Day 15 - July 20

I love the days that you can feel like you are more than a tourist or a person just visiting. Because we are staying with people in a home and Angella has pretty much been adopted as a sister and daughter to us, we get to have a glimpse of what it feels like to be a part of the community here.

In the morning, mom and I sat around and read, watched some T.V. and caught up on some work that we had to do. Last night I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I went to bed before midnight and slept until I got a text message from somebody in the states at 2:00 in the morning. It doesn’t usually bother me, but for some reason, I couldn’t fall back to sleep this time. If I haven’t said before, we are 8 hours ahead of Minnesota time. As I was trying to fall back to sleep I kept hearing mosquitoes buzzing around near my head. Then I wouldn’t hear anything for a while and just when I thought it was safe to fall back to sleep, one would show up again! On top of the mosquitoes, I occasionally heard rustling of plastic. I knew that we had a plastic garbage bag in the room and we had a few food wrappers and things that cockroaches might like. I kept picturing them crawling all over the floor and eventually making it up onto my mattress! Every once and a while I would turn on my headlamp to try to find the mosquito, but when I did, I heard the creature in the black bag scurry away from the light. It went on for over 2 hours before I finally drifted back to sleep. Despite the middle of the night sleeplessness, I still managed to be away at 7:30 and not able to stay in bed! At least I got to sit around most of the day. At one point, I tried to take a little nap, but it lasted a measly 5 minutes.

Angella decided not to meet up with us at all during the day, but would catch up with us when we went to her friend Susan’s house for dinner. My mom and I took a cab ride to Garden City to get some money from the ATM, eat lunch, and maybe walk to the craft market nearby. By the time we got to Garden City, we decided we wouldn’t have enough time to walk anywhere. I was craving a pizza from the place in the food court, but for no apparent reason, it was closed. We settled for Chinese food. The service is so bad sometimes! Our server just didn’t bring some things and never explained what he was doing. At one point, he set the sauces down in front of us and then 5 minutes later another server swooped in and took them from us and delivered them to another table. Then, when we were finished with all our food, our waiter came back with the sauces and asked if we needed them. We didn’t ask for them in the first place, they were taken from us without explanation, and then when we have no use for them, they were offered to us! Almost all the waiters ended up just sitting down at random tables by the time we left. Clearly it doesn’t matter to them if they look busy or not. They just wanted to sit down. TIA!

We were supposed to meet Max, the person who runs Little Angel in Rubaga at 5:00 at his house. We were going to leave at 4:30, but Jozeph assured us we needed to leave at 4:00 in order to avoid the jam. It still took nearly a half hour to get there. We had picked up some rice, beans, school books, juice, and treats at the supermarket on our way. The two mothers were very appreciative of what we had to bring them. The children were excited to see us again and showed us around the house. I really don’t know how this place is run. Max apparently used to have sponsors for the kids for school and people who helped out paying the bills. The mothers said the sponsors are now gone and Max pays for all the bills himself. He has barely paid the mothers anything lately. One of them said she has only gotten paid 100,000 since January. That’s only $50 in 7 months! She doesn’t want Max to know that she told us but she is stuck because she has a family she needs to support and they can’t have her just going away to a job that doesn’t pay any money. The focus of our trip is to provide medicine and we also have some donated money to buy a food, clothes, or maybe a couple games for some of the places. We need to find a way for these places to survive on a daily basis. We heard about a few social programs from the other orphanage that I think we will recommend. The problem is, Max never made it. He was stuck in a jam. You would think he would have planned better considering he come to Little Angel nearly every day and works downtown. Jozeph told us what time we had to leave and he rarely goes to Rubaga. Even though we waited for a really long time, we still had fun. The kids ended up singing and dancing around the living room. I think kids really enjoy singing. It’s especially wonderful when they sing songs about Jesus! It’s great to see their smiling facing praising the Lord! Even though they have very little, they are very thankful for everything that they do have. We decided that we should buy them shoes for school. They brought us out the shoes they do have. Some have so many holes in them, they look like sandals. One pair had the inside sole so worn down that all you could see is the plastic support at the bottom. We drew lines on a piece of paper to try to mark down their sizes. Hopefully we will be able to find inexpensive shoes in all the right sizes when we go to the flea market on Friday.

At 6:30 we met up with Angella at her house. Luckily Jozeph is awesome and knows how to get around the city and avoid the major jams! He’s a great cab driver. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but Jozeph is a hard working guy. He went to school until Primary 7, which is just about junior high. His family no longer had money to support him in school, so he got a job working for a company. After many years with the company, they changed their policies so that in order for him to continue, he would need more education. Since that was not possible, he invested in a boda and started driving around town. Eventually he saved up to buy more bodas and hire drivers for them. Then he decided to sell the bodas and buy a cab. Now he has his cab, a few bodas, he owns land in the country, a house in Kampala, and supports his wife and children along with his brothers and sisters. He’s really a hard working guy. He drives his cab seven days a week from morning until at least 9 or 10 at night. It goes to show that if you put your mind to it, you can make things happen in this country. Jozeph has said numerous times that the men in this country are lazy. They tend to have 5 wives and not work and then expect people to give them things. It’s sometimes nice to hear what people in the country thing about the people living here. It gives you a perspective that you might not otherwise have discovered.

Susan the woman in charge of the international students at Mulago. Ross met her on his first trip and we usually stop in to see her at least once or twice. She is pretty good friends with Angella so she wanted to host us for dinner. Her sister, Barbara cooked a lot of traditional food – Matooke, rice, beans, pork, vegetables, and chapatti. Susan is also a really short lady! I think she makes my mom look tall when she stands next to her! We took a picture together and Susan was still shorter than me when she stood on the couch! Susan’s favorite part of the night was watching my mom and her niece, Clarissa, interact. They had flashcards with animals on them. My mom was saying the words in English and Clarissa was saying them in Luganda. Neither really understood what the other was saying, but they were communicating the same thing. We are going to bring some crayons to Susan’s office for Clarissa in the next couple of days. It’s the least we can do! Hopefully when I apply to a program here as a 3rd or 4th year student, she will approve me to come! She apparently has all the power to accept or reject student applications!