Hello, Goodbye.

So, I will use this post to update about the week thus far, though it has seemed to be a blur since Monday night. 

In the morning on Monday we went to Sanyu Babies Home.  I spent the first part of the day in the smaller baby class, which I have decided is not my favorite job.  I can handle it for a little bit, like feeding time or washing time or something, but just sitting there with them for so long is really hard.  Part of the reason why I like Sanyu is that it is a lot more organized than Nsambya and I know the kids get enough care and attention, and their brains are stimulated.  (At least most of them.)  However, it is really hard to sit there in a room of 15 babies when there are about 20 volunteers all wanting to hold one.  I just feel useless there sometimes.  After a little while of watching other volunteers steal the babies I was playing with originally, I finally stood up and started taking some pictures.  This brought me so much joy.  I really love the photographs I am able to take here, and to see the joy on other’s faces when I catch one of their precious moments.  After discovering that our ministry was officially allowed to take pictures, I went outside to take some more pictures and saw that we were having song-time with the 2 and 3 year olds.  I officially love the toddlers at Sanyu.  They are so crazy and absolutely hilarious.  I spent a lot of the time taking pictures of my friend Emily, since it was her last day in Uganda. 

After visiting Sanyu, we came home and had lunch and then had our planning meeting, probably the quickest meeting we’ve had yet.  I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Emily and some others before she left. 

Oh my word, I never thought losing a friend that I made in probably less than a month would be so hard.  We had our goodbye prayer circle for Emily, Jessie, and Kevin, and then me and my friend Jenna went with them to the airport.  As for Jessie, she was the one who came with me on my flight to Uganda; I am now the only person left who came the same time as me.  Kevin, he was really great because he was incredibly sarcastic all the time, but if you pulled him away he was really wise and really good to talk to.  But Emily, oh goodness.  She was someone I just felt myself with.  I really believe we will be friends long after this trip, and I can only pray this will happen.  She is truly an incredible person.  I think I have stayed pretty strong this entire month, but once I got home and realized the person I always went to was gone, I just broke down.  I feel really bad for the 5 new people who are here, because I know that first week is really challenging, and I am not doing very much to help them transition. 

Today we went to Modern Infants Primary School again, and it was really fun and crazy as usual.  Afterwards we had lunch and went to King Solomon’s Secondary School in Kyambogo.  I have to admit, when we got there I got another wave of sadness at my friend leaving because she and I had some fun times together at this school.  I think this week is going to be my breaking point, all of it. 

Anyways, I really enjoyed the program we did there, and then afterwards we stayed after to talk with a few of them before they had to go to class.  I got to talking to some girls, one named Fiona and another named Maureen.  Fiona was really stylish (or as they say here, “smart”) and said she wanted to be a journalist.  Fiona started to get a little bored of me I think, and she left to talk to someone else, so I got to talk with Maureen.  Her story and the absolute reality of the suffering here hit me like a ton of bricks, causing me to leave the school with tears in my eyes, angry that I still can’t think of anything I can do to help her.  I asked her how she was, what year she was in school, all the usual questions, however when I had been through all these questions we still had a little time left.  I asked her how her life was, and if she would tell me about her family.  She started to get emotional as she told me that she was in Senior 5 (one year before she graduates from secondary) but she is never sure if she will be able to make it to graduation.  Her family comes from a village far away from her school, though both of her parents died when she was young.  She had an older brother who was 23, and three younger sisters.  Her older brother is working to pay for Maureen’s education, though he himself has not been educated past P.6 (6^th grade).  Her sisters were not in school because their brother could only afford one at a time.  She constantly feels pressured to do well in school and get a good paying job to pay back her brother and help him care for their sisters.  The tone in her voice was so genuinely desperate that my eyes started filling with tears just listening to her.  I asked if her family was Christian, and if she herself was “born-again” she said she was, and then she asked me to pray for her and her family and to continue praying for them even after we left that day.  I did so, though I didn’t feel like I deserved to because I knew that I had much more than her materially, but I still could not think of a way to help her and her family.  She then brought me to her classroom and had me pray for her extremely immature classmates, I won’t explain the harsh adjectives used here because in comparison to the story I had just heard, the comments I got from some of her classmates infuriated me.  She held my hand the entire rest of the time as I asked her more questions about her family, searching for a way in.  The only things I can think of are to sponsor her until she finishes school and then move on to sponsor her sisters and brother in the same way once she has graduated.  However, there is a girl in the Acholi squatter’s area that I was thinking of sponsoring already, so I’m completely unsure of what to do.  I don’t think I’ve ever been that silent in the car ride on the way home.

Later on we actually did go and visit the squatter's home, and I was torn even more when little Josephine, the girl I was thinking about sponsoring, asked the first person out of the car where I was.  When she saw me step out of the car she ran up to me and jumped in my arms.  She refused to let go, burying her head in my shoulder, as I asked her how school was, how she was, how her parents were.  She answered all my questions after which I whispered into her ear, “Nkwagala nyo nyo Josephine” which means: “I love you so so much Josephine” in Luganda.  She turned her head towards my right ear and whispered, “Nkwagala Emily.”  This was the highlight of my visit there, as afterwards it got a little chaotic and my strength was tested once again.  We had gone at a time where the kids were just getting back from school.  Needless to say, all the mzungus at these slum houses attracted a lot of attention from the kids coming home from school, and even the ones who didn’t live there came to say hello.  Some of them came for legitimate reasons, because they wanted to play and be loved on, while others came to see what they could steal from the mzungus.  It broke my heart as I heard one of our girls tell Vanessa, who passed the message onto me, that the kids from school were making fun of them and were stealing the gifts we had passed out.  It was absolutely chaotic, and it was so frustrating because if we had just organized it a little better before jumping straight into it, it would have worked out so well.  This is one of my frustrations, many of the Ugandans do not communicate with each other or with the American MST’s very well, and it causes many of our projects to fail or not run as smoothly as we would like.  Vanessa apologized to our kids before we left, and our hearts broke when they immediately began telling us about their lives, only for us to cut them short because we had to go.  We promised we would be back soon.  I am praying that the other kids who witnessed us talking and playing with them will not tease them in school and will not rob their houses searching for the gifts the white people gave to them. 

I have cried at least once every day this week, and I don’t see an end nearing.  He is showing me His heart for His children, which is beautiful.  But He is also showing me how it feels when His heart is broken over them, which is excruciating.