Day 11 - July 16

It was bound to happen. It happens every year. It can’t be helped – if it can, somebody needs to tell me how to stop it. I’ve had a day that I LOVE this country but I HATE this country!! There are road blocks with every project that we do, but we can just work through them. Usually we have one problem every day, but there always seems to be a day when every project is super frustrating!!

We started the morning going to Mulago hospital to meet with Evelyn’s doctors. She is a girl who we saw last year that was born with a deformity that basically prevents her from defecating at all. (If you don’t like a graphic picture in your head, don’t read the rest of this paragraph!) In order to fix the problem, there are numerous surgeries involved. The first is called a colostomy which is done so that the pressure built up from the feces in her intestine can be removed. Part of her intestine is now exposed outside of her body so that she will not be backed up with feces anymore. It’s one thing to have the surgery, but it’s another to have the surgery and then do nothing for months! The surgery was done in February, and there has still not been anything done!!! There was supposed to be another surgery to put the intestine back and fix the problem, but the surgeons don’t know what to do and they want to wait for a skilled set of physicians from another country to help them out. Evelyn’s mother comes to the hospital from the village at least once a month and is then told to come home. She has to keep the wound area clean while living in the village which is nearly impossible when you have to take care of your family in the village.

The situation has gotten out of control because the mother doesn’t understand why they keep sending her home and nothing is getting fixed. The doctors and nurses don’t care to do anything because they are frankly sick of the mother. Angella and I spent over an hour yesterday talking to the nurses and to Deo, a guy from the village who knows Evelyn very well. He is frustrated that he can’t help. Today we sat around for more than two hours waiting to talk to a doctor or nurse. The nurses ignored Angella when we tried to ask her a question. The doctors were just too busy on rounds. Finally, we saw a doctor that Angella knew that we could talk to. He didn’t know much since it was his first day, but it was at least a way in. We finally found that there is no real plan for Evelyn yet, but she will come back in two weeks for the doctors to come up with one. We’ll go back to the hospital to try and figure out what the plan is. For now, if anybody knows a team of surgeons that is willing to come and do a crazy surgery as a volunteer job, I’m sure they’d love to have you and Evelyn wouldn’t be the only case to tackle!! It’s just so upsetting to see a very sick kid not really getting help because of the lack of resources. That’s what’s going on with Evelyn. They want to fix what’s wrong but they don’t know how and they don’t know how to find out. I really just pray that we can find a way to fix this poor little girl! She is very sweet until you try to see her wound. She immediately screams and cries. Poor thing!!

While we were waiting we got pretty hungry and tired so we decided to go to the cafeteria and grab a snack and a soda. We tried to stand in line but found that people just kept pushing their way right in front of us and they were getting served. Lines don’t exist here, especially if you are Mzungu. I finally put my money in front of a woman’s face so that she was forced to see me and serve me. Maybe I just don’t know how to navigate the lines here, but I tend to feel like people will push in front of me but not other people. The same thing happened in the grocery store as I was waiting in an actually check-out line. After the first person went in front, I thought he was just rude, but after the second tried I was not happy and I ended up just edging my way back in front of her and putting all of my water on the counter in front of her. I need to figure out that system fast!

While we enjoyed our soda and donuts (not anything like our donuts other than the fact that they are fried in oil!) we decided to try to call Joshua’s step-mother again. Joshua had cancer last year and we accompanied him during one of his chemotherapy appointments, along with his father, Wycleif. We also took him to the zoo with his stepmother, Jessica, and two of her daughters. When I tried to call Jessica, she spent the entire conversation complaining that I had her number. She denied knowing me, refused to claim that she was Jessica, and told me that I should tell Angella to stop giving out the wrong number. I double checked the number when I was done and it was definitely the right one! I repeatedly asked about Joshua and she kept changing the subject by asking me a question. She never denied or confirmed that she even knew Joshua! She finally just hung up on me. I wasn’t about to waste more air time on her. I decided that maybe I should try Wycleif’s number again even though last time it was not in service. To my surprise it worked! The man on the other end was Wycleif and he informed me that Joshua is still alive and in school and we will get to see him next Friday afternoon in Entebbe while I am waiting to pick up my friends from the airport! Praise the Lord! Something worked out today! Let’s just hope that plans don’t change again before Friday!

Our next project was to go to what I would describe as a flea market to get clothes to bring to Watoto. Even though they get clothes from the orphanage, they often don’t get the right types of clothes so the kids go with the same things all the time. There is a truck that drops off a huge pile that all of the 8 houses in the complex get to choose from. The problem is most of the other houses have older children in them, so they usually don’t send many little children’s clothes for them. The flea market would over-stimulate any person’s senses. There are people everywhere and all of them are yelling in Luganda. Occasionally I could pick out Mzungu – sometimes in a laughing tone because they were surprised to see us there, sometimes shouting to get our attention, other times a not so friendly tone. Regardless, the color of my skin determines the price of the clothes. There are some umbrella’s set up with clothes nicely hung. Some people have tarps laid out nicely with folded clothes. Then there are the piles…..piles of every sort of kids clothes you can imagine just thrown on top of a tarp. A man will holler out a price and show and item of clothing and then throw it down to pick up another. Once we found a tarp that looked promising. We told the guy what we were looking for and he began to try and show us what we wanted. After spending 15 minutes gathering a pile of clothes and deciding what we like, all the while sweating in the hot mid-day sun, he told us the price would be 1,500 per shirt. It’s only about 75 cents, but the price for the woman before us was 500 and we knew it was not a fair price for what we were getting, so we tried to haggle. He refused so we walked away. He lost on the sale of 20 items, and we went to start the process all over again. We had to go to at least 4 tarps to get enough clothes for the 2 young girls and one older girl that we didn’t already have clothes for. We then spent nearly 45 minutes trying to find pants and shorts for the boys. They were harder to find and even more difficult to get a good price. They were trying to charge 5,000 for shorts worth 2,000 or less. We had to go to many and walk away after wasting time. Even Angella was getting angry at the way people were treating us about prices. I should be used to it by now, but for some reason, today was just too much! Often, once we walked away people agreed to the price we wanted, but Angella turned to them and said we had a price and the refused and now we will find something else. Even though we were cheated out of the real price, we were able to use the money people had donated to get a lot of clothes! In all, we had 14 pairs of boys pants/shorts, 5 pairs of girls pants, 14 girls shirts, 4 dresses, and 16 pair of underwear. The price? 93,500 shillings……in US dollars ---- just about $45. Clearly better than anywhere we could have gone back home, but it still should not have been that much. I wouldn’t have minded if people were cheating me out of the prices if I was buying it for myself. We even tried to explain we were buying the clothes for street kids and orphans, but that doesn’t pull on anybody’s heart strings at the market since we weren’t putting any clothes on their own kids back.

I must sound really bitter right now, but I am truly frustrated with the system. It’s not the actual money, it’s the principle. There are plenty of good people in this country who don’t take advantage of us, but there or more that do just because of our skin color. It’s so weird to know that the way people look at me is based on my race. It’s not something I think about at home because there are so many different people living together, but here we really stand out. It works to our advantage sometimes. For example, everybody was being checked in the supermarkets and large restaurants with metal detectors because of fear of bombs. When our friend Susan went through, the man checked every pocket of her wallet, which folded up was thinner and smaller than my bag. When I opened up my bag he barely looked and didn’t check any of the obviously large pockets that could have been filled with anything! I can walk up the hospital and go through any security point and not be stopped or questioned even though it’s not during visiting hours and I’m not a doctor, but if Angella does the same thing, she would be questioned, stopped and probably prevented from passing, even though she IS a doctor and has real reasons to be there. Discrimination is not cool, no matter who it affects and no matter if it works as an advantage or disadvantage.

On a lighter note, on the way out of the market, I saw a stand selling Obama jeans. There was a huge tag on the side with our president, endorsing the genes. I’m pretty sure Obama doesn’t know about them, and I don’t know if he would endorse such a product. They are used genes being sold under a false name and a price that is not showing their actual value. I wonder if he would respond if I wrote him a letter about it?

Tonight we went bowling with Angella, her sister, Kate, a friend, Richard, Susan, and my mom. The bowling alley has 6 lanes that were almost all full. I’m pretty sure I could see the streaks of wax that were not rubbed in, and the ball was taken if every direction but straight as it went down the lane. Nobody seemed to care and nobody really seemed to know how to bowl either! It was quite a sight on every lane. Sometimes the ball would not land until halfway down the lane. A guy next to us laid down on the ground after every ball. There was a lot of dancing by people in every age group. The pins usually came down, but by the time the gate went up, there were often 3 or 4 laid down already. Then you had to reset and hope the next one worked out. At one point, it took four tried to get 10 standing pins! At least there was an electronic score keeper. However, it never really added in strikes and spares with the right point system. I was upset that I got exactly 100, despite 6 spares. Then I realized that I had actually knocked down 100 pins. I’ll never know what the real score was! TIA!

Overall, a frustrating day, but I know tomorrow will be better! We are going to Mbende to check out the village and decide what types of things they need and how many medicine cabinets they will be needing. We also need to determine whether the children are orphans or they are just poor children in the village. The study we are doing requires orphanages so I am hoping that they fit the description!! Thank you for letting me vent today! I’m hoping that this will be the one frustrating day of the trip and that the rest will go a little smoother!