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All my Uganda pics are finally up and on flickr. I just finished going through tagging and adding descriptions to them. All total there ended up being like 316 photos. It takes a while to upload that many to flickr even on my fast cable connection. Anyway, I hope you enjoy them!
I’ve felt a little weird since coming back but I’m not sure it is really reverse culture shock. It is almost the lack of it that has me feeling strange. In some ways, I feel like I should feel different now that I’m back in the US after going to Otino Waa and the fact that I don’t feel terribly different feels weird. I think part of what makes trips like this one a little different for me is the fact that I’m not really shocked to encounter suffering. Between my general world view and my knowledge of current events, I realize that most of the rest of the world leads a truly horrible existence between wars, famine, and disease. Now, Otino Waa struck me as exciting because of the fact that most of those things exist outside of the school. The kids are all well fed, well educated, and sleep in relatively nice accommodations. Still, the way that everyone was telling me about how different I would be after coming back I think has thrown me a little.
Even while we were in Africa I was telling someone that it is kind of funny that I ended up on the trip considering I don’t really have any interest or sense of calling when it comes to global missions. I just like to travel and take pictures. I should point out that I’m grateful for the chance I had to go and I believe we did a really great thing while we were there (building the house). Yet, I also feel oddly “normal.” I’m not really any more or less passionate about missions than I was before we left.
Anyway, I guess all of that is to say that I’m still mulling over how I feel about the trip and what God was trying to teach me now that I’m back stateside. I haven’t had much time to do any thinking though as I’ve been terribly busy with work since getting back. Hopefully after this next week things will calm back down just a little and I can take stock of life. Getting together to share photos this Friday will be good too. Well, I think that is it for now. I hope you enjoy the photos. Later!
I’ve got the first 50 pics up on flickr. I have 311 total to upload which is about 10% of the 3000 or so that I took. That puts me right about where I thought I would be. I still have a few to go through so the 311 number may grow a little but it will be right around there. I’ve got a few pics to edit in Gimp before they are completely finished and I’m running everything through neat image (which only handles batches of 50 photos at a time) so it might be Tuesday or Wednesday before I’ve got them all up there but they’ll be there for sure by mid-week. Hope you enjoy!
So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last two weeks that I haven’t been posting, the answer is that I have been in Lira, Uganda. I spent 9 days working at an orphanage called the Otino Waa Children’s Village. Since it is hard to try to sum up the entire experience in one post, I’ll instead just post some short thoughts and then the rest of the story will get filled in over on my flickr and over the next few weeks here. So, in roughly chronological order, here we go. . .
- We crossed the Nile River yesterday. I have never seen so much water moving with so much power.
- The power is out as I write this, who knows when it will come back on.
- My body is not adjusting well [to the time change], I feel sick and exhausted and I’m still not sleeping well. I will have to be careful in the heat.
- Our 6 hour bus ride yesterday took about 10 hours. A good 2-3 hours of that spent on dirt roads. Even what was paved could only be generously described as such.
- Otino Waa is a much more impressive facility than I imagined.
- Posho [what we had for lunch every day] really does taste like good cardboard.
- The fruit here is amazing [especially the bananas]
- The house I had lunch with yesterday was really fun but it was awkward sometimes too. The house mom was telling me about how lucky I am to live in the US. I didn’t know how to respond because everything I could think of either sounded tacky or arrogant. The difference between my life in America and their lives in Uganda is so profound it is almost hard to imagine. It would take them months to make the money I make in one day at my “low paying” job.
-I wanted to tell them yesterday that al the extra “stuff” we have makes our lives complicated too, but again I realized how arrogant that would be. Some of these kids ran for their lives through the bush or watched their parents die from AIDs. How can I compare bad traffic and the difficulties of the Christian dating scene to that?
-Uganda is hot, hot and humid [and it's the dry season]
- I’ve managed to avoid getting burned too bad but I haven’t completely escaped the unrelenting sun.
- They wear fleece hats and coats when it drops below 7o degrees. I finally start to feel comfortable.
- I’ve been drinking 4-6 500 ml bottles of water every day and I’m still dehydrated.
- Missions is not my calling,, but this has still been a great trip. Where most stories out of Africa are about disease, war, and famine, we met children who were full of genuine joy and zest for life.
- Our bus driver James has Jedi powers. He talked bridge guards out of arresting us, talked other guards into letting us though a security checkpoint without showing the right papers, got our room number from the front desk clerk, convinced the drivers of a damaged ferry to come back and pick us up before shutting down to make repairs, and was pretty much awesome all around.
- We saw a lion hunt and kill a small deer. Coolest thing I saw on the trip.
