After two weeks in Uganda
I straddle a line between despair and joy. I’ve come to see
that this is the balance that life is always trying to strike, not too far on
either side. I like it here, in Gulu, in
the village with the gray blue sunsets and the jungle green all around. I find
peace as I step sometimes toward despair, sometimes toward joy. But I feel
peaceful because here I’ve come close to doing what I was meant to do. Life
should always be this lovely adventure. Today I saw so many things, things it
would take a year to see back home. A young boy who told me he was missing
school because he had to go into town to get his HIV medication. I finally made tragic Joseph crack a smile on
the swing set. I held a sleeping baby. I
pumped the well so the young girls could fill their jerrycans. I went with
three twelve year old girls on a walk to the garden to harvest the bwo for
dinner.
On the walk I met a goat. A chicken. A baby pig, I fed a
sheep as she lay in the shade. I walked in the mud and picked handfuls of bwo.
I washed my feet in a pool of rainwater. I walked through sweet potato fields,
beneath a mango tree, banana tree, lime tree and guava tree. I walked until my
feet were stained rusty red as the soil of Bar Dege. I learned to say ‘I love
you’ in Acholi Lwo. And back at the orphanage as we sat and cleaned and sorted
the leaves into bowls one of the house “mothers” came along and said: “Ah munu,
you are learning”
Indeed.
