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. 

Mary and Martha

As some of you know, one of the many roles I play at DP is that of a teacher. I teach English every morning, between 2 different classes. One of the “classes” actually only consists of 2 girls, and I laughed when I heard the names of the girls who had been assigned to my class: Mary and Martha. 

If you’re not familiar with the Bible, there is a story in it where Jesus goes to visit 2 sisters, and their names happen to be none other than Mary and Martha (though these girls I teach are not related). Sometimes if there is time left over at the end of class, I’ll get one of the children’s Bibles and we’ll read a story. The first one I was dying to share with them was the story of Mary and Martha. 

The girls loved it. They weren’t familiar with the story, and their eyes lit up when I told them there was a story in the Bible with their very names. 

Love Instead

This kid, I swear, is sometimes the reason I get up in the morning. His name is Baby Silas, although he’s not much of a baby anymore, as you can clearly see! I’m not sure about his exact age, but he’s somewhere around a year and a half. 

Every time I walk through the gate, he comes running up to me and dives into my arms. The way he runs is the cutest thing ever. It’s almost like he doesn’t have knees, and he really waddles and swings his arms side to side to get momentum.

Well here’s a story about Baby Silas that started with a ring. 

Whenever I wear this ring, the kids at the home are all mesmerized by it. They have great teachers who clearly inspire them, because they’re constantly pointing out letters and numbers on anything they see. So when I wear this ring, I usually have several little hands grabbing at the ring and pointing to each letter, saying “Letter L. Letter O...” I've taught them that it says “love” and we'll talk about what love means, and how I love them and God loves them. One of the many sweet moments that are peppered through my days at work. 

Well one day a month or 2 ago, I was holding Silas and talking about love with the kids. Silas started mimicking the sounds of the word “love!” So immediately that became my new project: get Silas to really say the word.

Now, I can’t count it as a first word for him—he says a few other little words—but it’s still one of the first and it makes me insanely happy to have taught it to him. I also taught him to say “I love you.” 

Now every time he sees me, he grabs my hand, looking for the ring. If I’m not wearing it, he looks a little confused. It’s so cute, I can’t stand it. 

I finally was able to get him on video saying “love” and “I love you.” Check it out, it’s so sweet. I had to add a segment at the beginning of him running up to me so you can see the run-waddle. 

I’d like to get to share a little bit about Silas’ story, although I’m not sure how much of any of these kids’ stories I should share on my blog, for confidentiality’s sake. So I will just keep it confidential and only let you know that Silas was referred to us when he was about 4 months old. His parents were unable to take care of him for various reasons, and essentially this sweet baby was dying. I’ve been to his home and met some of his family, I’ve seen where he comes from and what could have been his fate. 

And instead, the first phrase he learned to say is "I love you."

Reasons Why

Well it’s almost 11 am and I still haven’t been able to leave for work yet. Why? Well it’s been pouring down rain all morning, and since I take a boda boda (motorbike taxi) to work, I can’t leave until it stops raining. 

Don’t you wish America operated like this? :)

Well since I’m stranded because of the rain, I think it’s the perfect opportunity to go ahead and take the time to polish a blog post I’ve been working on for awhile. I think it’s a pretty well-known fact that different cultures measure time differently. In the West, it’s “If you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late; if you’re late, you’re replaced.” On “African time,” however, things happen when they happen. Time is centered around the event, not necessarily the numbers on the clock. 

But a big contributing factor to “African time” is just that everything is so interconnected here. There are so many variables to everything, and it’s all interdependent. 

When we were in Zanzibar, we had gone to the little fishing village that was just off the beach from our hotel to get chips-my-eye (no idea why it’s called that), a tasty snack of an omelet with French fries in it. We were directed to a place that makes them, but they told us they didn’t have any that day. The reason? Someone in the village had died, so the guy who normally brings the fries had been involved in the funeral arrangements for the person who had died. 

Another morning at the hotel in Zanzibar, we were awaiting milk to come for our tea and coffee. They couldn’t get it to us yet because the guy who keeps the key to the milk fridge hadn’t arrived yet. 

A few weeks ago, I went to the store to get paint, but I was unsuccessful in my trip. Why? The store (a very big, Western shopping center) didn’t have power. It was running on a generator, but the generator wasn’t powerful enough to support the paint mixer. 

My friends Tony and Lizzy invited me to Tony’s uncle’s house for lunch on Uganda’s Independence Day, October 9^th. Tony had told me to meet them at 10, which had me a little confused, really. Honestly, any time I’ve been invited for lunch at a Ugandan’s, we end up eating around dinner time. Food takes a long time to prepare here, so that’s just the way it is. I’m not complaining or anything. Really if anything, I appreciate the hard work that goes into preparing food here. It just means that we’re not going to eat at an American’s idea of “lunch time,” so by now if I’m ever invited for lunch, I expect to eat at 4 or 5 at the earliest. 

So when Tony told me 10 am, I was skeptical. I started calculating how late I should be in African time, but the rain actually made that decision for me. Right when I was thinking of leaving my house, it started pouring down rain, and didn’t stop for hours. So I was stuck at home. 

Finally the rain stopped around 1 or so, and I got in touch with Lizzy and Tony. They told me that they were just heading off to get the chicken, so I could meet them any time. 

Haha, so I finally left the house another hour or so later, giving them enough time to go get the chicken and to meet them at his uncle’s house. I was actually surprised that when we got there, there was rice and beans prepared, so we ate that as a late lunch, then enjoyed each other’s company as the chicken was cooked, then we ate that for dinner. 

I showed up to teach the kids at DP one morning last week, but we couldn’t get in the building because the person who had the key hadn’t come yet. Normally someone else keeps the key, but the staff was away at a planning retreat all week, so someone else had taken the key, and he didn’t show up until later. 

That’s just life here. Everything is interconnected. Everything relies on something else, and if there’s a missing link, it’s like a domino effect. Sometimes you can’t get paint because the power is out. Sometimes you have to wait until the rain stops before you can go get the chicken from the market to cook it for lunch. Sometimes there’s a variable with the DP van driver who is unable to pick up the employees who have the key to where you need to be. It’s aaaallll dominoes, and that’s just how it is here! You’ve just gotta go with the flow!

Laying it Down at His Feet

About 6 months ago, I got on a plane to Africa. It was at this point that my boyfriend Jeremy moved into my computer. He is this... thing... on Skype or Facebook chat, and I’m not sure anymore if he is a real person or if he is some robot who lives in my computer. A few months after I left for Africa, this robot person got on a plane to Iraq where he’s serving with the US Army. 

It’s actually been amazing how well we’ve been able to keep in touch. Even with the time difference, when he was still in Murrica and I was in Africa, we managed to Skype on his lunch breaks, which was evening time for me. We’re now in the same time zone, and he works the midnight-8 am shift, then sleeps in the day, which still works out for us to get to Skype in the evenings. I am so grateful for having been able to keep in touch so well. I don’t take it for granted. I don’t envy the way communication was for those at war, or for those on the mission field, hundreds of years ago, or even 20 years ago. Technology is an amazing thing. 

The problem, though, with this robot who lives in my computer who resembles Talley, is that I rely on getting to see him every night. Iraq is pretty uneventful these days, so he’s relatively safe compared to other deployments in the past, and on most days he’s just around the base being bored out of his mind. But there are times when they go on missions around, and I don’t hear from him for a day or so. I try not to worry, but it’s impossible not to at least be a little concerned, and it’s difficult not to let my imagination run away. All I can do in these times is pray and trust that God will take care of him. 

On Monday morning of this week, I arrived at the children’s home to teach English, to find that one of my students was not there. My stomach dropped as I was told that she had run away from the home with 3 other girls. They had run off during church the day before. 

I couldn’t understand it. These girls were good girls. One of them especially, who was in my English class, was so bright, was such a leader to the other kids at the home, and she was so strong spiritually! She was always asking to read the children’s Bibles, she knew her memory verses and Bible stories, and was always helping out at fellowship time. 

Then one day she was gone. They all had just run off. Dwelling Places is not a prison. If the children want to run away, that’s their choice. But like the prodigal’s son, there is much grieving when a child runs away. Not only are there the feelings of worry for the children and that they would just be safe and come back, but anyone who had any part in the kids’ lives is feeling a jumble of other emotions. There’s the sense of failure, that we could have done something to prevent it. There’s the feeling of futility, that we’re putting in all this effort to alleviate the problem of street children in Uganda, but what’s the point when they just run away back to the life they came from? There’s hurt, regret, betrayal, misunderstanding, among so many other things. 

So I cried and prayed with some of the other teachers and social workers. Thankfully those girls did actually come back later that day. Unfortunately it was with the police. They had found them... of all places... at the airport!!!  The airport is about 35 kilometers outside of Kampala! Apparently they had begged for money until they had enough to get on public transportation to the airport. I got mixed stories, that they were going to a beach party on Lake Victoria, or that they had gone to the airport thinking they could get on a plane somewhere, and another story that one of the girls was looking for her brother. Who knows, but the fact is that they didn’t come back by their own will, so please pray that they will not choose to run away again. 

The same day that these girls ran away, Talley didn’t appear online for a couple of days. 

I had no choice but to rely on God and to trust him to take care of all of them. “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet you heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6: 26-27). 

God is definitely teaching me about relying on him. There's no denial that so many things are beyond our control, so what's the point of stressing over it or worrying? It's always easier said than done, but God has never let me down. That doesn't mean everything is always easy. God doesn't just take away the hardships in life; rather he equips his children with the resilience to handle the trials. And he asks us to lay down our worries at his feet, because he is in control.  

A typical evening-- Slyping with Jeremy by lantern light because the power is often out at my place

Africa... does something to you

Africa fills your heart with such joy and such sorrow like no other place on earth can.

You spend time with the children at the children’s home, ones who have been rescued from living on the street or in a bad situation with their families. You teach them in the interim school, you lead fellowship time with them, sharing songs, stories, and prayers, you are bombarded by 20 pairs of arms hugging you every time you walk in the gate. You leave after time spent with them and find that you’re smiling the whole way home and you didn’t even realize it.

Then one day you arrive and discover that 4 of the girls have run away from the home. You cry and pray with the other teachers and women who take care of the children. You worry not only for the safety of those girls and pray that they will return, but you hurt for the women who take care of those children. You know all they are feeling is failure, misunderstanding and discouragement, and you feel the sting of it too. You feel as though there should have been something you could have done to prevent it, even though it’s beyond your control, and you also feel the futility of all the work you’ve done for all the children, for it to only be met with ingratitude and the children returning to the life from which they came. 

You are invited over to a friend’s house for lunch, and spend all day in great company as food is slowly and laboriously prepared. You appreciate the time and work that goes into preparing food, and enjoy the relational nature of this culture, that it’s about time spent together, not about the task at hand. 

You leave with a full belly and a full heart from the relationships you’ve been building, but on your way home, you see children sitting on the street in the dark with their hands held outstretched, and there the sorrow comes. What can be done? You can’t give to these children once you know what happens with the money they collect. It goes to someone who is making a fortune off of these street children, charging them for a place on the floor in a shack in the slums to sleep. You can’t encourage that system by giving them money, but you can’t just leave the kid there, cold, hungry, and alone. You work with an organization that is doing something about it, sure, but there are still so many kids out there.

You go for a nice trip to Tanzania, you learn a lot at a conference and network with other missionaries, you spend a few days relaxing on the beach and come back refreshed and happy to see your friends. 

You see your boda driver, happy to see him after a few weeks, and ask how things have been in Kampala. He gives you news that his brother died. That he was on his way to buy a plot of land, and since Uganda still pretty much runs on cash, not credit, he was carrying a lot of cash on him to buy the land. Some people found out what he was up to, and stopped his boda under some false pretense that the boda was stolen, then beat him to death and took his money. 

You get to interact with these kids and see their growth one-on-one. You watch the 180 degree turn some of them make from when they first arrive at the home. You see one girl turn from the loudest, most stubborn girl, to one who is a real leader to the others. She has her moments of defiance still, but she is also always keeping all the other kids on their toes, making sure they’re behaving and doing their chores. You even get to teach her, and she writes you sweet letters that brighten your day. 

Then she goes back to her home for the school holidays, and asks you to accompany her there. You see where she came from, suddenly you understand. This girl ran away from home to live on the streets. You know it must have been something bad to make her choose a life on the streets over life at home, but until you see it, you have no idea. You meet her mother, drunk beyond her senses at midday, you walk through the filthy house with dirty clothes and dishes covering the floor, with nothing but a wet mattress on the floor for the kids to sleep on, and anger and sorrow swells inside you. 

Shortly after I had arrived in Uganda, another American here was asking me how I like it here and that sort of thing. We were talking about how great our experiences have been, and I remember her saying, “Africa… does something to you.” And I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s the only way I can put it. It definitely does something to you. Something amazing. I can’t put it into words, but that’s it.” 

I think now I may know a little something of what it does to you. It fills your heart with joy and sorrow to such depths that you never even knew were there, in a way that I’m not sure any other place on earth can do.

Victories in Drama

I’ve been writing over the last few posts about some of the “victories” I’ve had over the last few days (although the victories are always God’s, aren’t they? For from him and through him and to him are all things. Romans 11:36). Well one thing that has been coming along really well over the last couple of weeks is the work I’ve been doing with the older youth in drama. 

About 2 weeks ago, I finally started a project with them that I’ve been wanting to start for some time. I’ve been wanting to lead them in writing their own play, then performing it. I wanted them to pull from their own experiences or from other general experiences of DP kids—life on the streets, in the slums, etc. This way they would have real ownership of the play and would be able to voice some of their own stories. 

This project has been on the back burner for a long time for many different reasons. Honestly I very strongly doubted my own ability to lead such a project, and I also doubted the youth’s interest and ability. I don’t have any experience in writing scripts, much less in leading a group to write one together! And when I started it, would they slouch in their chairs and stare at me over the top of their eyes, refusing to participate like teenagers are just so good at doing? 

I’ve also been working with a local volunteer, and between cultural and language barriers, I had a hard time getting him in agreement and understanding over what I wanted to do. He was bringing in lots of other scripts for them to do, which I didn’t necessarily have anything against, especially because it’s always best to be working alongside a Ugandan person, so that way when I leave things don’t just fall apart. But eventually I had to sit down with him and say, “Look I’m leaving in a few months, and I want to do this project. We have to do it now because time is running out.” So we agreed to start it. 

Then... 

the students went on holiday. Back on the back burner for another month. 

Well now they’re back, and I knew I had to jump in with both feet the first day they were back, or it would never happen. Still unsure how exactly to drive this boat, I faked confidence and started with having the group brainstorm themes that could appear in the play, such as child neglect, alcoholism, drought or floods that lead to poverty, etc. Then we brainstormed possible settings, then took a majority vote, finally deciding on Katwe, Kampala’s biggest and worst slum. We also came up with some characters and traits, such as an alcoholic dad. It’s going to be a cheery play, can’t you tell? 

They had wasted half of our time the first day by being late (surprise surprise) so that’s all we had time for. I was a little thankful actually, because I wasn’t entirely sure what to do next! So the next time we met, we first dealt with a few questions like what we want to communicate to the audience, what we want them to think and feel so we could have a little focus. Then we started working on a plot outline. I had doubted their interest, but they were fairly participatory. A few just slouched in their chairs and didn’t input anything, but there were enough coming up with good ideas to create a general outline for the plot. By the end of the hour, we had a plot! I was kind of surprised how easily it had come together. I don’t know if it will be a quality production by the time it’s put together, but hey it’s something! 

Ok so Africans do theatre very differently than Americans. I guess that’s a no-brainer; it’s a different culture, why wouldn’t a cultural custom be done differently? It took me awhile to realize some of their methods because the plays they were doing were in Luganda, but I soon realized that the “scripts” the local volunteer (Kasozi is his name) was bringing in were not scripts as we know them in the West with specific lines for each character to memorize and follow directly. What he was bringing in was like one page for the whole play, with key action points jotted down. 

Kasozi would pick a few people, tell them, “You’re this character, you’re that character, this is what needs to happen in this scene.” Then they would just go at it and I swear you could think they had been rehearsing for months. They’re just naturals. Africa has always been a story-telling culture, so it’s ingrained in them somewhere to be able to just tell stories like this. 

If they weren’t doing something how Kasozi thought it should be done, he would step into the scene and show them how to act it, then have them do what he did. This felt like nails on a chalkboard to me at first. From all my training in drama, one of this biggest things you’re taught is to never ever ever show someone how to act and just tell them to mimic you. Directors (good ones anyway) are supposed to find the right words to get you to find the action from within and blah blah blah. Ok so I had to just let go of this. I’m not here to change the way an entire culture does theatre. You’ve got to look at the big picture in times like these. Is it working for them? Yes. So just go with it. 

So this has all worked out to be tremendously helpful in the task of writing a play together. We came up with maybe 10 or 12 key points in the play, then the next time we met, it was enough to get on our feet and start putting it together. There’s no need to get tangled in actually writing a word for word script. That could get really tricky and tedious working as a group anyway. As long as each person knows what’s to be accomplished in any given scene and is capable of getting it there, we’ve got ourselves a play. 

They perform better in Luganda, and while we may have to eventually perform it in English, for now they’re putting it together in Luganda. So Kasozi has mostly taken over with directing it as they improvise through each scene, which is great because I finally feel like we’re working together on this rather than our conversations from a few months ago where he didn’t seem to understand at all what I had in mind. 

I’m watching the play sort of magically appear before my eyes, and it’s truly inspiring. 

Victories in Surprise Teaching

This last week was a week full of highs, although all I can do is be aware that it was a high and that we can’t just ride on those, thinking they’ll never be accompanied by lows. You can experience those kinds of things if you’re here for just a few weeks. You can run on adrenaline for that short of a mission trip and ride on all the highs, but for my 8-month assignment, I need more stamina than that. 

Still, it was a pretty sweet week. My week started off Monday morning with a miscommunication. What morning doesn’t start that way? No surprises with that anymore. I was told that there was a meeting with the education team, and what I thought the woman had told me was that she wanted me to be there. No, what she thought she had communicated was that she would be in a meeting and wanted me to teach her class for her. 

Again, a surprise teaching assignment. Again, nothing new. So I trotted down to the class and did what Uganda has been teaching me the hard way: wing it. And the beautiful thing? It was easy and comfortable. 

I remember last term, I had asked the teacher to come and observe that class, to see how school is done in Uganda, before I started teaching. I showed up to observe, and the teacher didn’t show up, so I ended up teaching. I remember that day, being so frustrated that the other teacher didn’t come, and floundering around in the book for something to teach them. 

This time, I had already been teaching that class for a term, so I know their level, their personalities, etc. So it wasn’t difficult to pull a few teaching activities out of my hat and just go with the flow. 

The rest of the week involved all sorts of things like that. In teaching both that class and another class, I felt like I knew what I was doing. Even if I hadn’t prepared a lesson in advance, I felt confident in the way I was presenting it, and the students understood it well. Time with the youth in drama was going well and I was stepping up in leadership, where I had previously just kind of observed. I finally started a project with them of leading them to write their own play, which had been on the back burner for months. Time spent with the kids was fun and meaningful, whether I was at the children’s home for fun, fellowship, or to work on the puppet show. The puppet show is coming along nicely, and the kids are having a lot of fun, arguing over taking turns to hold the puppets. 

Well I’ll finish this post for now, from a combination of my brain being fried, and knowing that if I go on it will be another forever-long post. Omutwe gakooye! (My brain is tired!) So I’ll save more for another post later. 

A few prayer requests: 

I’m heading to Tanzania for a couple of weeks! Praise God for the chance to go-- I’ll be spending a week at a conference, then enjoying a few days in the unbelievably gorgeous island of Zanzibar!! Pray for safe travel, that the conference will be fruitful in the work I’m doing here, and that the vacation will bring me back here with a renewed spring in my step to finish my last few months here. 

Continue to pray for the investment I’m making in these kids spiritually. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in “What are you doing? Are you actually accomplishing anything?” that we lose sight of why we’re here. Pray for focus and relationships that draw others closer to Christ. 

Even though I just said it’s not about the things I’m out to accomplish, I am nevertheless in the middle of a few projects-- the puppet show with the younger kids, the play with the older youth, teaching English, and working in the office to prepare the older youth to live self-sustainably. Pray that those things continue to go well!