The first morning (my flight got in at 7:45am), I arrived at our guest house (we, the long-termers, live right down the hill from the guest house) just in time for morning devotions. I walked into a room of 8 other Mzungus (Mzungu is the word for white people, literal translation, foreigner) and the Ugandans who work for the organization. I was thinking I would arrive at a compound when we got here (with our house and the orphanage in the same compound like at the Child Rescue Center in Sierra Leone), but I found out our kids house (orphanage is a bad word here) is 10 kilometers away. After devotions on this first day we went out to the kids house. We hopped in a taxi-a van that functions like a bus, crammed in with about 20 other Ugandans, and then got out at the taxi park and jumped on a bodabodas (motorcycle taxis) to get the rest of the way. In the afternoon we went to Mulago Hospital in Kampala (the hospital in The Last King of Scotland, if you've seen it) and prayed over sick kids and brought bubbles and candy and stickers (we were in the general ward that day, but the cancer ward that I visited later is crazy--kids so swollen they look completely deformed and a child in a neighboring room was screaming through a surgery with no anesthetic). My first night, we went back to the kids house for a movie night--The Lion King. Did you know that the word for Lion in Swahili is Simba? The kids know about as much Swahili as I do though (which is next to nothing). They speak Luganda. My second day, I went to Jinja with two amazing short-termers, Tonya and Chady, we visited the source of the Nile and spent a whole day white water rafting. I came away with a pretty awesome looking black eye from hitting my head on a fellow rafters helmet during a particularly rough Grade 5 rapid.
I absolutely love the organization I'm working with, which is funny because I didn't know nearly enough about them before I came to work with them. I knew I would be working on education stuff with orphans in Africa, I had read the website, and I knew I loved Shane, our executive director. I had no idea how the organization really functioned or what it actually believed about community development. Come Let's Dance is registered as both a American and a Ugandan NGO. The whole purpose is sustainability and coming alongside of Ugandans to empower them to create their own future. I love it because we don't just work with these Ugandans, we live in community with them, they are our best friends, we know their families, we know their stories. The organization started with a kids home which we don't call an orphanage, because our hope is to get the children back with the families that abandoned them for financial reasons or with other families in the community if they are true orphans. Most of the kids go to boarding school, and during the school break we send them back to their remaining families or another family in the community. It's interesting that the idea of an orphanage is something that the West brought with them and before that Africans were naturally incorporating orphaned children into the homes of aunts and uncles or other community members. There was not necessarily even the idea that you could abandon a child to be taken care of by an orphanage before the Europeans came. So the whole idea with our organization is family empowerment. CLD is working with the mothers and fathers of some of the children to start microbusinesses by giving out no-interest loans. CLD works in the slum where many of the kids came
from, and has pooled some of the slum women together to start a sewing shop that creates products for tourists (jewelry and aprons). Hopefully someday soon school uniforms for Ugandans so it can be really self-sustainable (right now the business is almost broke). We just started a farm project, so that the children's home can be
self-sustainable creating food for themselves and for the market and the hope is to add a vocational training school in agriculture. My role here is thinking about what it would look like to create a school for our kids. I'm taking a couple post-graduate classes at Makerere University's School of Education and observing classes at secondary and primary schools to learn about the Ugandan system of education. I'm trying to start a couple sustainable enrichment programs for our kids while I'm here as well. I love that it is always the Ugandans that are at the head of our projects. Our hope for our NGO is that there will be a day when we don't have to exist anymore--and that's probably my favorite part about our organization.
I love it here so much. I'm starting to learn to live in the present and to not be constantly planning the next step (which is what I felt like I did all of college). I am excited to learn how to be myself outside the safety of university and inside the sometimes uncomfortable experience of living in another culture. I don't think I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I left college other than get to Africa and work in education. I can articulate now where and what it is I feel called to do and what I am passionate about doing with my life. I want to live in community with the most marginalized, the people in places and situations everyone else has given up on. I want to do grassroots community development work focusing on education in conflict and post conflict areas.
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