Widows and orphans

 

The drive to Kakira is quite beautiful. Located a little way past Jinja where you can find tourist attractions and crumbling colonial houses. Tea plantations and sugar cane growing for as far as the eye can see. Lovely and green and fresh. The air is warm and you might at one point or another catch a glimpse of the River Nile or Lake Victoria.

The entry to Kakira Sugar Works is grand. With guards and a sign in sheet.

Driving in you could be forgiven for thinking that this place would be a pleasant place to live. Good security, beautiful surrounds and steady employment.

Instead you are increasingly overwhelmed by the mass of humanity crammed into this prison of poverty, disease and despair. Mudbrick house after mudbrick house, with little room between each, shared latrines that flood in wet season, the sickly sweet smell of alcohol being brewed illegally from sugarcane in backyards, children who should be in school running around in rags.

Almost every day Lulenti and Mary, our Australia HOPE International partners, would have someone come to them in crisis. Currently they are trying to put over 60 orphans through school. When these kids land on their doorstep or are found abandoned, homes are found, whether Mary and Lulenti’s own, or a relative or friend of the childs parents. Many parents are from IDP camps in northern Uganda, or from southern Sudan, all looking for work after fleeing the war and the LRA. When they die, many from AIDS due to the high level of alcohol consumption and promiscuity in the area, they leave children who have no connection to family or culture. In Australia, when parents die and leave children behind it is tragically sad, here the result is devastating, leaving the fabric of culture and society to disintegrate.

One woman they found a few years ago was living under a tree, where she had been for at least a year with three children. One boy was found almost unconscious, abandoned near a road. People die because they can't afford medical care. Kids go hungry because there is no food.

Bill, Suz and I were taken into Kakira to meet the orphans that they care for. It was a very short time but lovely to see these faces that I've heard so much about. And yet, on the fringes, like I said before, hung the children in rags and not school uniforms, who are not lucky enough to go to school, whether they are orphans or not.

HOPE's involvement in Kakira is limited to helping with emergency relief, helping out a few widows, trying to raise support to help with the cost of sending the orphans to school and a few small, mostly agricultural projects. It is not small or meaningless, especially when the money sent is added to the love, care and sacrifice of Lulenti and Mary.

But this is not the dream for Kakira. What we would love most is to build a school, with a boarding section, so that these vulnerable kids will have a chance. A chance to be loved and cared for. A chance for an education. A chance to get out of the prison of poverty that they are currently trapped in.

It may seem like you cannot do anything. But I beg to differ. Scattered across Uganda and even into DR Congo are schools that are a testament to people doing something. Can you give five dollars? A thousand dollars? Sixty thousand dollars?

Isaiah talks about true fasting and James talks about true religion. And both of them equate that trueness with looking after those who have nothing. To share our food, to clothe the naked, to help the widow and the orphan. Yes it is true that we can and should do that in our own neighbourhood but I can't help but think as I spend more time here that this global community we live in makes anyone our neighbour in a way that was unimaginable 2000 years ago.

Once again this week I was struck at the unfairness of it all. That we drive out, sign the sign out sheet and go and sleep in our hotel on the banks of the River Nile. Now I know that I can't change the situation and at this stage I don't think I'm meant to go and live in Kakira but I do feel that part of what I am here for in this world is to be reminded and remind others that we need one another. And these kids in Kakira need us more than most.

Mukama akuhe omugisha

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