gracious and as excited as kids about their new toy.

As we were talking about our marriages, Dan announced that he and Robinah had celebrated their tenth anniversary last month but that they hadn’t had a party. When he saw the camera, he came and stood near me. Finally, I said, “Dan, we didn’t know it was your anniversary. We can talk about it on Wednesday after Christmas is over.” He nodded and went away.

I’m not sure how to handle this one!

Monday, December 24: Learning to Organize

With our brief rest over, it was time to deliver more shoes!

We overslept by 20 minutes and hurried down to breakfast. There was no buffet! Adrian, our waitress, said that the kitchen had decided to provide a la carte breakfast that morning. We ordered scrambled eggs and bacon. Lisa added sausage, and we waited for half an hour for our food. It was delicious when it arrived (the sausage was a bit too much for me), but it set us very late. We dashed upstairs, and got ready as quickly as we could, but Vincent had to wait nearly 30 minutes for us).

We drove to Joseph’s house where we loaded shoes for our first stop: Michael’s house. Before we could start, Joseph had many questions about his camera, and Lisa patiently showed him how to take and save pictures with his new Nikon.

Michael lives on the eastern outskirts of Kampala, where the city stops and the jungle swamps begin. It is a very poor area where Muslims and Christians live in a sometimes uneasy peace. Michael’s house is at the end of a dirt track. He has an incredible view of the swampy area at the end of Kampala from his narrow porch.

We pulled down the track beside his house. There were more than 100 kids sitting in his back yard! Most of these kids were barefoot. One little girl had a terrible burn on her leg. Michael and Mabel had worked hard to make these kids understand what to expect. They had collected the names and sizes of the kids to get shoes. Joseph called out names and kids came forward. This was a slow process from the perspective of the kids and there was some pushing and shoving to get close to Joseph. I tried to keep them moved back so that Joseph had room to think!

I was worried that we would see a repeat of our visit to the prison area with a slew of late arrivals, but Michael had things under control! When the last pair of shoes had been given to the last child, we sat under the tree behind Michael’s house while he sent two of his kids for sodas for all of us. He used the time to visit a couple of nearby houses.

After a while, he invited us into his house. He told us about going through his community and inviting the parents of the poorest kids to send them to his home for new shoes. “This is truly showing God’s love,” he said.

Mabel told about going into the home of a witch doctor. “These people, they don’t talk to anyone. They just stay alone. Their kids don’t play with others, nothing. I was so scared to go in there this morning, but I prayed and I went in and I asked them. They didn’t say they would send the kids, but all three came. All three kids got new shoes.”

Michael said the kids were so happy because they had never seen anything like this. He said he had stopped in the house of a woman who lived nearby. He said he went to the door and found her sitting inside. All four of the kids had on their shoes and they were marching in front of her, so that she could see their new shoes!
Michael’s home is a very peaceful place. I always enjoy visiting with him and his family, but we had to move on. His mother’s house is only a block or so from his, so we barely got in the van when it was time to get back out. We went in and spent a few minutes with her. She said she was doing okay and she was glad that she had her children to help her through these times. Her English was perfect. She even corrected Michael’s English a couple of times.

Michael has a sister that can’t speak. She is in her late 20’s and is probably mentally retarded in some way. She wasn’t with us in her mother’s house, so I asked about her. He asked one of the children to get her, and a few minutes later, she came out carrying a baby. “She was raped,” Michael explained. “We have tried to figure out who did this, but we have not. The man that we thought was responsible says that he is not. Now, I don’t know what we will do. She will stay with my mother for now.”

Joseph had s surprise for us as we started across town. I had told him that I wanted Lisa to see Christmas shopping in Kampala because she didn’t think traffic could be any worse at Christmas than it was during the summer. Dan heard us talking and he asked if we wanted to see a market, but I didn’t catch the name of it. I said we would, so Joseph asked Vincent to stop at a Shell station. Dan jumped out. “He is going to buy meat,” Vincent said.

“For Christmas?” I asked.

“I guess,” said Vincent.

Joseph got out after a minute, then came back and told us to come with him. Lisa had picked up on the meat thing and said she didn’t want to go. I started off with Joseph and Michael, then went back to the van and insisted that Lisa come. I thought we were going to a Christmas market where they happened to have meat. Lisa had picked up that we were at the slaughter house!

The amazing thing is that there was no odor, which was a VERY good thing, but didn’t tip me off about where we were. My first clue was a stack of at least 30 gigantic horns, the kind Ugandan cows usually wear! They were laying in a pile and a man seemed to be trying to auction them. I had stopped to look when Joseph came back. “This is the retail area. The wholesale market is ahead, then the butchering area. Would you like to see them slaughter a cow?”

“I don’t think Lisa should see that,” I said a bit shakily.

As we walked past the wholesale section, where sides of beef and smaller pieces hung on hooks as bidders bid, I asked Lisa if she was sure she was okay. Lisa is deathly afraid of cows, and, without blinking, she said, “Yep, this is the way I like cows best: in pieces. They can’t get me that way!”

A huge open shed stood beyond the wholesale market. We squeezed between the building and the chest high fence of the shed. The scene inside the shed looked like something from a nightmare of hell. A recently butchered cow had just been gutted. A man in elbow high gloves wearing a rubber apron and waders was squatting beside the mass of entrails sorting them. He would stab into the white mass of washed intestines and pull out something which he’d toss aside. A man standing next to the fence had a stack of 50 or more feet and lower legs. All manner of meat lay on the concrete floor while men ripped and tore at it with cleavers and knives. There were a few heads still there and a man was working at removing the horns from a skull. He cut the skull in such a way that the horns remained connected. He waved at us, then grabbed the horns and held them up behind his head. He wanted me to make his picture!

There was blood everywhere, but the concrete was well cared for and it was remarkably clean. And there were far fewer flies here than at most restaurants in Uganda!

I looked over to make a comment to Michael and found a large man poking at his chest. He wasn’t shouting, but he was obviously angry. Michael turned toward us. “Are you ready?”

We turned and followed him out. He said that the man was angry that we were making pictures without being on an official tour, in others, that we were making pictures without paying anyone. He told Michael to take us to the office and get a guide. We got back in the van instead!

We went from the slaughterhouse to downtown! The city was a complete zoo! The newspaper had said a day or two earlier that the City Commission had approved allowing shops to display merchandise on the sidewalks during the days before Christmas. So stores, packed to the gills with merchandise, had spread out across the sidewalks and, in many cases, into the streets themselves. There were cars going in all directions and boda bodas and pedestrians trying to squeeze between vehicles trying to inch forward. There were people riding bicycles with loads three times larger than bike and rider. There were people with four foot stacks of merchandise on their heads.

The closer we got to the city center, the slower traffic moved and the crazier the scene became. Last Christmas, we went down into the very heart of the city and it was even more unbelievable. Vincent, however, turned off before he got into the worst of the traffic. Using parking lots and alleys, he rushed us out of town.

Later, I told him I knew what he’d done. He smiled. “It would have taken three hours to get out of there,” he said, and this was no exaggeration given the traffic we were seeing. “And I was hungry!”

We stopped at Bon Appetit for a late lunch, but there was a sign on the door saying they were closed until December 27. It was nearly 3:00 and we had another church to visit, so I told Vincent to stop someplace where we could get a snack to go. We stopped at Hot Loaf and got samosas for Lisa and me and meat pies for everyone else, then we drove back to Joseph’s house for shoes.

Everything was ready so it only took a minute to load. We drove back to the main road, then about a mile further. We turned onto a rural road that led through farms and banana fields. The newest church in the presbytery, Najeera Presbyterian Church, was about a mile further. We turned off the one lane dirt track onto a drive beside a home made brick house. There was a piece of Romex laying in the road and I could hear music blaring. The new church had already been afflicted by the curse of the African church: a sound system!

The church has no walls and only part of a roof, but the wooden benches were filled with a mix of kids and adults. Joseph cleared the kids to a building about 200 yards away while I spoke to the adults. He wanted me to use my same Christmas message, which I did. I’m not sure if the people got much of it, but the pastor said that they did.

When I was finished, the shoes started. This was an amazing process to watch! Pastor Elliot, the pastor of the church, and his wife and the elders kept the kids at the building across a field from the small courtyard where the shoes sat. They would release the kids 10 at a time. They were told not to run, and I wish I could have gotten a video of the kids trying their best not to run!

As I walked across the field to the place where the kids were waiting, a man approached me. He wanted me to sponsor him to come to America. I explained the process, but it did no good. He wanted a letter from me inviting him to come and stay with me. I told him I couldn’t do that. He wanted my phone number and email. I refused, and left him complaining in the field!

Joseph called me back to serve tea and bread. I started with bread and bananas, but Dan would have none of it. He soon took over the process, so I went back to play with the kids. A young man in a strange hat came up to me and wanted to know what was happening. He reeked of beer and his eyes were wild. He started yelling at me when I couldn’t understand his Luganda. I asked one of the elders to interpret. He told the man to leave, then screamed at him and pointed far away. The man left.

Once the shoes were handed out, the kids came up to get food. There were lots of kids, but we had enough food for them to have bread and butter.

It was nearly 6:00 by the time we finished. Since no one had eaten more than a bite or two, I asked where everyone wanted to eat. The consensus was Indian so although I was a bit reluctant, I told Vincent to head for Garden City.

The restaurant is on the top floor of the four level mall. Even though it was packed, Vincent was able to let me out near an entrance. He found a parking place very nearby, so we all walked about a block into the mall. Access between floors is by a sloping ramp which was absolutely awful on my knees (Hannah, you need to add a sloping surface to your physical therapy routine for the balance challenged!!). And after three levels of ramps, there are four steep mini-flights of stairs! I was ready to stay awhile when we got to the restaurant.

Najab Restaurant is one of my favorite places on earth. It is roofed but open on three sides. The view of the golf course area with its huge trees and lush fairways is spectacular. There is also a view of some of Kampala’s many hills and a beautiful white and gold mosque sits atop one of the hills. It’s cool and quiet, and it is outstanding food! I ordered for all nine of us. We had everything from Goan Vegetable Curry and Spinach Dumplings in Cream to Goat Stew! It was fabulous and reasonably priced until the waiter asked about ice cream. I asked if it was included in the price (which the owner has done for us more than once). He said it was, but he was wrong and the ice cream cost more than anything else we ate!

In the end, it was expensive, but well worth it to see our friends photographing one another eating various things with Joseph’s new camera. As we were finishing, Joseph said, “Jim, once we have eaten this food, we can’t go back to matoki.”

I didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, then we will begin letting you wait in the van.” There was an outbreak of Luganda as they tried to decide if I was kidding. After a moment of shock, they decided it was okay!

There was no doggy bag at all. We ate every bite!

I had to fight the stairs, but I found an elevator for the rest of the trip down. We stopped at Uchumi, a department-like store, on the way out. I had managed to get a bad sunburn on my arms and needed aloe vera. A dancing Santa wiggled by the door to various Christmas tunes. Each of our guys (and Grace, too) had to stop and dance beside Santa. I wish I could have taped it!

Joseph carried my backpack up to the room at the hotel. Everyone else came with him. They offered to come and get us Christmas night to go out to eat, but I told him we would be fine. The first Christmas I spent here, they took Dan and me to Christmas Day service then to visit in each home. Last year, when I was in Uganda alone, I told them they didn’t have to worry about me on Christmas if they had things to do at home. Vincent came to the hotel and got me, but I didn’t hear from any of the others. When I told them Lisa and I would be fine on Christmas Day, they looked relieved and told me they’d see us on Wednesday!


Christmas Day: A Time For Us

After watching a whole “LOST” DVD last night, we slept until 9:30! Before going down, we fixed Christmas cards for our waitress, Adrian, Martin, the doorman, and our maid. We put 5,000 shillings in Martin’s card and 10,000 in the other two for a total of about $15.

Again, there was no buffet, but Adrian took good care of us. We started with pineapple and coffee. Lisa had French toast, which was every bit as good as Fulmer’s favorite at Kolping House last year. I stuck with scrambled eggs (without sausage) and I learned something very valuable about myself: I will, I will eat green eggs and, if not ham, at least bacon! I will eat them in Uganda when there is nothing else to eat. I have no idea what made them green, but these eggs would have made Dr. Seuss proud.

Adrian told us that they had hired a Thai chef so we could have that menu any time. And there would be a buffet today to celebrate Christmas. She was very pleased when we gave her the card. It would have been enough without the money, I think. And we gave both our bus girl and desk clerk 5,000 each. For some of them, we’d given a week’s wage.

We went back to the room and read for a while, and I watched a little more “LOST.” We checked the newspaper and found that there were two movies on at Garden City that we would like to see, so we went downstairs. Adrian caught us and said the buffet was ready. They were only serving until 3:30, so we knew we would have to eat or miss it. So we went out onto the patio. The food was unbelievable! There were salads and a huge assortment of Indian and Thai foods. There were so many foods, that you had to be a bit careful about what you selected. Several bees had taken up residence in one of the salads and I learned that flies are particularly fond of chocolate mousse!

The food was excellent, but very spicy. In fact, I had to run back from the buffet when going for seconds to get my napkin to avoid a nasal disaster! Lisa said she’d never had her eyes sweat before! As we were finishing, Adrian came back to announce that they now had turkey. She really wanted us to try it, so we went back to the buffet. It was a beautiful bird, very plump and browned to perfection. It was as good as any turkey I’ve ever had, if a bit gamier than most.

After lunch, we returned to the room for water (to wash down a bit of the burn), then it was on to Garden City!

It is less than 10 blocks from the Hotel to Garden City, by far the longest I’ve walked on a cane! It started with a steep uphill slope, then down, then up, then down a bit, then up a lot. There was a sidewalk which only had a few holes more than three feet deep! The route follows the golf course. There weren’t very many others on the street at all. I guess we proved that at least two Tennesseans will join those mad dogs and Englishmen in the midday sun! It wasn’t so much that it was hot as it was the sun was hotter than the sun can be!

We finally reached the hotel that is somehow attached to the mall. We ducked in the lobby and cooled off a bit. This is a very nice hotel with a beautiful pool!

We cut through the parking deck to the mall. This time, we took the elevator! Almost everything was closed, but we’d checked the paper and had the show times for the movie. So even though it IS Uganda, we were both surprised when we saw a sign saying the movie theaters were closed for Christmas Day!

We picked up a few things from Uchumi then spent a while sitting in the mall people watching. Uganda is such an interesting place! There are a lot of Indians here, some in traditional clothes and some looking like Beverly Hills transplants. There are many different kinds of Middle Easterners, again wearing full Islamic attire to jeans and t-shirts. And there are Chinese, Thai, and even an occasional (though VERY rare Masungu). In fact, we saw one other white person in our whole excursion, a woman passing out religious tracks outside Uchumi.

When I was feeling a bit better from the heat, we started back. A man asked us if he could be our guide to see Kampala. I told him we didn’t need that. He said he needed money for Christmas dinner for his family, but he was wearing a uniform from a hotel or restaurant. We kept walking.

It was much cooler, but the last long hill was a tough one. Once we got back to the room, we stayed there. It was time to call home for Christmas, so we talked to everyone.

We spent the rest of the day working on blogs and reading, and enjoying a day to rest up from shoes!