Saturday
10.30pm

I’ve actually got to bed on time but I can’t sleep. My head is buzzing with all I have seen and heard. I think I was glad of a quiet afternoon on site this afternoon – although perhaps ‘quiet’ should be in inverted commas as it involved up to 40 children playing with the parachute purchased through Barbara’s friends and family, laughing hysterically, probably another 20 playing football with Ben, our UK footy fanatic, the building team going full pelt and assorted office staff from Uganda and the UK busy working. Oh, and the unpacking and sorting of all the goodies (baby clothes, pencils, sewing kits etc) brought out by members of the team from England, and another 15 or so African teenagers practising their dancing for Saturday’s celebration. Believe it or not, after the few days we have had, all that qualified as ‘quiet’!!

The last few days have been people-packed, activity-packed and emotion-packed. This morning was no exception. A number of us went to visit an IDP camp (Internally Displaced People) on the outskirts of Soroti. At the height of the civil war, a few years ago, up to 14,000 people crammed into the camp, under the protection of the Ugandan army, fleeing from the rebel soldiers pillaging the countryside to the north of Soroti. Now only around 3500 are left. The government is trying to make them go home, to the rural north, and all NGO intervention and outside help has been closed down for the last three years. Conditions are very poor and families are surviving at subsistence level.

Yet, once again, people living there were without exception warm, welcoming and friendly to us. The arrival of our bus was greeted immediately by a teeming crowd of children wanting to shake our hands, hold our hands, touch us somehow. As we walked around so many team members were drawn into so many fascinating heart-rending conversations – with parents who fear losing what little they have if they go home, with children asking for school books, with brick-makers who cannot afford to buy the bricks they make themselves, who build their own homes with mud and water, with a teenage mum who became pregnant while at school and now lives alone at the camp with her two month old baby and another teenage friend with a six week old baby – scratching a living selling tomatoes and raw cassava. Such beautiful babies, such a precarious existence. For them and for so many others we met.

At these times I try to remind myself of two things. One, as Ron Newby always said, ‘you can’t do everything but you mustn’t do nothing’, and I thank God for the work of Global Care, which is reaching out into at least some of these desperate lives and giving people hope. I am privileged to be seeing first-hand exactly what a difference even a little giving can make. Secondly, and possibly even more importantly, I am reminded to “fix my eyes upon Jesus”. He endured all things, betrayal, abandonment, torture and an agonising death, for the joy set before him. “Consider him… so that you do not grow weary and lose heart.” In him are my answers, and Uganda’s answers, ultimately found.

Carolyn

* also on Saturday, various members visited Soroti market. Others visited a successful citrus farm in the afternoon. Lee and Kathryn taught our sewing teacher, Gertrude, at the Soroti centre, how to do macramé – a new skill she picked up very quickly and was keen to use, to make crafts for sale.