Our First Month in Uganda: An Unforgettable Journey

“Muzungu! Muzungu!”

Those words, shouted gleefully by herds of precious children as we visited villages across Uganda will be ringing in our ears for the rest of our lives.  Muzungu is the East African term for white person and transcends the many different languages and dialects spoken in Uganda.  Wherever we've gone, we've been greeted with that exclamation, especially by children, who in some cases we were told had likely not seen a Muzungu in years, if ever.  Fair to say we've stood out; we’re different, rare, intriguing.

While the village children may have felt they were experiencing something special in our visits, we were the ones who walked away moved -- and different.  You cannot step into the situations we've encountered and ever look at the world, at America, at God the same way again.  There are countless indelible images running through our minds from our first month in Uganda.  We've witnessed both desperate need and God's life-changing power moving unmistakably in its midst.

In our first week, several Samaritan’s Purse staff gently introduced us to Uganda via western-oriented restaurants, malls and a bowling alley in the capital of Kampala.  We also enjoyed the happy coincidence of Chrissy’s former colleagues from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation (EGPAF) being in town for a conference that Chrissy had helped plan before leaving DC.  We all ate at a revolving restaurant overlooking the city and went rafting on the Nile River, a major bucket list experience.


Following the first week in Kampala, we set out on a three week tour of Samaritan’s Purse projects all across Uganda.  See the map of our journey with the projects we visited at each stop.  Before leaving Kampala, we visited a project that is reintegrating orphans back into their homes, a process aided by the empowerment of mothers with new income-generating activities to support their children.  Vulnerable women in the community are also empowered by savings groups, which provide livelihood trainings including financial savings and an invaluable support structure.  We also visited a project outside Kampala that is mobilizing the church to serve as the hands and feet of Christ in the community, caring for the most vulnerable among them.  They share the love of God by meeting practical needs and building capacity, often by providing livestock as a means of livelihood.

Our second week in Uganda was spent in the northern town of Lira, known as the site of huge refugee camps for the millions of people fleeing the terror of Kony and the LRA, which ravaged northern Uganda for two decades.  The LRA killed over 100,000 civilians and abducted more than 20,000 children before fleeing the country in 2006.  We heard personal accounts from Samaritan’s Purse staff who barely escaped with their lives as children, running from their homes as the LRA attacked their village.  These atrocities have gained a lot of global attention over the last year as the Kony 2012 video went viral.  To hear first-hand accounts of the horror from people who lived it was unbelievable.

Most of our time in Lira was spent observing and participating in the Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) project, creating sources of safe and potable water for local communities.  Our first two days on the WASH project were spent visiting a nearby village where SP had established a water filtration workshop.  Here, locals came to participate in making their own water filtration units out of concrete, gravel, sand, and sheet metal.  We also enjoyed trying our hand at constructing diffuser plates out of sheet metal and beating the air bubbles out of the concrete as the units dried in the molds.  While this task served as excellent exercise, it also gave us a unique perspective into the challenges around securing one of life’s most basic needs: water.  One afternoon, we walked the quarter mile or so from the village down to the banks of the Nile to
observe women as they filled buckets and jerry cans full of water.  The water they were drawing from the river for their family’s drinking and washing was also being used as a watering hole for several cattle and a source of recreation to the many children who were swimming and splashing in the shallows.  Though people generally knew that water should be boiled before it’s used for drinking, this often doesn't happen as this requires women to take time gathering firewood and starting a fire, in addition to the already laborious task of fetching water from the river.  As a result, illnesses such as diarrhea, parasites, and typhoid are extremely common in rural villages such as the one we visited, and unsafe drinking water is a major cause of death among infants and children.  Knowing that the water filtration units SP was constructing would virtually eliminate this threat was so inspiring – who knew that a little concrete and sand could actually save lives?


One of our Lira days in particular stands out as even more emotional, on both ends of the spectrum, and profound than usual.  On March 12th we were visiting a church mobilization project in the villages.  When we arrived at a church action group meeting and found them welcoming us and celebrating our visit with exuberant singing and drumming, Pearce was overwhelmed and brought to tears.  The reception was a degree of pure joy, warmth and kindness unlike any we had ever seen.  These leaders vividly demonstrated what it means to love strangers and deeply appreciate everything and everyone that God brings into our lives.  The other tears shed that day were of a much different kind, when members of the group took us to visit one of the families in their care.  We were standing inside a small hut, looking into the eyes of three young children orphaned by HIV and alone.  In this moment, God broke our hearts for the hurting and vulnerable people of Uganda.  God’s call “to look after orphans” is now illustrated by the pained faces of these precious children.  This experience evoked a new level of love and compassion as God gave us a glimpse of how He looks at His children.

While in Lira, we learned that one of the church action groups was leading an afternoon of HIV counseling and testing in a village and, given Chrissy’s background in pediatric AIDS, we jumped at the chance to attend the event.  Upon arriving in the village, we were greeted by a group of a hundred or so people, mostly women and children, who were sitting in two groups – those who were waiting for their name to be called in order to have their finger pricked and blood tested for HIV and those who had already been tested but were anxiously awaiting their test results.  It was greatly encouraging to see how many people were taking control of their health by being tested for HIV, especially given that over 7% of people in Uganda are HIV-positive, and we enjoyed sharing words of support and encouragement with both the individuals being tested and the church group who had organized and sponsored the testing.

Our time in the Western region of Uganda was divided between two projects: livestock and refugee food assistance.  The first two days of the week were spent learning about how SP is providing livestock such as cows, pigs, goats, and fish to families in the Kamwenge area in order that they could provide milk and meat for themselves as well as an income for their home.  Though we visited many families who had received animals from SP, undoubtedly the most colorful experience of this rotation was when Chrissy helped with deworming a cow.  The cow, who was none too thrilled at being restrained and her mouth held open, literally coughed deworming medicine all over Chrissy’s face, arms, and chest as she valiantly attempted to shoot three syringes full of medicine down the cow’s throat.  We think both Chrissy and the cow got enough of the medicine to be free from parasites for the next few months…

The remainder of the week was spent in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement near the town of Mbarara (try saying that ten times fast…) where SP is responsible for distributing food to the over 65,000 refugees who call this area home.  Though most of the refugees had arrived in the settlement after fleeing across the nearby border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, it also has residents from Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Ethiopia with each group establishing their own communities within the vast settlement.  Arriving at the settlement, we expected to see acres of tents and make-shift temporary dwellings littering the landscape, as we've all seen on CNN in the aftermath of acute disasters, but were instead surprised to see that the area looked very similar to the many rural areas we had visited with whole villages of huts and small storefronts lining the streets.  As we came to learn, this particular refugee settlement has been in operation for over sixty years, and new residents are allotted land where they can build homes and gardens, thus setting this
area apart from the typical refugee camps that we see in the news.  During our two days at the settlement, we learned about the process of how newly-arrived families become registered as refugees and obtain their ration card (used to track whether or not they've received their monthly ration of food), how the warehouse full of food from the UN’s World Food Program is managed, and were able to take part in distributing food to the refugees.  This last activity was especially exciting as we traveled into one of the communities in the settlement and helped measure and dole out rations of rice and corn-soy blend flour to eager families.  Each ration is designed to last a family for one month and the recipients were overjoyed to learn that rice, donated by Brazil, was included in this month’s ration as they hadn't received rice in over a year (rations typically include some kind of flour, beans, corn, etc. but rarely rice).  To learn that rice was such a luxury item was especially humbling as we had already grown tired of having rice and beans each night for dinner that week.  It was amazing to see how many things, like rice and meat, we truly take for granted in our hyper-privileged lives.

Our final week of the rotation was spent in Karamoja, a unique, isolated and particularly challenged but beautiful area in the northeast.  There are several major projects Samaritan’s Purse is conducting in this region, including one focused on maternal child health, Chrissy’s passion.  After a wonderful experience on the rotation, we’re both excited to be returning to Karamoja this week for the remaining three and half months of our time in Uganda, to dedicate ourselves to serving the Karamajong through the projects there.  There is much to say about Karamoja, its history, its people and our experience there, so we look forward to sharing more about our home for the next several months in another post.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, which is certainly true.  But we've also realized that an experience – being present and immersed in the sights and sounds of such a spectacular and diverse place – is worth a thousand pictures, which still cannot fully capture, convey and do justice to Uganda.  But, having spent the last week sorting through the several thousand we've taken in only our first month, we hope this album of our favorites gives you a taste of the indescribable experience we've had as well as the beauty of this place and the Ugandan people, whom we’re so blessed to be working with.

PHOTO ALBUM OF OUR FIRST MONTH: SNAPSHOTS OF AFRICA