Eva

Eva caught my eye even before she came to talk to me on Friday. The first time I saw her was at the first primary school assembly I attended a week after arriving here. During presentations, one girl who was taller and looked considerably older than the others got up and sang two songs. I couldn’t hear a word she said because most of the students were talking amongst themselves and I was standing in the back, but she didn’t seem to care that people weren’t paying attention. When she finished, the next group got up and I didn’t give her presentation another thought.

The second time I saw her was only a day or two later. Bob, Kendall and I were going on our first walk down the road outside Noah’s Ark. As we were rounding a bend, we heard someone yell “Aunties!” from a nearby field and looked over to see a young woman half-running toward us, a small child on her hip. She arrived with a huge smile on her face, which I soon came to learn is a nearly permanent fixture there. We introduced ourselves, not recognizing her until she told us she attends New Horizon, the school at Noah’s Ark. Kendall recognized her right away from the presentation. It took me about fifteen minutes to make the connection.  Apparently her initial impression on me was not the strongest.

Since then, however, I have come to notice and admire her very much. Every week at assembly, she presents one or two songs by herself. They are always in Luganda so I have no idea what she is saying, but that doesn’t keep me from loving her performances. Last week, the drummers joined in and she spent as much time dancing as she did singing, skipping around the stage with her face lifted upward.

She is often in the group that leads praise and worship as well, always the tallest one among the younger students. I have been meaning to tell her for weeks what a great leader she is and how much fun it is to watch her sing.

But the time I love watching her most is not when she is doing a presentation or leading praise and worship. It is when she is in the back, worshipping with all her heart even when she knows no one is watching (or thinks no one is watching). She sings along to all the songs. She dances when no one else is dancing. She nudges the people next to her, urging them to move too.

Eva has a beautiful heart and God has filled her with the joy I hoped I would see here.

I have had her in my English class a few times in the last month, and we have developed a friendly acquaintance. After class on Friday morning, as the other students were leaving, she stayed in her seat and quietly asked if she could talk to me. I sat down beside her.

“I was wondering… if you could help me,” she said, not meeting my eye. “My family and I… we need clothes. And we don’t have the money to buy them. I was wondering if you could give us any clothes.”

I had no idea what I expected her to say when we sat down, but I wasn’t totally prepared for this. I hesitated. Should I really be going around giving handouts? But my hesitation only lasted a moment because then I looked at Eva, at this teenage girl who sat humbly before me, asking but not expecting. This was a need right in front of me, and how could I possibly say no to her? I told her I would bring something to one of our next classes and she left as new students filed in.

The next day at school, Eva approached me again, a shy smile back on her face.

“Auntie Katie,” she said, “I want to tell you my story so you know why we are in need.” We sat down on a step in the sun and waited for her classmates to file back into the classroom before she started.

“So, my clan… Do you know what I mean when I say clan?” I nodded. “Well, my clan… is no more. I buried my father when I was seven and my mother died when I was ten, but I did not bury her. I did not bury my mother. At the end of second term, I was called out of school because both of my grandfathers died. I went into the village to bury them. My mother’s brothers and sisters have all died and my father’s brothers and sisters have all died. There are eight children left by them, including me and my sister. She is in P3 here. We live with our grandmother, but she is old and needs us to care for her. We have no way of getting food and clothes. We are used to it though. We are used to going two weeks, three weeks without food. But we are in great need.”

I can’t say much of what she said surprised me. Unfortunately, there are lots and lots of similar clans in Uganda. It’s awful. Some children have to grow up so fast. We exclaim when a 15-year-old gets her driving permit. “She’s growing up too fast!” we affectionately sigh, or sometimes sob. But what about the 15-year-old girl who must become a mother of seven while working hard to stay in school to secure a better future for herself and her family?

“Many people ask me why I don’t get married to get help,” Eva told me. “That way, my husband could provide and we would be better off. But me… I don’t want that. That is not for me. I want to finish school; I cannot get married now.”

I commended her for her determination in school and told her how much I love watching her sing and dance at assemblies. “God has given you such joy, Eva, and I can see that. Everyone can see that! Now that I know what you are going through I am even more amazed and thankful for the great joy he has put in your heart.”

“I have to have joy,” she said. “Otherwise I would have nothing.”

Oh this beautiful, humble girl who can dance with joy while her stomach is growling.

After talking a bit more, she let me pray for her and then I gave her a small amount of money to get them through the weekend, assuring her I would have something else for her on Monday. She hugged me and thanked me with her mouth and her eyes, and then went back to class.

Over the weekend, I gathered a few more things for her. One skirt, a shirt, a bag of sugar and a very small jar of peanut butter were some things I had on hand that I was sure she could use. I put it all in a black plastic bag, along with some money so they could buy food and clothes for the next week. This morning at school, Eva sought me out again and I handed her the bag.

“It’s not much, but it should help for this week and I will have more for you next Monday,” I said.

This time her grin was not shy. She looked thrilled.

“Oh Auntie Katie, thank you so much! Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, looking in the bag. “Oh, you say this is not much, but this is so much to us. My grandmother was so excited on Saturday and said for me to tell you thank you. She was very, very happy.” Eva hugged me no less than three times before leaving the library with a spring in her step.

I have no idea what I will bring for her next Monday, but I would hand her a bag of just about anything to see her face light up like that again.

I tell you this not to paint a picture of me as a selfless, generous giver—trust me, what I gave compared to what I have is pitiful—but because Eva has touched my heart and I want you to know this young woman who trusts in the Lord with all her might and has possibly done the best job in the world of showing me what true joy looks like. I will only be here for six more weeks, which most likely marks the end of the time I can physically help her, but my prayer is that something or someone comes along who can help her family make ends meet until the time Eva is able to do so herself. Please keep this strong, precious girl in your prayers as well.

p.s. I have changed her name for the purposes of this story. Just in case anyone reads this who will serve at Noah’s Ark in the future, I don’t want Eva to feel belittled or betrayed by the fact that I told people she asked me for money. 

What's the Alternative?

As far as orphanages go, Noah’s Ark is about as good as they come. The children get different suppers every night of the week, they have a trampoline, and there are lots of aunties to take care of the kids and teach them basic hygiene, social skills, discipline, and other things children would normally learn from their parents. They can go to school right on the compound from the time they are three years old until they finish secondary school. They are formally ministered to several days a week at Sunday school, church, school assemblies, Teen Club, and other things.

Even with all that, Peter and Pita never claim that this is the best option for the children. They describe Noah’s Ark as God’s second plan for these kids. His first plan was for them to grow up in the family into which they were born, but when that didn’t work out (usually because the kids are abandoned—there are very few actual orphans here), Noah’s Ark is able to fill that role.

I recently had a conversation about this with another volunteer, Sara. We agreed that in many ways, Noah’s Ark is certainly not the best option for any child. Like I mentioned a few weeks back, each of these kids should have two adults caring for them, but here the aunties are stretched thin, making sure the 120 kids in the home get their teeth brushed and don’t fight with each other and have on the shoes with their own name every morning. I have started bringing books each evening for a group of eight girls so they have a chance to sit and read quietly, practicing after the other children go to bed so no one takes their books away from them.

Sara asked some girls one night if they had any brothers or sisters, and they all said yes. Many kids come with siblings, sometimes as twins or triplets. When Sara followed up by asking whom they were related to, the girls swept their arms across the crowded dining room and said “All of them!” On one hand, what a blessing to be a part of such a big, amazing family! On the other hand, they will never grow up having the same close-knit family experience that most children are privileged to get. 

As Sara and I discussed the negative aspects of growing up in a children’s home, we always circled back to the same question: What’s the alternative?

Some people are very anti-orphanage. There are some Africans (probably many of them) who feel like westerners swooped in and institutionalized something that should be the responsibility of families. In this culture, where extended families live together and care for one another their whole lives (they do not institutionalize the elderly, either—in fact, I’m sure the idea seems ludicrous to them), family members are the first responders to tragedy and childcare. If a child’s parents die, that child would go to an aunt or uncle or grandparent, not sent away to another family or orphanage. Blood relations actually mean something here.

So why is a place like Noah’s Ark needed? Because not all families honor that responsibility. Noah’s Ark has its own social worker and works closely with the police on a regular basis. When a new child comes in, they do their best to find any living relatives who can care for him or her. Peter and Pita and the authorities know that the best option for any child is to live with family. But when a baby is found in the bushes on the side of the road, where do you start? Even if we found the parents, why would we give them another chance to throw the child away?

An orphanage is certainly not an ideal environment for a kid to learn and grow, but what’s the alternative? Abusive parents? Death in a pit latrine a few hours after birth?

Or take adoption, for example. I have wanted to adopt for as long as I can remember. If there are so many kids around the world without a loving family, why not give a few of them a chance to have one?

Peter and Pita, however, are against international adoptions. They point out that with racism in so many predominantly white societies, however subtle it may be, raising a Ugandan child there would only be inviting him into a life of hardship. He would face a different kind of struggle, but he would not be free from the major struggles from which we would love to protect him. Peter said he is here to raise up good Ugandan children who can give back to their country and help make a better future not just for themselves and their families, but for Uganda.

I hear them. I understand what they are saying. And considering my absolute support of adoption of any kind, I have given their words a lot of thought. Sara says she has friends who adopted two African children and now live in a small town in Canada. Those kids are the only blacks in the whole community. Is that the best situation for them? No. But what’s the alternative? Never having their own mother and father?

Even here, where Peter and Pita are called Papa and Mama by children, staff, and community members, it only slightly resembles a family structure. Some of the kids go days without seeing Papa, not to mention learning valuable life lessons from him or having some father-son time. Despite the challenges of racism and growing up in a culture different from the one in which they were born into, I have a hard time believing this really is better for them.

Or another example: Noah’s Ark has a rule that they only accept children two years old and younger. Otherwise the place would grow faster than its capacity to care for children and no one would get adequate care. Once, however, they took in a ten-year-old girl. From what I understand, Peter was hesitant at first. If she joined the children’s home, which usually houses children until they are twelve years old, it would be a total shock from what she was accustomed to. Think about going from living in a small home with a small family and all of a sudden moving to school… for good. It might be fun at first, with all your classmates and new friends around all the time, but it would be hard to make the mental transition to knowing that that is now your “normal.” If she joined a family unit, which is a group of twelve older children who live in a house with an auntie, it might be hard for her to fit in with the girls already living there and would most certainly be a difficult transition.

But what’s the alternative? For this girl, the only other option was for Noah’s Ark to give her back to the witch doctor from whom she was taken. Witch doctors are still very common in this culture. Every day, babies are killed as sacrifices for who-knows-what. It is atrocious and scary and real life for these people. If she were to be given back, she would almost assuredly be raped, her body used for I-don’t-even-know-what-they-do, and possibly sacrificed. Sure, transitioning to Noah’s Ark as a ten-year-old was difficult, but no one can argue it beat the alternative.

One of the many things I learned from Dietrich Bonhoeffer when I did my religion capstone is that there are instances in which there is simply no best choice. There is no right answer. There is no good decision. At that point, all we can do is pick the least bad option and trust that that is the best we have to offer.

The world would be a better place if everyone who had a child cared for that child. That is God’s first plan for everyone. But when mothers abandon their babies and fathers die of AIDS and witch doctors are looking for sacrifices, sometimes the best we can do is look for the solution that will bring the least harm… to look for the best alternative we can find.

Just Another Tuesday

5:00 a.m.     I wake up. It doesn’t get light out until 6:30 so this gives me some good time for morning devotions. The whole time, I debate whether or not to go running. I can hear it raining lightly on my tin roof.

6:30     I opt for a hot bath instead. In my bucket, of course. Running in the rain is not as much fun when there isn’t a long hot shower and sweatpants to follow.

7:30     I continue reading Jolly Phonics Teacher Guide to try to learn how to teach the primary children how to read. Jolly Phonics is a program started in the UK that a Dutch volunteer brought here two years ago. It is used in all of Noah’s Ark and is spreading to nearby Ugandan schools as well. While reading, I eat deliciously delicious samosas for breakfast, which I can buy at the Noah’s Ark kitchen. Did I mention they are delicious?

8:30     I teach English to my ten P7 students at the primary school. We are working on spelling words with the alternative spelling for vowel sounds. (This means words like rain, with an ‘ai’ to make a long ‘a’ sound—things like that.)

9:10     I conduct a reading assessment for Abbey, a P6 boy with whom I will be working for the rest of the term. During the assessment, he reads to me a bazillion flashcards so I can get an idea of where he is struggling and come up with a small program to get him up to speed with the rest of his class, or at least as close as we can get in the next seven weeks.

10:30     I walk down to the nursery school to look for some reading games in the office. After about two minutes, I get sidetracked by Blessing, one of the girls I met on my walk last week (see my previous blog). I sit down at her table for snack and then we play on the playground with the other kids before they have to go back to class. I forget to look for games.

11:00     I meet with two other students to work on their reading skills. Total, I have seven with whom I am working as often as I can. Usually I can only get in two or three a day between juggling when I am free, when they are in a class I can pull them from, and when the library doesn’t have a class in it. Any time I spend with them is an extra help to them, so hopefully it will still make a difference meeting two or three times a week.

1:00 p.m.     I go to the children’s home to eat lunch with the toddlers. The babies eat in their own section of the home and the older children all eat at school, so the dining room only has about thirty kids during lunch. We have the same thing everyday: posho and beans. Posho is like a very dry tofu. It is made from a grain that is ground up and mixed with water, then cooked until it makes a solid-ish mass that can be broken apart into pieces, kind of like really thick and dry powdered mashed potatoes. It barely absorbs the flavor of whatever you eat with it. This is the most common meal in all of Uganda—many families and schools eat this for every meal everyday.

2:00     I go back to the library to do more reading with students, but there is a class in there. I forgot to check ahead of time when it would be in use.

2:15     I go back down to the nursery school office to work on math games. They have a lot of games to practice basic reading, but one of the volunteers asked me to create some games for math to practice their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So far, that has mostly consisted of making flashcards for the game Memory on my computer, but hopefully I will have enough time to make quite a few different ones before I leave. (If anyone has easy-to-create-and-understand math games or resources, please let me know!)

4:00     Baby time. Almost every afternoon, I hang out with the babies for a couple hours before supper. They are such a joy to be around. As soon as I walk in the door, Maurise sees me from down the hall and starts flailing his arms in the air for me to pick him up. That boy is heavy, which is a blessing because he was severely malnourished when he came. I spend quite a bit of time with a younger baby named Florence, who has been sick for a couple weeks now. She is my cuddle buddy. Our system is for me to hold her on my chest while I sit on the couch. She rests her head on me, grabs a handful of my shirt with her hand and sticks both my shirt and her thumb in her mouth, successfully covering my entire collar in drool in only a few minutes.

6:00     I walk to the dining room for a quick supper before returning to play with babies. When I get back, only the four older ones who can walk are still awake. Titus and I play on the couch, and then Jacintha climbs on top of me too. I notice her nappie (diaper) is coming undone and plan to fix it when I take her in to sleep. It would have been a good plan if she had not pooped right on my shirt at that moment. The stuff was smeared all over my side. Lovely girl. Now would be a great time to change a nappie.

7:00     I go back to my room and do a quick “load” of laundry, meaning I heat up some water and hand wash the two shirts with poop on them before they can stain. It is a success and the shirts are fine.

7:30     Tuesday night Teen Club! A Dutch volunteer, Christian, and I are leading a teenage Bible study once a week at the request of Peter and Pita. This is only our second week of leading and we are striving to get to know the students better so we can connect with them and find out what kinds of discussion work best with this particular group. At one point tonight, we break up into girls and boys and lead our own discussions. The girls are open and responsive and laugh together. The boys mostly grunt. We’re trying to figure out what to do with that.

9:00     Teen Club ends and Christian and I stay in the hut to debrief.

9:15     We forget we are supposed to be debriefing and start talking about everything from African brains to Dutch peanut butter (which he claims is the best in the world). It’s nice to have someone my age from the western world to process with. This is his fourth time here and at this point he is planning on staying for a year, but expects to stay even longer if God allows it.

11:00     I finally head back to my room and promptly get ready for bed and go to sleep. 

On the left is Janet and on the right is Anna-Christine. Most likely the cutest twins who ever existed. 

Maurise was having a hard time putting on "his" shoe. 

That is the grin that greets me every time I walk into the baby home. 

Blessing, my nursery school friend. She has a good habit of living up to her name. 

I am blessed!

This is Herman, of course. He's huge and lives outside. Do you see the four noses? The top two are for sensing light and dark and the bottom two are for smelling things. Cool, huh?

It Is Very Far

My plan was to walk to Mukono taking the back road, which is different than the way we take in taxis and on bodas. As I was leaving Noah’s Ark, I asked one of the security guards how to get there, just to make sure, and then asked how far it was.

“Oh, it is very far,” she said, shaking her head disapprovingly. Well, I don’t know what Ugandans consider “very far,” so I decided to go that direction anyway in hopes that what seemed very far to them would be some good exercise for me.

About half a mile down the road, I ran into my new friend, Grace. She is a sweet girl with a gorgeous smile and goes to one of the secondary schools down the road. I stopped to talk for a bit, and then asked Grace how far it would be to walk to Mukono in the direction I was heading.

“Oh, it is very far,” she said smiling. Not disapproving, but she seemed amused that I was going to try.

Shortly after Grace’s house, I turned down a road that was new to me but would supposedly take me into Mukono in a very long time. Amid the many high-pitched shouts of, “Hi, mzungu!” I heard a woman’s voice yell, “Auntie!” She came running across the road and asked where I was going. I told her I was just going for a walk but hoped I might end up in Mukono. Then of course I had to ask her how far it was.

“Oh, it is very far,” she said, shaking her head like the security guard. (I’m not kidding or taking literary license here—they all gave me the exact same answer.) I was starting to accept the fact that I was going to have to walk all the way back to Noah’s Ark, past the compound to the main road, and get a boda from there to get into town to buy toilet paper, which is really all I needed anyway. But I had already come that far, so why not just see if I could make it the rest of the way?

A few minutes and a wrong turn later, I fully came to terms with the fact that I would not be walking to Mukono that day. I turned around as un-awkwardly as possible (because it always looks weird to walk with a purpose down a road, then for no apparent reason turn around and walk with just as much purpose in the opposite direction) and began backtracking.

A boy sitting at the road’s edge yelled hello, so I crossed the road and knelt down to say hi. At that instant, four girls from a nearby fruit stand came running over and surrounded me. One of them took my hand in hers, staring at it and touching it all over. We talked and laughed for a bit, and then they said some kids by the fruit stand were calling for me to come over, so I followed.

The girls led me past their stand stocked with pineapples and tomatoes and lemons to the back of a mud hut where a young woman was cooking. She was rolling out dough with an empty glass bottle and then cutting out circles with an upside-down cup the way Dad used to make biscuits. Then she put the circles in hot oil until they turned a dark golden-brown and looked almost like hamburger patties. She called them pancakes.

After we had been introduced, I took some pictures of Christine and explained to her that this is way different than how we make pancakes in America. The girls quickly gave me two, one to eat immediately and one to take home with me for later. I was a little worried about my digestive system being able to handle something made on a wooden board behind a mud hut, but deciding it would be better to get sick than offend these sweet girls, I took a bite. It was awful.

The oldest girl of the bunch took my camera out of my hand. She started by taking a few random pictures, and then went into full-photographer mode. She told us who was going to be in each picture, where to stand, and even positioned our arms and heads exactly how she wanted them. I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying, but what did that matter?

After a few minutes, some of the younger girls told me I needed to meet their neighbor who was lame and had no food. We made our way around their hut and away from the road to a small brick house with a man sitting outside. Our photographer had me kneel down next to him for a picture before the girls took my hand again, helped me up, and led me along a path around that house, further into what you might call their neighborhood. It was a narrow dirt path with small brick houses on all sides and a garden in the middle.

Our next stop was at another lame neighbor’s house. He was also sitting outside his empty doorway, perched on a red brick. The photography continued and we somehow collected a few more children.

One of the boys to join us was the first baby born in the Noah’s Ark clinic. His mom was so excited about him being the first that she actually named the little boy Papa Peter, so now this little three-year-old is called Papa and I find it quite funny.

Next on the agenda was for me to learn how to dig. The girls demonstrated with the hoe and then showed me patches of the garden they wanted me to do. They all stood around and examined what I was doing, and I think my digging met with general approval.

As soon as the garden looked slightly better, the kids led me to a nearby shop where a woman was selling sweeties. I bought suckers for the ten or so kids surrounding me and then we walked back to the second man’s house for a big, candy-filled family photo before I was to be on my way.

As we were saying our goodbyes, the three oldest girls asked me to bring them back to America with me in December. The term would be over so they wouldn’t miss any studies, they assured me. I could only smile affectionately at the thought of bringing three 12-year-old Ugandan girls back home to Wisconsin with me in the chill of winter. They had no idea what they were asking! Then again, I have very little idea what they are asking to escape from.

I assured them I would come visit again, and the whole group of them walked me partway down the road and sent me off with lots of high fives and hugs.

Reflection: Today I spend two hours in the life of some girls from the village, only to leave at the end and walk back to my own life. I am spending three months living a life of luxury on the Ugandan scale, only to pack up and resume my “normal” life when I’m done. Isn’t this the kind of attitude I have despised for years? I rationalize that because this is what their lives have always been, they don’t need to pick up and leave as badly as I do, but have I ever considered that maybe they need it even more? Do I want to go home more out of calling or comfort? I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want to do nothing.

God, help me.

God, help them.

God... help us.