It’s freezing cold, a rare, refreshing feeling on the race…
The Ugandan rain on the rusty tin roof over our heads is such a peaceful sound. We are huddled here in the small space of this straw house- Jacinda, Jan, (the Australian woman we are partnering with) & the older Ugandan widow whom we are building a *new* house for.
I have found refuge in a corner, on top of an old bicycle tire. I’ve seen some of the local kids playing with these things on the street, and imagine it is probably being saved for the woman’s orphan granddaughter, Viola. (My heart breaks for the reality that here, trash become toys.) The girl, and two other neighbor children huddle around me as I type out this blog on my ipod. These kids have probably never even seen anything quite like this before. In fact, I realize, they have probably never even seen a computer before. Its moments like these I am face to face with the fact that the world that these children live in is so very far away, both literally and figuratively speaking, from the children back in the place I call home.
We finish making the frame of the woman’s new house and make our way on muddy roads. Very muddy in fact. Well, actually, they weren’t roads at all, but rather dirt paths that had been widened by Brian and Jan’s 4-wheel drive the first time we came through.
Praise the Good Lord for 4-Wheel drive.
The car slid off the path- twice.
Here there is no calling people for help, except maybe a few people walking back from the watering hole. There are no tow trucks. We were just plain stuck.
It took chopping down multiple trees- yes, trees- with machetes, shovels and hoes before nearly two hours later we were finally able to get out.
Funny, a situation that easily could’ve made so many people angry and frustrated helped to bring about the restoration of something that had seemed to have been missing from our team since we first had arrived in Uganda- joy.
Would we have had that same joy without the car going skating down the road? Of course. The work being done on that woman’s house was so tremendously fulfilling to all of us, but the memories of the day however- priceless!
