I could complain about the flight.. Lets just say my neck is sore, and I am fatigued.
I met a man from San Antonio who is a plastic surgeon doing a medical mission to fix deformations for people in Rwanda.. that was cool. I had a 2 hour delay on my flight out of New York causing Delta to kick everyone on board a $100 voucher and I still made it to Amsterdam with time to spare for my connecting flight... that was cool. After I sat looking at the Luggage carousel for 25 minutes, my bag rounded the corner, bringing a smile and sigh of relief to share with the person standing next to me. Unfortunately, they hadn't seen their bag yet. I hooked up with Bosa, our driver, and as we waited for Joe to walk out of the Terminal, I handed him a snack of soy wasabi almonds and bought him a bottle of water. Joe finally showed up and we headed into Seeta to check into the Ridar Hotel. We got into our rooms right around 1:30am and wouldn't you know it!? my 30 hour sleep deprivation disappeared. I didn’t feel tired. The feeling quickly returned when I decided to lay down and imagined what it was like to be on the plane in the uncomfortable head-bobbing position. It was quiet. It was dark. It was warm. I closed my eyes and before I knew it; it was morning.
Today we had a nice breakfast and started out trying to get a hold of Felix so that we could meet with him about the wall. His phone was off, so we figured that it would be best to head into Kampala and stop by Christian Life Ministries (CLM) so that we could also run a few of our errands while we waited. We arrived at CLM and asked if we could meet with Felix and found that he was actually in Lira. After calling Felix, talking to a receptionist, talking to a man named William, and talking to Betty, we discovered that the plan was to withdraw the money that we wired for the project and exchange it into shillings to take with us to Lira. We needed to wait for someone to go and withdraw the money. Before long a girl walked out of the CLM building with a brown envelope and handed it to me and said, “here is your money”. Long story short, it was an incorrect amount of money, and we had to eventually get to jackson to actually find out what was going on. CLM gave us 20% of our budget out of their own pocket because the wire transaction had not been completed. He said, “sometimes it can take weeks, and sometimes only a few days.” Finally understanding; we took our funding and exchanged it at a rather good rate, and then bought some boxes of water.
We drove back to pick up some letters for children that were at the hotel, and then drove out to the orphanage to see the children, and to see what has been happening there. The school has made progress. There were several construction workers that were there relaxing as the children were gathered outside the classrooms listening to the schoolmaster. It was a beautiful dusk at the orphanage. Places that I have always seen somewhat dusty and barren were lush and green, and the area down by the pump house was surrounded by large beautiful banana trees. We also met with Daniel and Rachael Grahm, who were in Kampala. They were able to come out and see the orphanage. They are missionaries up north, who we will be visiting a little later in this trip.
Also to our surprise I heard one of the boys call me “Makurada”. I turned to him and asked how he knew that, and he told me that it was my name; he was from Lira. I ran into a few other familiar faces from Lira later in the evening. Some of the older girls that I know had been moved from Lira to Seeta. They were moved to finish their Primary school and to go to Secondary school. - Today is the first day for primary school in Uganda, and secondary school officially starts in the next few days as well. I asked them who was going to play seven stones with me, but they couldn’t tell me.. Seven Stones is a game where as you try to stack seven stones on top of each other without them falling over, the catch is while you do this, the other team tries to hit you with a rock (balled up sock). The more times you can stack the stones without being hit, the more points you get.
The Jet lag started to hit Joe quite visibly as he would stand and try to endure conversation. He told me a few times that this was the case, so we started to make our way back to the car. It wasn’t easy to leave quickly, since I doubt Ill see anyone from Seeta again during this trip. It felt strange to me. I almost didn’t want to go to Seeta in the first place because I knew that they would be sad that I was only there for a few hours, not to return till the summer months. I didn’t even get to see my daughter Florence; she was still with her auntie on holiday.
Tomorrow we will leave for Lira in the morning. Hopefully we will get there in good time. I booked a room at the hotel there for the first night, and after that I am at the orphanage full time. There is a chance that I will get internet, but not until Bruce and Julie come to Uganda.
