We are at the airport and we’ve both hit the point where we
can’t think straight or make decisions. I’m
looking forward to my bed, food variety (I’m unbelievably full of starch), a
tap that produces drinking water, hot showers and wearing jeans. I was dreading the journey this morning – the
road is so bad that sometimes the only way to drive is on the wrong side of the
road in the ditch, but then of course the cars/buses/bikes coming in the
opposite direction are heading straight for you. In the event I slept for most of the way this
morning, only waking when Charles swerved violently, we went over a bump at
speed, or he slammed on the brakes. Then I thought about Tom in Soroti who gets
up 4 days a week to start collecting the children to bring to the centre, and
11 hours later will drop the last one off.
I’ve been musing in the last couple of days at how
incomparably different my life is at home.
I love Uganda and I love my friends here, and I’m sad to be going as I
don’t know if and when I’ll be back. So –
I hereby give anyone reading this blog permission to tell me off if I complain
about any of the following things.
1.
The M1 queue in the mornings and the length of
time it takes to get to work.
Remind me of those children in Rukungiri
who had a 2 day trip to hospital for surgery, then a 2 day trip back to the
rehab centre. Get me to imagine how much pain they feel as
the transport bumps and rattles along the unmade roads or slides in the mud. Remind me that here many people walk to work
or school which can be several kilometres away.
They have to walk in tremendous heat and pouring rain. They walk along
the side of treacherous roads. Many can’t even afford bicycles. Allen said the furthest she’d travelled was to
Kampala for a Global Care conference.
2.
Anything to do with food!
Remind me that many people here have only
what they can grow on whatever piece of land they have. Remind me about Arnold and his family who were
having a meal of cassava – their only meal that day. And don’t let me forget how much starchy food
I was given as that’s what fills people up.
Remind me about banana wilt, floods and droughts and the people so ill
and frail they had nothing to eat or sell and couldn’t afford to get to the
hospital. Show me my pictures of the
children in the hospital with malnutrition.
3.
My job
Remind me of the parents of a disabled girl
who had to go out every day to look for work digging a neighbour’s land. As that was their only source of income they
left the child locked in a shed each morning.
4.
Paying taxes
Remind me that we have free healthcare, at
the risk of contradiction I’ll add good roads, free education, a police force
and law enforcement agencies and prisons where justice and punishment are not directly
related to how much you have for a bribe. We have foster carers, social
services and social security. Our children
with disabilities (CWD) have free medical care, surgery, physiotherapy, speech
and language therapy, day care, schools, hospices, respite care, mobility
allowance and that’s not all. Here the CWD
are amongst the most rejected and despised in the country. These vulnerable children often live in
extreme poverty and few have adequate access to such services.
I could go on! Money, pensions, housing, electricity, clean
water, running water, ‘dustbin men’, re-cycling, washing machines, proper beds….
We have been encouraged by so much on this trip –
particularly the passion and care shown by the Global Care staff, the work that’s
being done with the CWD and the dedication of the staff at Rukungiri, Kampala
and Soroti. We were delighted to see
children who had put on weight from the last time we saw them and who appeared healthy
and well. It’s been brilliant to see the things we’ve sent out or raised money
for being put to good use in the skills centre at Soroti.
We’ve come back with a huge shopping list that we need to
discuss with the Global Care UK staff – but we have been challenged to step up
our attempts to fund-raise and recruit sponsors.
As I wait to board the plane, I know that my heart will
always have a place here and I hope I’ll hold onto the value of making a child
smile. This trip we learnt that our
sponsored girl at Atiira was abandoned by her mother and left on her neighbour’s
veranda when she was 3 months old. She’s
a shy, introverted little thing. But on
this visit we made her smile with finger puppets. It doesn’t take much. That little girl has an education, a meal at
school each day, support for healthcare, and a lovely team who look out for
her. How much does it cost us? Each
month our sponsorship is not much more than the cost of us going to the
pictures and having a bag of popcorn. www.Globalcare.org.uk
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