On the fifth day of our trip, we traveled two hours north to the Katakwi district to visit a couple more possible care points. At the site called Adacar, we were able to provide the children with a meal of rice and beans and gave mosiquito nets and posho (flour mix) to many of the Child Headed Households. The photo below is the children waiting in line to recieve their meal.

These children gathered early in the morning to wait for our arrival which wasn’t until about 3 in the afternoon. I love the little decorations they had hung!

It is not uncommon for young children to care for their siblings all day long. This young girl was in charge of her two little sisters… who knows how far they had to walk just to get there. One of the difficult parts about coming home is trying to get my own kids to realize how truly lucky they really are. There are so many things here we take for granted… things like a garbage system so we don’t have to smell burning garbage all the time, safe water coming out of our tap so we don’t have to walk several miles and carry water back for our family, meat that has already been prepared for us to purchase so we don’t have to cut off a chicken’s head and pluck it’s feathers to cook it, hospitals that actually provide all of the supplies that you need so that you don’t have to go to the pharmacy just to purchase a needle and sutures for your stitches. Ya know… those things. Life in Africa is hard… but yet they are still so filled with joy!

 

Some of the girls teased me that it must have been somebody from Fargo that donated “long-johns” to a child in Africa.

During the meal we noticed this young girl crying… we never did fully understand what made her cry that day, but we did find out that at that both of her parents were dead and she was left to care for her three younger siblings by herself. She was NINE YEARS OLD. Heartbreaking.

Here is a photo of our team along with our the Country Director for Children’s HopeChest, Joseph. He was the amazing man that navigated our travels, kept us on schedule (tried to anyway) and kept us safe! We were all laughing because we had asked an older Ugandan boy to take our picture and we could tell that he was aiming the camera quite high and most likely photographing only sky. He managed to get us in the cornerof this photo though!

And… I have shown you a photo of an African sunrise, so I thought I should also show you one of an African sunset. It was breathtaking!

Photos from our last couple days in Africa coming tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 11:49 am and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.