Thanksgiving, AIDS orphans, and a Medical Clinic in Bwindi

Happy Belated Thanksgiving! I’m so aware of the MANY blessings I have to be thankful this year, especially considering all the poverty and suffering I’ve seen here, but also the joy so many have by the grace of God despite their circumstances. I had a great Thanksgiving here. We had class in the morning, then played American football for a few hours – it was a ton of fun. I sacked the QB a couple times :). After that the vice-chancellor and his wife had all the students, American professors, and other Americans in Uganda over for a big Thanksgiving dinner – turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and of course, matooke! There were tons of deserts; it was so good. We watched Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I don’t usually watch at Thanksgiving, but it was nice to do something that made me feel like I was home. It was really nice to celebrate Thanksgiving with all my friends here; I’ve gotten to be pretty close to a few of them. I did miss watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but there’s always next year ;)

Two weekends ago we met with an organization that works to partner traditional healers and modern medical practitioners, since the vast majority of Africans see a traditional healer and will never see a modern doctor. The statistic was something like there is one traditional healer for every 140 people and one modern doctor for every 120,000 people here. The organization trains traditional healers specifically in knowing the symptoms of AIDS and helps them establish ties with modern doctors that they refer people to. We met with a traditional healer, who threw sea shells and interpreted them to tell the condition of one of the girls in our group. He didn’t report anything significant; it was an interesting experience.

We visited an orphanage for children whose parents have died of AIDS; many of the children are HIV positive. One family of 6 children was headed by the eldest, a 16 year old girl; they live at home and the orphanage helps provide food and support. All the children could do was speak of how good God is and how much they love the Lord. They sang praise songs in English and Luganda about God’s faithfulness, goodness, and provision. It was an incredibly humbling experience – they are so thankful for all God has given them and worshipped so joyfully. We played games with them for hours; it was a blast. I was reminded of Christ’s words: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Those words ring true to my experience; I felt so humbled and almost unfit to sing along with these children who have experienced so much more pain and suffering than I’ve ever known.

That same weekend we met with the Bishop of the Church of Uganda (the name for the Anglican/Episcopal church here) of the Luwero Diocese. He studied in Philadelphia and worked at a church in St. Davids – the town where my university is! It was crazy to find that connection. I’m sure most of you are aware of the current conflicts in the Episcopal church in America over homosexuality. As a result, some conservative Episcopal churches in the U.S. have broken from the American church and sought to be under the oversight of more conservative bishops in other countries. The bishop we met with oversees 8 churches in the U.S., and he talked about the pros and cons of this arrangement – that churches are able to be under leadership with whom they agree theologically, but that it is very difficult to provide sufficient oversight from half a world away. On Sunday we went to a Catholic church for worship, which certainly was quite the dynamic experience. The service was obviously liturgical and similar to Catholic services I’ve been to in the States, but at the conclusion of the service a group of about 25 young girls dressed in traditional outfits came out and danced to 6 songs!! And most memorable of all was the priest, who had recorded the music they danced to, which was something like Afro-pop, and sang along and danced! It was pretty amusing seeing a priest dancing and essentially rapping at the alter! Our group discussed how much our experience represented the effective contextualization of the Gospel – that the Gospel message had truly become theirs and been contextualized to the African context and culture. There’s a clinic at the church, and a group of women sang to us about AIDS, the symptoms, and how to prevent transmission. They sang a lot about the fact that AIDS is not a death sentence – there’s such a stigma here about AIDS, and many people don’t want to know their status even if they have all the symptoms. They sang in doo-op style, like a barbershop quartet. To us it sounded pretty cheesy, but it’s very culturally relevant – the culture is so oral and singing a very effective means of communication.

This past weekend the 9 of us in the Ministry and Missions Emphasis traveled to Bwindi, which is in the Southwest corner of Uganda only 2 kilometers from the Congo border. The area is Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, a national park where the endangered mountain gorillas live and is a huge tourist attraction. (A permit to track the gorillas is $500!) We stayed at a camp in the forest. Our hut was pretty plain, but nice enough, and the food was great. We didn’t get to see gorillas, but we were told that the morning before we arrived they had been feeding right near our hut. We met with an American doctor who’s established a medical clinic among the Batwa people. The Batwa are pygmys, and the clinic has flourished and is now run by the Ugandans, including 2 Ugandan doctors, and does tons of great things in the community. On Saturday we accompanied the doctor on a medical clinic in one of the VERY remote villages high in the mountains – it took us about an hour to drive there from the clinic along REALLY bumpy, muddy roads on the face of the mountain. Our van got stuck in mud a couple feet deep twice; pushing it out was a fun experience. The medical clinic is one of the most memorable experiences of my time here in Uganda. We set up a tarp and two wooden benches on a flat area on the edge of a mountain in the village that overlooked the incredibly dense forest. Before beginning we greeted the people in the little of their native language that the doctor had taught us: Agandi! Indi Joelle, Ndeego America. (Greetings! I am Joelle, I come from America.) Then they played drums for us and danced their traditional dances. We joined in dancing, which gets incredibly exhausting after not very long – jumping up and down and kicking feet in imitation. Then all day the doctor, me, a doctor’s assistant, and one other USP student sat on one bench facing the many people that lined up (more like crammed in) to come see the doctor. The doctor kept me by his side all day and taught me to do tons. I listened to everyone’s lungs and heart with a stethoscope and learned enough of the language to ask what was wrong (of course I couldn’t understand their response so the doctor had to translate). I wrote all the medical records and the prescriptions as the doctor ordered, and by the afternoon I knew what the prescription should be for the sicknesses that were common in most people, so I was prescribing the medicine and just checking it with the doctor to be sure. We saw lots of little babies that had colds and a couple that were pretty malnourished and sick, who we brought back to the hospital with us. An old man was carried to us and set down next to us. He looked terrible – he was INCREDIBLY thin, his skin was loose off his body, and he couldn’t move himself. He was carried there by others and set down on a mat on the ground next to us. The doctor and I made our way over to the man. I listened to his lungs and heart, neither of which sounded very good at all. He was incredibly weak, and Dr. Scott checked him out while I set up a drip. The doctor had a really hard time getting a vein to insert the needle, but eventually found one. The doctor said the man likely had tuberculosis and maybe AIDS, and perhaps organ failure. He said he seemed likely to die, and when I asked whether bringing him to the hospital would just prolong his death, he posed the question of whether we have the right to make the decision of whether he should have the chance to live. TB can be treated and someone with HIV can live for years on anti-retrovirals, he told me. The man lay on the mat the rest of the day and looked a little better after getting some fluids into him. We brought him back to the hospital at the end of the day, and that’s the last I heard of him.

I preached in church in Bwindi, which was a really awesome experience. I began with the story of Horatio Spafford, the man who wrote the hymn “It is Well” following the death of his son and four daughters and the downfall of his real estate investments. I related that account to the story of Job and posed the question of whether we serve God for nothing in return and simply because He’s worthy or we only serve God for the blessings we will receive in return. Then I discussed that the Christian life is never guaranteed to be easy, in fact we are guaranteed suffering and persecution, but that by the strength of the Holy Spirit and the fellowship, encouragement, and bearing of one another’s burdens among our brothers and sisters in Christ we can persevere. I concluded by having our group sing “It is Well” in 3-part harmony. It was really touching, and I was told by many how well the message was received. Having to stop after every sentence or two for the translator to translate the message was a cool experience; it was difficult at first to not get distracted and lose my train of thought, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. I also fell on the stage about 20 minutes before preaching! It was totally not my fault, and incredibly embarrassing! Dr. Scott asked all the mzungus in our group to come on the stage and introduce ourselves in Rukiga (the language spoken there), and since I was already seated on stage I stood up and he came over and grabbed my hand and pulled. I had no time to react, and as my foot hit part of the seat I knew instantly I was going down. I was laughing pretty hard by the time I hit the ground, and when all the mzungus broke out in laughter the about 300 people in the church knew it was ok to laugh. It was pretty funny, and also pretty embarrassing. I laughed along and brushed it off – what can you do?!?! Offering in church especially in rural areas here is always an interesting experience – people bring chickens, vegetables, fruit, matooke, sugar cane, and other things, since most people’s wealth here is in the form of what they grow. After the service everyone remained seated and the deacons auctioned off all that was brought, putting the proceeds in the offering basket! Someone in our group bid on a chicken and won, then held the chicken in her lap for the remainder of the auction. It was a pretty amusing sight. She gave the chicken to the man who had translated for me as a gift.

I have a new sister!! Her name is Grace, and she’s 12 and really cute. She’s serving as our housemaid, and Momma told me that she’s an orphan. I don’t know much else about her and haven’t bombarded her with enough English yet to know how good her English is yet, because I didn’t want to overwhelm her.

In other news, we had a costume party a couple weeks ago with all the USP students and the African Honors College students. It was so much fun – we carved pumpkins and bobbed for apples and ate ice cream!! The girls in the Ministry and Missions group dressed up along the theme of the Magic School Bus; we each had a different character and one of the girls whose personality is quite similar to Miss Frizzle dressed up as her. We drew a huge yellow school bus on a big piece of paper and carried it to the party. It was a ton of fun. One of the missionary families had us over for homemade lasagna and a movie – boy was that a treat! We watched “The Mission,” an older movie which I would highly recommend. It was about the Jesuit mission to Brazil, the genuine conversion of many of the people there and the establishment of indigenous churches, and the subsequent murder of the native people by the Portuguese army when the Jesuits refused to withdraw their mission and it no longer aligned with Portugal’s interests. It was pretty thought-provoking. The group of us American students led community worship two weeks ago. The power went out for a few minutes in the middle of singing, so we chuckled a little and sang and played instruments later. Oh Africa! :)

This is our last week of classes, and I have 6 10-page papers to write within the next week and a half! Yuck. I’m looking forward to schoolwork being over and coming home, though I know I’ll be really sad to leave Uganda and the relationships I’ve developed here. I hope all is well at home! Thanks for your continued prayer, support, and encouragement. It’s so nice to see new family and friends that have found my blog!