What, are they out chasing down the chicken?

Alright enough of the downer posts. It’s time for a funny post. I’ve got a great story that I hope you’ll enjoy. 

I mentioned that I went to Karamoja a few weeks ago. It’s a region in the northeast and is entirely different from the rest of the country. While most of Uganda has gone fairly Western by now, the Karamajong take great pride in their cultural heritage, and have held on strongly to their ways of life. They’re a pastoral people, and make their livelihood mostly from cattle-herding. The area is very rural, very tribal. 

So one night, we went for dinner at a hotel that supposedly had good food. We sat there for about 2 hours before the food was served. I’ve traveled enough to not let long serving times bother me, but the next night we still attempted to have a better experience than that. 

We went to a different hotel at 6:00 and ordered dinner to arrive at 7:30, thinking we could order it then go off to freshen up or whatever and come back and it would be ready. They didn’t have a menu, but verbally told us the options for the evening. We all happened to order chicken and various sides to go with it. 

So we arrived at 7:30 with foolish hopes that our food might actually be ready. Food was served at 9:00. 3 hours after we ordered it! 

The next day we found out what had happened. We made some comment about the long wait to one of the employees, and she burst into apologies. “Oh, I’m so sorry for last night! You know, chicken was over!” (Meaning they were out of chicken) “We didn’t want to disappoint you because you had ordered chicken, so we had to go out and seek for chicken, that’s why it took so long.” 

Oy. Seriously? 

There are so many subtleties in African culture, and saying “no” is a very complicated thing. They never want to disappoint you or tell you “no.” They felt like they would have disappointed us greatly by telling us there was no chicken, so they had to find a way to get it. Really they were disappointing us by making us wait 3 hours! (And really why did they tell us they had chicken in the first place when they didn’t?) I would have been fine changing my order to whatever they had ready! But this is the culture, and in spite of having to wait so long for dinner, I can’t help but just laugh about it all.

Ok, you know how when you go to a restaurant and the food is taking a long time, you joke, “Are they out chasing down the chicken?” 

This time, THEY ACTUALLY WERE OUT CHASING DOWN THE CHICKEN!!

May We Not Become Weary

So. The last post I wrote was the first one I had been able to write in over a month. The last month or so has been tough. I knew coming to Uganda that I would experience difficult things. I knew I would grow and change. But I didn’t anticipate the extent to which my heart would break and how it would be sewn back together with love, joy, and hope. I’ve experienced darkness and challenges in many different ways since I’ve been here, but about a month ago, it all came rolling in at once. Day after day there was one thing after another. 

That day that I saw the girl in the slums that I talked about in my last post, I had just come for an outreach with my friend Davy and the organization she works with here. They do weekly outreaches to some boys who live in the slums, teaching them a little because they’re not in school, and then teaching them Bible stories and songs. I thought it was odd that they only reached out to boys. Where were the girls? I learned that the boys tried to get them to come, but they refused. Most of them were too stuck in their ways and preferred a life of prostitution, and didn’t want anyone trying to tell them to change.

So the boys came, and with them came the overwhelming smell of glue, which they sniffed to get high. Several of the boys were just passed out on the benches and most of the rest had a glazed over look in their eyes. 

It rained all afternoon, and a walk through the slums after a rain is enough to break anyone’s heart. Little wooden shacks don’t do much at all to protect against heavy rains. 

We left the outreach and headed to the clinic to see a boy they knew who had been in a fight and had been in the hospital for a couple of days. 

Then I ran into those girls who had run away from the home, and my entire world was turned upside down, my entire reaction to poverty changed forever in an instant.

Are you getting the gist? This was a 3-hour span of one day. The next few weeks continued with things like this happening just about every day. In this time I visited Karamoja, a region of Uganda that is severely looked down upon by other Ugandans. I saw appalling living conditions and more importantly heard countless stories from my friends of warfare and hardships. I learned about how poorly the Karamajong people can be treated by other Ugandans, as though they’re dogs, as though they’re garbage. I visited the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria, a place of no hope, no self-betterment, a place of high HIV/ AIDS statistics, darkness, and witchcraft.

I wanted to keep up with my blog, but try to process this into a presentable post? Not happening. Instead I went into a sort of comatose phase for a few days, letting the darkness just engulf me. It was too much. Small things like challenges at work were even too much to think about. Instead I would find myself just sort of glazing over and checking out, feeling like there were too many problems in the world and there was no hope to try to improve any of them. 

Then, like it always does, hope came. Do you know what? It was actually from a Facebook post that someone made on the Dwelling Places page. Facebook is getting really weird and ick, but it turns out good things can still come from it. I’m not sure who it was-- maybe our UK Administrator?-- posted this on the DP page, from the book of Habakkuk, and it was just what I needed:

Habakkuk’s Complaint

 2 How long, LORD, must I call for help, 

   but you do not listen? 

Or cry out to you, “Violence!” 

   but you do not save? 

3 Why do you make me look at injustice? 

   Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? 

Destruction and violence are before me; 

   there is strife, and conflict abounds. 

4 Therefore the law is paralyzed, 

   and justice never prevails. 

The wicked hem in the righteous, 

   so that justice is perverted.

The LORD’s Answer

 5 “Look at the nations and watch— 

   and be utterly amazed. 

For I am going to do something in your days 

   that you would not believe, 

   even if you were told. 


I was also encouraged by Galatians 6:9: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” 

Violence, injustice, conflict, strife, and darkness with always be there as long as we’re on this side of heaven. But God’s response to Habakkuk was “I am going to do something in your days.” If we wait and trust, God always brings light out of the darkness. I had to be reminded that this isn’t the end of the story. It’s not the whole picture. This is just one piece of it. And God is doing something with it. 

The Face of Poverty

It had rained heavily that day, so as we worked our way through the alleys of the slum, we had to concentrate hard to negotiate our way around puddles, slippery muddy spots (hoping that it’s only mud), bodas, cars, and thick crowds of people. A hand reached out to me, and I touched the hand, but didn’t look up and said “Sirina ssente.” I don’t have any money. 

As I kept walking, I heard, “Aunt Caro!” My breath stopped. I turned around to see the face that belonged to the hand that had reached out to me. It was one of our girls who had run away from the children’s home around July. I went to her in disbelief and just embraced her. My mind was racing. I didn’t know what to do. 

She was very high on drugs, and was with another girl who had also run away from the home some time back. I didn’t know the other girl because she had run off before I came to Uganda. This other girl said she had run away because she got pregnant and wanted to abort the baby. I wasn’t sure if my heart could break any more. 

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just bring the girls back. They would have to come on their own, if they wanted to come. I begged them to come back and told them how much we love them and wanted them to come back. They told me yes, that they were coming on Monday. I found that a little strange that they seemed to have planned that out, but I later learned that they had actually run into some of our other social workers a week before, and had talked to them about coming back. When we ran into these girls, a friend I was with turned to me and said, “God wanted you to be here right now.” She had no idea how right she was. I had no faith at all that those girls would come back, but I was shocked to find that they came on Monday like they said! God had planted those other social workers there the week before, and had planted me there to reinforce the idea of coming back and to remind them of how they were cared for at DP compared to life in the slums. 

Praise God that they came back, but unfortunately the other girl (the one I didn’t know) ran off again a few days later because she found out she was pregnant again. DP talked with her, assuring her that they would care for the baby, but she refused and ran away so she could abort the baby again. I was concerned that the other girl would then run off to be with her friend, but thankfully she has been at the home for a few weeks now. She was tough as nails when she came back, and she’s still very resilient, but is softening some. She is less aggressive now, she’s doing some work making crafts that DP sells, and I caught her flipping through a Bible a couple of times today. I can just pray that God will keep her there and that she will continue to soften and grow. 

I almost never give to people who beg for money on the street. You want to help, but when you learn more about what’s behind the begging, you just can’t give to people in those situations. Especially in Kampala, behind kids who beg on the street, there is usually a person making a fortune at their expense. You can’t encourage that kind of system by giving money. And besides, giving money to beggars just encourages them to live on the street. So if I give money or time or effort, it’s to a place like Dwelling Places that is working to get the kids off the street and empower families to be self-sustainable, not to hands that reach out to me on the street asking for a coin.

But that day that I saw her there in the slums, my entire life changed in an instant. I left there feeling shocked, hollow, and numb as I made my way through the town center to run some errands and passed a multitude of street beggars, some disabled, many of them small children. This time, I actually looked at their faces. I didn’t know any of them, but I wondered what their stories were.

I was reminded of a quote I heard from someone at DP. "Orphans are easier to ignore before you know their names. They are easier to ignore before you see their faces. It is easier to pretend they are not real before you hold them in your arms. But once you do, everything changes." -David Platt

I learned the truth of this quote in an all-too-real way that day. It’s easy to pass a street beggar when you don’t know them. It’s easy to turn your back to poverty when it’s not personal. But when poverty has a face and a name, a favorite bedtime story, a favorite color, when you’ve heard her laughter as you bounced him on your knee, when you’ve held her when she cries... 

you simply cannot turn your back anymore.