Day 12 - July 17

Today was another one of those rough days. Not because we couldn’t get anything done, but because we saw some of the “real Africa”. There is a village in a place called Mbende where a man we met, Deo, has started a project called Good Hope Initiative. He grew up in the village and many people have donated land and buildings for him to use as a center for the orphaned children of the village. He now has two different buildings in two different village areas where the children come, mostly on Saturdays, to do their homework and do some singing together. He also has placed orphans in homes with guardians that take care of them after their parents have died. Some of the other children in the program are simply disadvantaged because the parents are even more poor than the average villager. They may have less land, or poor growing areas, or are not able to work on their land. The truth is, I don’t think any of the kids in this village really have an “advantage”. There is little access to health care with only a small clinic building. Even when the doctor prescribes a medicine, it is usually unavailable or too expensive. Angella reminds me often that people here don’t die because of misdiagnosis or not knowing what to do – they die because they can’t pay to treat it. She sometimes feels like when people come to her, she ends up telling her what is going to kill them. If she says they have malaria, they know what drugs to buy, but they can’t afford them. If she finds they have cancer, chances are they won’t be able to pay for chemo drugs. It’s a sad, sad story but is a story shared by the majority of the population, so few people have time or money to mourn each other’s situations or help their neighbors pay for their health care. When you get immersed in this place, you are overwhelmed at the reality of the needs. The statistics are staggering. When I hear about how many people die from treatable diseases, how many women die in childbirth, and how many children don’t make it to age 5, it doesn’t hit me. When I see people dying from treatable diseases, children without mothers, and babies wasting away, I don’t know where to put all of my thoughts and emotions because there are too many to contain.

The drive out is much worse than it was last year. The roads are under construction in most places. If you thought construction season in Minnesota is bad, try dealing with construction here. I’m pretty sure it is a 5 year plan. There is over 60 miles of construction area, and in the whole distance, I only saw 10 men working and two different machines to do the work. Things are probably not going to go very fast when 5 guys with shovels are moving dirt from a huge pile onto the road. When I was with Gloria, I thought the dust was bad. THIS was BAD! There is constantly dust in the air. Every tree, building, and probably person on the side of the road is a shade of red from their coating with dust. You have to drive with the windows open or else you will suffocate from the heat. When you roll them down, you suffocate from the dust. It’s times like these that I thank God that he put hair in my nose to filter out the air! For more than two hours there and back, we were on bumpy roads with clouds of dust. There were times when big trucks would go by, and we would have to quickly roll up the windows and stop the car because there was so much dust coming in and the cloud was so thick that you couldn’t see anything in front of you. When we got home, Angella finally got a glimpse of herself and saw that she had brown hair instead of black and that her cream colored shirt was nearly brown! When I took a shower, my hair kept rinsing out reddish brown water. Usually my feet are the problem, but this time, it was my entire body! I’m sure when I was my clothes, there will be a bucket full of red water!

We are trying to check out Mbende to see if it will work for the orphanage project medicine cabinets. I have been there once last year, and I wanted Angella’s opinion on how it might be able to work. Our problem is that we are not quite sure exactly what Deo’s project is and how it works. He seems like he really cares about the village and the children, but he doesn’t really understand what we are trying to do. We need to be able to provide medicine cabinets to homes with only orphans and caregivers that will be using the medicine so we can track how much medicine is used. I think Deo’s understanding is that we are supplying the whole village with medicine and that we are somehow going to save the day! We just don’t have the resources to do that yet. When we discussed the trip earlier this week, Deo said there are 130 orphans, so we planned accordingly with candy, crayons, and a couple of coloring books. When we started to line the kids up to hand things out, children just started coming out of the woods. In the village, word spreads fast and when people here there are Mzungu’s giving things out, they all want to see. We counted nearly 200 children plus numerous guardians. As we asked Deo more questions, we realized that many of the children are not actually orphans and that a lot of them live in a home with mostly non-orphaned children. In order for the study to work, which I hope it will, we need to have proper accounts of which children are orphans and which are “disadvantaged” and distribute them properly. While we ate dinner later that night, Angella and I decided that we need to give Deo a “homework” assignment of listing the children who are orphans, their guardian, and what their relationship is. Hopefully he will be able to complete the assignment so that we can move forward with project. If not, we will still return to the village this time with people and some things that they need, but we won’t be able to enroll them in the study the way we were hoping.

The second center we went to was the main center where the children come and where some of the orphans actually live. The people of the village brought chairs for us to sit in and the children all lined up to sing songs. There is one that they sang called “We are the children of Uganda” that has been stuck in my head all day. It’s really repetitive and has a catchy tune. Seeing all of those children lined up singing about how they are the children of today shining brightly really makes you wonder. They are standing in torn, dirty clothes. They go to village schools where they often have no school materials to learn with. Most of them won’t have money to attend higher grade levels or university. If they are the future of this country, what will the future of the country be like? I really hope that there are ways to get them more help than we can give them. Our focus is on bringing medicine, but there is always so much more that can be done. Even if we just provided medicine, our small organization is not able to sustain any sort of project this big yet. Hopefully someday it will be different and we will be able to provide much more.

Today we brought some candy, a single coloring crayon, and ripped out pages of a coloring book for each kid. I felt like such a cheap person bringing so little to them (however, we knew beforehand that we were going to bring more later once we assessed the situation). The kids were so happy with just one piece of candy. The truth is, that one piece of candy is probably something they only get when there are visitors to the village. I just wish there were a way to control the madness. We prepare for a certain number, but I know that number will always be much higher because the children of the village will continue to arrive. How do you turn away a little kid who shows up wanting your help? I really don’t know the answer. I just know that we can only be faithful with the things we have been given and we can distribute what we have the best ways we know how.

After we got home tonight, I felt like we had two days of harsh situations. Yesterday was just a lot of little things. Today was physically exhausting from the dusty, bumpy ride and emotionally exhausting from the realization of the poverty in the villages. We need to come up with a plan for Mbende and how we can help. We need to figure it out in the next couple days so that we will have a good plan before Pamela and Nick arrive.