Uganda Trip
So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last two weeks that I haven’t been posting, the answer is that I have been in Lira, Uganda. I spent 9 days working at an orphanage called the Otino Waa Children’s Village. Since it is hard to try to sum up the entire experience in one post, I’ll instead just post some short thoughts and then the rest of the story will get filled in over on my flickr and over the next few weeks here. So, in roughly chronological order, here we go. . .
- We crossed the Nile River yesterday. I have never seen so much water moving with so much power.
- The power is out as I write this, who knows when it will come back on.
- My body is not adjusting well [to the time change], I feel sick and exhausted and I’m still not sleeping well. I will have to be careful in the heat.
- Our 6 hour bus ride yesterday took about 10 hours. A good 2-3 hours of that spent on dirt roads. Even what was paved could only be generously described as such.
- Otino Waa is a much more impressive facility than I imagined.
- Posho [what we had for lunch every day] really does taste like good cardboard.
- The fruit here is amazing [especially the bananas]
- The house I had lunch with yesterday was really fun but it was awkward sometimes too. The house mom was telling me about how lucky I am to live in the US. I didn’t know how to respond because everything I could think of either sounded tacky or arrogant. The difference between my life in America and their lives in Uganda is so profound it is almost hard to imagine. It would take them months to make the money I make in one day at my “low paying” job.
-I wanted to tell them yesterday that al the extra “stuff” we have makes our lives complicated too, but again I realized how arrogant that would be. Some of these kids ran for their lives through the bush or watched their parents die from AIDs. How can I compare bad traffic and the difficulties of the Christian dating scene to that?
-Uganda is hot, hot and humid [and it's the dry season]
- I’ve managed to avoid getting burned too bad but I haven’t completely escaped the unrelenting sun.
- They wear fleece hats and coats when it drops below 7o degrees. I finally start to feel comfortable.
- I’ve been drinking 4-6 500 ml bottles of water every day and I’m still dehydrated.
- Missions is not my calling,, but this has still been a great trip. Where most stories out of Africa are about disease, war, and famine, we met children who were full of genuine joy and zest for life.
- Our bus driver James has Jedi powers. He talked bridge guards out of arresting us, talked other guards into letting us though a security checkpoint without showing the right papers, got our room number from the front desk clerk, convinced the drivers of a damaged ferry to come back and pick us up before shutting down to make repairs, and was pretty much awesome all around.
- We saw a lion hunt and kill a small deer. Coolest thing I saw on the trip.
