Oliotia! (hello to you) This e-mail will be a compilation of short stories just to catch you up on some things that are going on!
We've been all over the country side outside Kampala and seen some pretty devastated areas. One of the boys (the pastors or the house dad's) will inform us they need to borrow us for a little bit, and we'll be all over the place meeting kids and families that might be taken in to the kid’s home that Come Let's Dance helps sponsor, going to pastor's conferences, and meeting crazy travelers and aid workers from all over the world. Here are some stories from the last few weeks…
Sofia
We stood looking at coloring books, cheap crayons, and biscuits (cookies, if you’re in America) wondering what a girl who lost her ability to walk would appreciate most.
We finally decided on the book with the big happy safari animals and numerous word searches. We walked through the open rusted gates for our first visit to Mengo hospital. It’s supposed to be one of the nicest hospitals in Kampala and we were disgusted but not so surprised to find that “nice” in America and “nice” in Uganda did not mean the same thing. We walked along the sidewalk that weaved around the different run-down buildings; the birthing center, the new patient center, the terminally ill center. As we walked through some of these buildings we found most of the patients on their deathbed, people didn’t come here to get well, they came here to die. Doctors don’t wear gloves or wash their hands. IV’s are hanging from rusty nails in rotting wood on the wall. Syringes and other items that should be kept sterile are piled without containers into cabinets. Visitors have their soiled sleeping mats on the ground next to the patients’ cots, and sleep under the cot during the night. It was awful. We finally came to the pediatric center, where
Sofia, the object of our visit, was.
Sofia is about eight, has brown wondering eyes, and a shy smile. She had gotten a cut on her knee a month or so ago and it wasn’t taken care of properly so it got infected. The longer the cut went without treatment, the farther the infection spread. Until something completely preventable turned in to paralysis. The mother couldn’t afford hospital treatment so little Sofia’s legs were just left to decay and become useless. Some volunteers from Chicago that left just before we arrived were informed of the situation and immediately put forth the money and effort to bring Sofia to a hospital. She’s been there ever since.
I’ve since thought about how if those people hadn’t brought her to a hospital, Sofia would have become one of those PBS documentary children: begging on the street surrounded by flies, crawling with her hands, as she drags her body and limp legs behind her. Even at the time of our visit her legs still looked awful, her knees had swollen to twice their normal size, and down to her ankles they looked like sticks. She won’t be able to walk for at least another six months. We stay with her, coloring, laughing, talking, smiling until the doctor arrives and says they have to drain the fluid in her knees. Sofia loses the color in her face and her eyes leak a few tears as she thinks of the pending pain. She closes the coloring book and hugs it tightly. I’m not quite sure what the fluid drainage entails, but my heart sinks as the doctor tells us that she isn’t allowed any pain medication during the procedure. They have to do this at least once a day. My thoughts race to find the optimism in the situation… at least now she’ll be ok right? The current pain will lead to walking again right? All of these procedures will work out, and she’ll still get to have a childhood right? But we don’t know, and we can’t do anything about it. I’ll watch all those PBS documentaries differently now, I’ll look at the blind, lame, diseased people I walk past everyday differently now, it all could have occurred from the completely preventable. All of Africa suffers from an infected cut that goes untreated.
Internet Lessons:
We took all the older kids, half on Thursday and half on Friday, to an internet café to teach them how to use a computer. It was crazy how all except a limited few had never worked on them before. We could barely even teach, because Sue and I have grown up with computers all our lives, so we forgot to tell about things like handling the mouse (double clicks and such), the space bar, and how to make capital letters. But we had all the kids set up an internet account on Yahoo and write their first e-mail. E-mail really is a wonderful thing it's unbelievable how connected it makes the world. Most of them wrote an e-mail to Shane Gilbert our American contact who is the director of Come Let's Dance. Some of them remembered e-mails of old friends that have since moved away, and were absolutely ecstatic to communicate with someone they thought they had lost forever. We hope to be able to take them back this week so they can check their e-mail, and get a few more pointers on how to use a computer.
Swimming:
On Saturday we took almost all the little kids swimming. Imagine 36 people in a taxi built for 14, it was nuts, and they sang the whole way. Susan and I just looked at each other and laughed, and we both had one of those moments where we sighed with joy at how there was no place else we'd rather be. We got to the pool and decided the swim lesson should be floating on your back. So we took 5 at a time trying to teach them to stay afloat, but most of them even though they could touch the bottom with ease were scared to death and clung to us for dear life. After we had done our best with all the kids David declared that everyone could swim and all the kids went screaming and jumping in the pool. It was so amazing to see all the kids get comfortable in the water and begin not crying when Sue and I threw them in. Sue and I weren't expecting to be out in the sun as long as we were, and even though we put on sun screen it didn't help me out much. I am peeling severely as I write this email, but it was so worth it!
Love, love, love:
Suzie (that's what everyone here in Uganda call her, isn't that cute?) and I have successfully made it our first two and a half weeks here, it's unbelievable that it has only been two and a half weeks, it feels like a lifetime. We've already had our share of building relationships with incredible people, amazing memories, homesick stomachs, and disappointments.
There was something in the air the other day, and we both felt it. It wasn't until we went to bed that night that we really talked about it. We were both in a way slightly discouraged, neither one of us have ever done anything like this before. We've gone different places on vacation, to travel, to visit family, to work with teams of people, but we've never come to a place with the intention to help and have no idea how. All the other trips kind of like this that we've been on have been mission trips with pastor leaders and schedules and months of planning. We have to come up with our own ideas of things that we want to give these people whether it is supplies, labor, or skills. We need to plan it, and we need to make it happen.
Writing it now makes me excited, but we figured out that the discouragement was stemming from the fact that we're also scared. We're scared that we won't make a difference, that we'll get lazy and nothing will get done, that we're just another group of people that will slowly fade out of their lives because at the end of the day we're still going home. And as we were talking the conversation slowly took a turn. We were never called here to change the world, we're not super amazing people with the capability to really even help out here. The only thing we can do, and that we have unlimited ability to do is loving God, loving these kids, and loving each other. But even though love is the reason why we're here, it's one of the only things in which we won't be able to see its effect. We won't be able to measure how much we loved someone or the difference that it has made. I don't know if it's an American thing or a people thing but we all seem to be very end result driven, we want to know that we've accomplished something, see the outcome, and reap its good feeling benefits, and we've come to the conclusion that that may not happen. We might not ever be able to see if we did anything of lasting importance here, and we have to decide everyday that that has to be ok. because whether we see it, or we don't, whether we get good satisfied feelings, or we feel useless. loving someone is always worth it. So as we continue to learn, our hearts continue to break, our spirits continue to be humbled, and our lives continue to head in directions we don't expect. we know that we are together for a reason, and that we are here to love. when it's hard, when we don't have to, when we feel we don't have any left, and when there's absolutely no evidence that we're doing anything at all.
Pray that we find direction, and that discouragements never get the best of us. You are all so wonderful!
Nicole and Sue
