The Ugandan sky is bright tonight, as I sit outside of my mud hut and contemplate the events of the day. We set up a ‘fall festival’ for the girls. We had different stations of face painting, bean/rock/corn toss, three legged race, water bottle bowling, and a cake (lollipop) walk. Emily and I worked on face painting together. As I had learned some skills in Ireland, I felt well prepared and even painted my own face to look like Spiderman hoping that the kids knew who Spiderman even was.
Most of the ladies did not want their faces painted, so mainly it was there children that did. And face painting quickly turned into hand, arm, foot painting. Only a few children actually wanted anything on their faces and even fewer let me do a full face picture like a tiger or Spiderman like me. However, all my favorite kids, Dong Ping, Ti, and Viktor… they all got one of these two choices. From the other stations we could here tons of laugher. Glad that the girls and kids were again getting a chance to just ‘be’ and enjoy life and each other.
In the evening, when I had wet-wiped most of my make-up, and unbeknownst to me looked like the Joker, we set up movie night and watched ‘Up’ with whatever girls and kids decided to stay up for it. Even though most of the girls do not speak English, they followed most everything as they laughed at many funny parts based off of facial expressions and sound effects. Tracy and I both cried.
While debriefing the day, Tracy brought up that these are the faces of the war. The events of Northern Uganda are something I have been aware of for years. Of course I have cared. But now, the victims have faces. They are the faces of these girls. They are the faces of Dong Ping and Ti. They are the faces of Spiderman. It brings a whole different sort of caring that something could happen to them. That things have happened to them. That in a few days we leave and I have to trust them all to Jesus. It changes things. I’m not sure what it will look like in my life… but I hope it doesn’t look the same.
