Days 2 and 3- Busia

How could I even begin to put into words, the things I have seen and felt over the last couple of days?

So much has happened; I am struggling to remember everything. And I know that as soon as I post this I will realize I have forgotten something.

Yesterday we went to Busia; we stayed overnight in a hotel. In truth, most of my memories are of the bus rides there and back, but that is only because each of the rides were about five hours long! I haven’t even been on a plane for that long!! JJ was a sort of human jukebox, and in truth it was simply aggravating. But it did keep me occupied when my iPod died. =)

One of my fondest memories was in fact before we even got there. We stopped for a bathroom break at a hotel, and we went walking around the parking lot nearby. Sitting in the yard next door was a mom and her kids; maybe four or five of them. And they must’ve been the most adorable children I’ve ever seen! We talked to them through trees and barbed wire, but this didn’t keep us from playing with them. One of the daughters took a liking to me immediately and started playing a game where she would hide from me and then peek-a-boo… Amber played with a girl who was positively brilliant; if perhaps she would’ve been schooled she would’ve grown up to be a genius. And Mike played with a child who just copied what he did; he would clap, stomp, pat his hands in increasingly complex patterns and this kid would always pick up on it.

Obviously the youth are just as bright here.

They had very little, and still they were all very joyful to play with us; it was perhaps my first glimpse into the lives of these children who don’t have anything near what is understood as necessity in America and are still beaming.

Blah blah blah, the next half of an incredibly long ride. I can tell already I am going to get sick of the bus very, very soon.

I was met in Busia by a fairly alarming noise; it was the women of the village, shrieking. It was a noise probably most comparable to the noise Spongebob and Patrick make in that episode with the secret club and the conch shell. Apparently, this noise was one of joy and not of panic, although I am still not used to it now!

The shrieking was in fact a part of a song, apparently a sort of praise song. Everyone knew the words and were singing along in the Ugandan language. I didn’t need to speak Ugandan to know the song was joyful.

Fairly remarkably, the same joy I found in the children earlier, I found in the elderly here. The oldest women and the oldest men were dancing to the song, with just as much vigor as the youngest ones! It brought an enormous smile to my face to see a very old man singing and moving back and forth with his cane, with the widest grin I had seen on the entire trip.

What ensued was a sort of ceremony for sponsored families of GFR, where all the heads of household received care packages with living supplies for the whole family and letters from their sponsors. I watched this for a while, but was much more interested in what was happening to my right; all the kids, maybe forty or fifty in all, were lined up to receive candy and be entertained.

Entertaining children is not easy when you do not speak their language.

It worked well, though, and we all engaged in rousing rounds of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” and “Ring Around the Rosie” and “Copy the Weird Noises JJ Makes”. It all went very well, I must admit, and the kids could’ve copied JJ for much, much longer than they did (and they did for maybe 45 minutes).

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing in this moment were maybe half of the kids.

No matter what any of us did, an alarming number of the children would not smile for the life of them. It’s not surprising, of course, but I still hate to see it.

I’ve found myself drawn to the kids lately, actually, they have a certain aura about them. But some of them don’t even see a point in smiling…

I don’t like that one bit.


After another little ride, we found ourselves at an old woman’s house. This is my first year, so I did not know her, but apparently on a previous trip one of the teams built her a house. This was my second encounter with the weird shrieks of joy, but if they truly are of joy then this woman was the happiest yet.

Now, here comes my greatest blunder of the trip.

Someone caught a chicken, and I asked to hold it. I took a picture with it, it was all good fun, and then Ben called us all in to here the lady’s story; no one was nearby to take the chicken, and I had no idea what to do with it. So I took it inside and we listened to it together; it fell asleep in my arms. It was cute and completely ridiculous at the same time.

As a favor to her, we all weeded her garden. Once again, no one wanted to take the chicken off my hands. I ended up holding it in my right and weeding with my left. We developed a very intimate relationship, and he became my best friend. I named him Edgar.

Being gift-giving people by nature, they gave me the chicken as a gift.

I was completely awestruck at the notion. Thank goodness Melody was there to say “thank you so much for the chicken!!”; if I had said anything but it would’ve been an insult.

So, we all boarded the bus, my chicken in hand.

These monogamous relationships get very aggravating very easily. The chicken realized that it was in a bus and got very angry. I handed it to “Hollywood” Fred; he said he had a place for it.

(It turned out later he snapped the chicken’s neck and ate it. I wasn’t very upset, chickens aren’t very good pets. They aren’t very cozy at all, and you live in constant fear they will get hungry and start pecking at you.)



We stayed the night in a hotel by Lake Victoria. It was absolutely beautiful. The only thing unattractive about it was the lack of hot water.



Our next stop was Humphrey’s house. His parents had died when he was fifteen; that was two years ago and he has been taking care of his huge family since. It was absolutely incredible.

We gave the family candy, stickers, that sort of thing, and a soccer ball. I did not know him, but I suppose it was very cool to see him laughing and playing along with the others; he must not have much to smile about very often. It fills me with a sense of warmth at that thought…



And, our final stop was at an unsponsored family’s house. An enormous family with nothing to their name. As per usual, I was drawn to the children, and (unsurprisingly so) the percentage of kids willing to smile here was drastically smaller.

I am one of the few people here who does not frequent these trips; if we visit this family in the years to come I’ll see much, much more vividly the change from having little hope to the exact opposite.

That is what I am the most excited about.


I arrived home very distraught.

I have never, ever seen anything like this before.

It’s overwhelming, it really is. That one family lives in these conditions is alarming; that all these families live in these conditions is impossible to comprehend. I am overwhelmed at the enormity of the situation.


I just do not know what I can do.


It hurts to walk away from the families, too.

As you smile and wave goodbye, there is a bittersweet taste in your mouth. I do not know what everyone else thinks, but I cannot help but wonder if I could have done anything else.

I have two hundred dollars of American money in my pocket (translated to about 300000 Ugandan Shillings)… Perhaps I could’ve given more of that?

I feel torn, really. I feel awfully guilty if I did not give everything I have for the people who don’t have anything, but yet there’s so much I want to hold on to… I feel selfish, really, and I hate it. Does it make me vain if I want to keep what I have?


There were a few people I hope I at least made a difference to. Perhaps that’s all I can hope for. There was one boy at Humphrey’s I sat down next to and played with as best as I could; he played with my ring (the one with the waves that move), I gave him an American penny… He loved it, and he kept saying the word “penny” until we left.

I do not know if it was childishness or Uganda-ishness, but these things were much more fun than he had had in a while. You could tell that in the way his eyes lit up.

And I think that’s what I need.

I don’t want to drop everything and move to Africa; I have too many dreams for that.

And I don’t want to abandon the cause completely, that would hurt much too much.

I need to find a good balance. I think that’s what I need to get over the next two weeks.

I just need a little Uganda-ishness.

When I am old and can barely walk, I pray I still have the joy to dance like that man did. And that’s all we all really need, isn’t it?

We all just really need a bit of Uganda-ishness.