Civilization

Made it to Kampala yesterday.  It was pretty uneventful except the drive to the airstrip takes one and a half hours and my flight was leaving at 2:00; the car that was supposed to get me there decided that it needed tires and didn't come and get me until 1:10.  Anyhow long and short is that we made it on time :-)  The road is so bumpy that I think we four wheeled it the whole way.

Today we went around Kampala, this city is insane.  It's dirty and over crowded, the cars follow no rules, there are millions of shops and street vendors, and the directions just don't make sense.  Anyhow, I think I'll get used to it eventually?  I'm also adjusting to being around 16 American's again.  I forgot how much college students talk about clothes, weight and movies.  I miss my Kitgum girls.

Promised Pictures

Here are some photos of the daily activities at the New Life Center.  I took about 1000 pictures and would like to show you them all but with my internet speed and the fact that you wouldn't want to look at them all, I will just post a few...

Panoramic of where the girls from the center lived.

Our cook/house help/best friend teaching the girls how to make chapatti (which she also taught me (and which I am willing to cook for you))

Learning tailoring.

 

The three of us from my program who went to Kitgum

 

How not to use your mosquito net.

 

Beans and Posho.  Staple food.  Oh and I learned how to eat it with my fingers!

 

 Teaching them games.

 

Free time for the kids.

 

Me and our fabulous, amazing, spectacular house help.

Today is my last day in Kitgum.  I would love to stay here longer but classes in Kampala start on Monday.  It's been really hard for me to leave these girls.  Lilly, with tears in her eyes, told me that I am the only person she has been able to talk with about her past and her struggles and that I'm the only person that can help her.  I am going to help her get back to school.  But I know it is much more than schooling that she needs help with and I wish that I could do more.  Josephine just keeps saying "life is going to be very difficult."

I would love to come back here.  I know that I will be here again, I just don't know when God will provide a way.

I have promised Lilly and Josephine that if they would like to go back to school that I would support them.  I will post about that later and see if any of you would be interested in helping to support either them or another girl here.

Where isn't the US army?

I never wrote about the US soldiers that are here.  Basically, the US, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya sent soldiers here to do some trainings on pandemics and things like that.  They ran clinics in some of the sub counties in the area (staying at each place for two days).  And then they came to Kitgum Hospital.  Ironically (or not ironically at all), I was there both days that they were there.

Basically when people hear that the US is coming with health supplies they come running.  I passed one of the community clinics and there were probably 1,000 people in line to get into this 4 or 5 room health clinic.  When they came to the hospital people were already there that had slept outside the night before.  I talked with one of the soldiers who said that they estimated well over 4,000 maybe pushing 5,000 people were in - I would say there were even more that were out of the sight of the soldiers.  They were only there for 2 days, from 9-3:30 each day.  And were only able to see a fraction of those people.  People who stood in line for hours and hours, some even days in the blazing hot sun with no water and no food.

While people in Kitgum were really excited that all these countries were genuinely interested in the well being of Northern Uganda, they realized quickly that while they did come to provide some support, they had no where near the agenda to treat everyone.  The activity was more of a training process for the army on how to work with local governments if there is a global emergency.

So yay for including some of the locals but I'm very frustrated that they gave the people a small taste of treatment but didn't even touch the health problem at hand.  The locals were so hopeful.  Even the soldiers said they weren't here long enough or with enough supplies to make any major impact.  Gr.  If you want to help, how about training the people working in the hospital who know next to nothing about sanitation?

The girls.

There have been so many things that have happened this week that I could have written every night and still wouldn't have begun to capture it.

Quick updates:

• Both kids were released from the hospital (thank you Jesus), even the one who had meningitis is now playing with the other kids and feeling just fine.
• The other girls from Go Ed that were here left early Monday morning.
• I am leaving Friday.

I've spent almost every waking hour with the girls from the center.  They all now call me "Anaka Meg."  I've grown much closer with the two girls that I wrote about, Josephine and Lilly.  Both of them have really opened up about what their stuggles are and how hard life is for them in the village.

The funny thing is that our lives are so completely different yet we are able to relate, or just understand because human emotion doesn't change by culture.  They wake up and have to walk 2 miles to get water, struggle to find something for breakfast for their young children, strap their child to their back and go to the fields where they will labor digging from 7am until 2pm.  They will get 2000-2500 shillings (a little over a dollar) to go home with and then struggle the rest of the day to try and find some food to eat or do more work to get food.

Completely different.

Yet when you get us together we just have fun and talk and cry and laugh.  On Cammie's last night we stayed in Josephine's hut with a bunch of the girls showing them the games that we played as kids.  You know the clapping ones or just the random hand games we grew up with.  We were in the middle of the game where you all sit in a circle and the hand slap goes around and whoever ends with it at the end of the song is out.  Yeah you remember.  Anyhow it ended on Josephine and she had this face that was just hilarious.  It was exactly like anybody in the states.  It just hit me then how alike we are.  I've known that this whole time but it was in that moment that it really struck me.

These girls are amazing.

Josephine

So I've been going to the hospital a couple times a day to check on the girls there and yesterday one of the mothers told me more about herself. She is an orphan who is taking care of all her younger siblings.  She has two children, one is four and one is two and a half.  Her husband was killed in an accident when she was pregnant with the second.When she was younger she was advanced in school and was invited to study at an English speaking school here in Northern Uganda. She got to the end of primary school (about the age of 13 or 14 probably.  But then had her first daughter and had to leave school.  Here's the other thing, secondary school is way more expensive than primary and most people can not afford it.  It is 270,000 a year.  The equivelant of $142.11. Which, in the villages, is unheard of.

There was a man from Italy who had agreed to pay for her and her brothers to finish their schooling (which goes up to about age 20).  He was willing to support them (I believe that both she and her brothers are rather intelligent) but right before he did, he was killed by the LRA.  They got nothing.  Josephine would like to go to vocational school (which costs less than $120/year) so she can at least learn tailoring and make some money for them.  She seemed to say that she would like to go back to secondary but doesn't have the money to even consider it.

Here's the thing that amazed me, with everything that she said she expressed how much faith she has in God.  "God didn't will for my husband to stay with us."  "God took away my parents but didn't abandon us."  "The man who was going to pay wasn't chosen by God to be able to help us."  "I wake up and if God wills, I will find work for the day and will eat; if not - I will wait until the next day and see if it's in His plan for me to get work."  "Maybe someday God will provide a way to go to school, but if not now, that is going to be okay."  I can't even imagine not being bitter about everything that has happened to her but she has absolutely complete faith that God is on her side.

What an amazing human being.

haha

 
The girls here are all trying to convince me to meet their brothers so that I can get married to a Ugandan and move into their villages.