Vincent arrived a few minutes after 8:00 and we were ready to go. Our first stop was Surrey Secondary School. We had missed Esther there earlier in the week, but she had shown up at church on Wednesday night and didn’t appear to be sick at all. So Vincent went in and came back shaking his head. She was absent again.
We drove across Ntinda and down a very steep road, then stopped. Tenywa (Jack) was working on a new house with his builder brother. He explained that he was on break from the university until early August. He had just finished his first year, and he said the break from studying was a welcome one! He has now officially changed his major to journalism/mass communications. He wants to be on television someday as a TV Journalist. As we started to leave, he called me. He said each student in his program is required to have a video camera. He said he couldn’t complete the classes next term without one. I explained that we didn’t have money for such things in our budget, and I wasn’t comfortable asking for more from his sponsor. He seemed disappointed, but he agreed to explore sharing opportunities a bit more thoroughly.
David later volunteered to donate his video camera. He recently bought a high definition camera, so the perfectly good tape based system would be wasted. He plans to send the camera to Uganda soon after our return home.
While we were working with Tenwya, Grace was searching for Esther. She found the young woman at home, and she insisted that Esther come see us. She soon came to the van dressed in casual clothes. She said that this was the first day she had felt well. She started to go to school this morning, but her mother convinced her to wait until Monday. She didn’t show any signs of illness at all. I listened to her story, which basically involved being sick and not feeling like going to school, and told her that if she missed another day this year, we will terminate her in the Project. She promised she would be back in school on Monday. Since the school is within 5 blocks of the church, we will see! As we told her, there are so many kids in Uganda who want to go to school. If she doesn’t care to be one of them, she should move out of the way.
Presbytery was scheduled to begin at 9:00. David worked it out that only one of us would go to the meeting at a time (he stay an hour, then swap out with me). The meeting, however, got off to a rocky start because no one was there at 9:00. We decided to continue on seeing kids and we’d go to presbytery at lunch time. Then, David could talk about leadership and I about record keeping.
Since Esther had proven not to be very sick, we were equally skeptical at Up Hill College when we heard that Namagulah Rita (Laqueta and Robert) was also ill and so not at school. Grace and Vincent talked for a moment and decided to call her and tell her to come and meet us here at the school. This school was arranged in a most unusual way.. The entry gate was up a steep hill, but only about 8 feet from the roadway. The gate opened into a huge courtyard with shady areas. The buildings surrounding the courtyard were for primary grades. This, however, was also a secondary school. The secondary students were housed in a building behind one of the primary buildings. So, secondary students had to past through the primary school in going to and from school.
The head mistress here was concerned about our reaction since the girl wasn’t around. She had student workers bring out old student desks and put them under a very nice shade tree in the corner of the compound. They brought out desks for all of us, so we rested well while waiting for our sponsored child to come.
As I said, we were skeptical because the first girl didn’t appear sick at all. So when this girl in her spotless uniform climbed down from a boda boda and started up the hill, I must admit the same doubts emerged again. When she fainted dead away in front of the kindergarten classroom, I didn’t know what to do. The guard at the gate got to her first with Grace and Vincent immediately behind him. Angie also went running to the girl.
The guard and Grace got on her feet. She was extremely wobbly. They took her in one of the buildings and brought her water. Within ten minutes, she came out and took one of the desks. She said she had been sick for weeks, but only stayed out today. She was obviously very weak, so we drove her back to her home, a distance of more than 2 miles.
And this begins the most remarkable and horrifying adventure we’ve had in Uganda. On June 1, 2008, Chattanooga Times-FreePress carried an article by Kathy Pownall called,, “Uganda’s Children Work on Dangerous Rock Pile.” an article about a young boy who worked in a rock quarry in Uganda. The photograph showed a small boy in torn clothes sitting with a pile of rocks and a bucket. He is hitting a rock with a hammer-like device. The story said he was nine years old and lived alone because his mother had died in a cave-in last summer. The boy had continued living in the mud hut he’d shared with his mother and infant sister, but the baby had been taken to an orphanage. This boy, Stephen, had fled from fighting in Northern Uganda to the relative safety of this quarry, yet another example of the plight of the Invisible Children. They were quite the cause back when they were being taken from their homes in the night. With the tentative peace accords in place in the area, the children are safe from kidnap, but these children are still in terrible danger and we must work to get them established in schools.
Before we left home, I got a call from Jim. He said he had a message on his phone mail from a woman who wanted us to go look for Stephen. It seems her daughter worked for one of our sponsors, a mutual friend who knew that Jim had gone to Uganda with me. He told her how to contact Jim, who then gave the contact information to me.
I spoke with Tommy less than a week before our scheduled departure. She said she couldn’t get this boy off her mind, and she wanted me to go look for him. She said she would sponsor the boy if I could find him. I explained that there were tens of thousands of children around Kampala who desperately needed our help, so it might be hard to find Stephen. “Do your best,” Tommy said. “I can’t get that boy off my mind. But if you can’t find him, find somebody I can help.”
I wrote to Vincent who started calling people and before we landed in Uganda, he had a lead on this boy! It was time to go and find him.
We’ve seen rock for sale all over town. Products ranged from very thin irregular sheets as large as 8x10 to colorful gravel. The quarry sits on a ridge near Over Hill School. It’s visible from much of Entebbe, but it looks like any of the other hills except part of this one is gone and a huge sand-colored hole has replaced the dense jungle and houses on the nearby hills. We turned off the main road and onto a dirt one that was reasonably smooth at first. We drove along the base of the ridge with houses on both sides of the road. These houses were no worse than any around Kampala. But the world soon changed.
The road became steadily narrower and more deeply rutted. A man came out and waved to Vincent. They talked for a moment, then the man went away. “He is getting the boy for us,” said Vincent. “He knows where he is. He says the boy is working with his father.”
“Vincent, the story says the boy is an orphan. He doesn’t have a father,” I said. Vincent seemed troubled by this, but he soon started the van forward once again.
We turned up from the rows of houses. There was a long patch of nothing. In the distance, we could see the pit where huge pieces of rock were being extracted. Up ahead, there were more houses, rows and rows of them. These were almost all mud huts – long wooden poles parallel to the ground with mud between them. Many had eroded and were beginning to lean. The houses were alive with people. The row nearest our road sat down below the driving surface. It was reserved for stores mostly selling vegetables. From the road, we could look beyond the shops to see narrow alleys with rows of homes.
And there were children EVERYWHERE. Many were small and covered in dust from the quarry. Some had runny noses leaving tracks on their muddy faces. Some cried. This is the worst poverty we’ve seen in Uganda.
We crawled forward through ruts that required our four wheel drive. Some of the ruts had water in them and once there was a small pond to negotiate. We soon reached the end of the houses. Kampala spread down the valley and up the hill across from us. There were more of Africa’s unique greens, but there were also colorful homes and prosperity. Our road snaked more steeply upward and the going became even rougher. We followed the road to the edge of the quarry where a very old woman sat by a huge pile of gravel. She had a large rock and she was striking it with a device that resembled a hammer. Her hammer was a long piece of wood with a brass collar around the end. She was breaking the big rocks into smaller ones by striking them with something that didn’t have a weighted head on it. She was good at her job, however. It only took three or four blows to chip off a gravel.
Vincent’s friend returned and he and Vincent entered into a discussion about the young boy he’d found. Vincent explained that this couldn’t be the right boy, but the man disagreed. Vincent started to pull away. We had to go into the quarry area. Two well dressed young men began yelling to us. “Make sure he gives you the right boy,” said one of the men.
“He’ll only send you his relatives,” said the other. They kept laughing and walking toward the van. One of the men shook my hand.
“Vincent, I think it’s time we moved on,” I said. He turned the van around and we started back through this hell. Even more kids lined our route as the word had spread that there were bzungu here. Although some of the kids were laughing and playing, most of them stared at us with absolutely blank expressions. They didn’t shout and laugh and wave as most Ugandan kids do when we pass. Vincent stopped to tell the man that they would talk soon and we slipped away.
This was amazing, hopeless, paralyzing poverty. It was so bad that David had a hard time video- taping our route. And when it was over, we found that Lisa and I had shot fewer than 20 photos between us. No one spoke as we left the quarry. No one could.
David and I were nearly two hours late for presbytery, so Vincent hurried back to the church. We went in and found that they hadn’t reached our place on the agenda. We went into the meeting. There were three ladies from Kassanda, three gentlemen from Kiwatule, and one gentleman from Mpig sitting in church chairs in a huge circle on the dirt floor. As soon as we arrived, Joseph announced lunch. The ladies from Kiwatule began bringing in food. We had matoki with either meat or g-nut sauce (I opted for meat gravy with not meat!), rice, potatoes, greens, and a small container of what appeared to be green peas. “These are egg plants,” said Lydia as I came through the line. “They are very bitter.”
I sampled everything on my plate before the peas. Finally, I put two in my mouth. They didn’t take like peas at all, and they were incredibly bitter. Michael laughed when he saw me eat them. “They help the blood pressure,” he said once he’d settled down. I gave David two peas, and the result was the same. Since these things looked like something very familiar, it was hard to adjust to the bitterness!
I enjoyed this lunch, though I stayed away from the greasy meat. David didn’t, in fact he had two pieces of meat: one purely fat, while the other had a small bit of meat attached. He put that piece in his mouth, chewed it for a moment, then put it on my plate where it stayed.
After lunch, David spoke for a few minutes about leadership, then I gave an overview of how to keep minutes. There was no reaction to either. As I was finishing up, Pastor Jimmy and another of the elders from Mpigi came in. They had been at a funeral and were just then arriving in Kampala.
The rest of the agenda went quickly. After all was done, Pastor Jimmy read a letter that basically accused us of not giving his church money it had been promised. Trouble was nothing had been promised! Joseph handled a potentially explosive situation well, and we were ready to leave in a few minutes.
The van had returned, so we boarded and Vincent sped away. The Dallas crew wanted Thai food, so we went to our rooms and hurried back to the van. We called the others, but they were tied up and could not join us. The setting was relaxing. The tables sat under a tall wooden structure with open walls to gardens. Gardens below the setting area held a playground that entertained the towheaded children from the table behind us. Soft music lulled everyone into a peaceful mood as we had one of the best Thai meals that I’ve ever experienced.
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