10 Days in Uganda, Day 4, Jennifer and Loyce
“Do you have grasshoppers in the UK?” Moses asked. We assured him we did. “Do you eat them?” he continued. We assured him we didn’t. He explained that they were a luxury food in Uganda. Men gave them to their wives and girlfriends instead of flowers and chocolates. “The women absol-u-u-tley love them,” he said with a typically African, high-pitched chuckle.
We dared to leave the hotel and took a walk down the road past the market. This was an informal affair where a widow might take two tomatoes and an egg to sell, unlike some of the roadside stalls where the variety, quantity and quality of the produce might even challenge Mr Sainsbury. Like the Ugandans, he should consider building his tomatoes into little towers to attract custom.
Walking past the market was a terrifying affair. Everybody just stood and stared. Surely they’d seen white people before? The children waved at us and shouted. We hoped it wasn’t “Whites go home”. But it sounded friendly enough. And they were smiling. We were approached by a relatively well-dressed teenage girl who was happy to chat in English. “Can you assist me with some money?” she asked. With such poverty in Uganda how can you criticise people for being driven to begging? Children learn it from an early age. But it doesn’t feel right. There is a fine line between asking for help and asking with menaces. The old adage “It is better to give a man a fishing rod than just one fish” is very true. We can give, we should give, but it’s best done through an agency such as Compassion where the money can be used wisely where it is most needed.
We were due to visit 2 of Sally’s sponsor children at their Compassion project about 10 miles from Kasese. While we waited for Nelson, the project director, to accompany us, Georgina struck up a conversation with the hotel doorman talking about his family and Compassion. “No sign of Nelson yet?” I asked when we were alone. “Oh, I thought I was talking to him,” she replied. No wonder the poor doorman looked bemused.
The project was about a kilometre off the main road down a dirt track. For a small rural community there seemed to be people everywhere. We had not anticipated the welcome we were about to receive. A mass of children, mostly in blue, school uniform surrounded the car. Every eye was fixed on us. We quite overwhelmed. It was the beginning of their school holidays and they had come especially to meet us. The adults were lining up to shake our hands, Gladys, Festo, Charity, Rock and Nelson again. They were genuinely pleased to meet us. We felt like royalty. The buildings were basic but functional. The main building was the church, made of brick and with a mud floor. There were holes for windows which allowed outsiders to stand and watch the proceedings inside. The buildings fitted well into the prevailing ambience of dire poverty. The children were sent inside while we were shown the classrooms (basic), the toilet block (clean), the dirt area with a rusty roundabout that served as a playground and the small office block. It was clear that they had very few resources. One small boy kicked around a “ball” made from a screwed up plastic bag. But the atmosphere of the place was one of love and care. The project children seemed to be thriving on it. There was a stark difference between them and the children not selected. Only one child in a family is usually chosen to participate in a project. The project children were generally bigger, healthier and certainly better dressed. The others were ragged and many had runny noses. One child, no bigger than a toddler, was 8 years old. Another wore a large, ripped tee-shirt which would only fit if he put both head and arm through the neck hole.
The children, gathered in the church, sang us songs of joy and hope. They smiled and they clapped. They praised Jesus, their Saviour. They had precious little else to give him. Sally taught them a song.
We visited Loyce and Jennifer with their families at home. These were mud huts with straw roofs. Inside, the few rooms were small, black and empty, apart from maybe a bench, a few chairs or a bed. The kitchen was a stone shelf with a fire below. The few presents that Sally had brought for her children were the only splashes of colour in this bleak environment.
Loyce was being brought up by her grandmother who looked haggard and exhausted. Her mother was ill. Jennifer’s parents looked worn down by the grinding effort to survive. Her father was pale and looked a physical wreck. Nelson was very worried about this family. I asked what they might have for breakfast. He became animated and struggled to contain a growing sense of righteous indignation. “How can you talk of breakfast, lunch or dinner when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? They are lucky if they have one meal a day. This family has nothing. Eh? Literally nothing,” I felt ashamed. He began to calm down. I had taken the point. And this was just one family in a country full of desperate families.
Back at the project I had no appetite for the meal they had provided. It is a solemn point of culture to feed visitors. There was boiled goat and chicken, rice, cassava (a cooked root), pineapple and the ubiquitous matoke (cooked plantain and Uganda’s national dish). I tried the goat but it fought back as I tried to swallow it. The chicken gave in more easily. Though it was unfamiliar to our western tastes, moulded by the likes of Colonel Sanders, this must have been a feast to the families we had just visited. I sincerely wished they hadn’t squandered it on us. They were so generous and gave us gifts of a hat, bag and pot before we left. These people, full of love and care, were shining lights in a very dark Uganda. Loyce had even given Sally a live chicken and had dutifully tied its legs together. For a moment, I thought Sally was figuring out how it might fit into her hand luggage on the plane, but she came to the conclusion it was better to leave it at the project. Good decision.