The Garuga Road: the road back home

Looking back on the last entry it seems extraordinary that I should have had such fears about my return. As it turned out people were very happy to talk about - and listen to - stories of Uganda and 'Cherish'. Money stretched to meet the needs, people were very generous to us; some gave us free hospitality, others financial gifts. A HUGE thank you to all who shared their lives and homes with us, especially my mother - Jo, my brother and sister in law - Alastair and Stella (what food!!), Julian and Elspeth Phillips, Jane Mann (amazing woman!), Rick and Bev Murrill (barbecue kings and our special leaders), sister and brother in law Rachel and Andrew, Richard and Fliss 'the Dons', Derek and Jackie Wood, and Sue Mitchell (prophetic landlady extraordinaire).

Above all I was very encouraged at the responses to my presentations in churchs and other groups. On every occasion people came up overwhelmingly positive about the content and message, as well as endorsing the aims and 'design' of Cherish Uganda. Many offered to help in all sorts of ways; from marketing, to researching, to coming out and working on the project.

It was so good to see our wonderful children, and our first grandchild- Ephraim (pronouned Efram) Ulrik, Burnham Waldron, born to Simon and Kamilla on the day I landed in the UK - 25th May! I had predicted months before that my grandchild would not wish to be born until my feet touched down in the UK, and 1.5 hours after I landed Kamilla went into labour, 10 days late .....

Hannah graduated from Brighton University in Illustration, with a 1st class honours and won the Illustration Prize, which was not a 'goody bag' like the others, but a cheque for £1,000!

Mixed with the joys was the sadness of Luigia, Sandy's mother's death on 5th July after a long and gut-wrenching fight with Parkinson's Disease. The Italian side of our family has become one of the most precious dimensions of our life via Sandy's mother, who was born in San Gimignano, Tuscany (famous hilltop town of lavish towers) and grew up in Sorrento - surely two of the most romantic and lovely places on earth?! The thanksgiving service for her life was a celebration of all she represented to us.

Getting back to Uganda proved harder. We were refused travel at Heathrow due to rules that say airlines cannot allow single flights into countries where there is no visa in the passport, and we did not have the paperwork from our team in Uganda proving that visas had been granted. In the end we had to pay fines and fly two days later , with Business Class from Dubai due to there being no economy seats until the end of August. It was my first taste of luxury in the air, but the cost .........

We had a great welcome back. Wow! Overwhelming! I couldn't work out why because when I got to the land everyone seems to have done very well without me! As I write this (6th August) two houses for the orphans are up to eaves beam level and the third's foundation is about to be cast.

14,000 or so bricks have been made on our site with the huge resulting hole to become our main irrigation reservoir (served by the 'grey water' from the houses and the rainwater run-off from the site road and land.

6 acres of land are now under cultivation, with beans ready for harvest. Maize, cassava, and sweet potatoes are coming up along with areas of forage made up of Napier Grass, Mucuna (a climbing legume of the bean family) and Calliandra - a legumous shrub great for forming hedges and stabilising soil. Leucaena, another leguminous fodder/stabilising shrub, is growing away.

Thanks Fin, Chris - and Harriet (Kulika Trust's project manager). Thanks, too, to Yusuf and Olivia, along with Mark, Paul, Rose M, Rose B, Margaret and Oboth for all the work on the land.

Rachel Parsons, the childcare manager and her team had appointed our first three 'house mothers', working closely with Watoto Homes (http://www.watoto.com/) who did an amazingly generous thing in training them and letting us take the pick of the team. They also helped ius in an extraordinaty way in helping us select our first Social Worker - Margaret - who started work today.

So I feel blest. Its great to know that a team can manage without you and still want you back. OK there are problems - it's not all good news: we have serious problems with termites, local villagers chicken and pigs, monkeys and squirrels - all eating our crops, and the maize that we bought (from a very reputable supplier) had Maize Streak Virus. We are behind programme on the houses albeit the contractor, Buster, is catching up. We have yet to build and test our 'rocket' oven. But I am inspired by this place and the Ugandan people.

Within a month or so we are going to be housing and caring for children who would otherwise have no future. We will be travelling a path for the first time in Uganda - with many watching to see where it leads. It seems so precarious - we are so few and have such tiny resources. We are such novices in this arena. But we have an amazing Heavenly Father who somehow takes clay such as us and moulds something that contain precious gold. It's a privilege. There is so little that I have to offer and yet Uganda is being changed by this little, and others are being inspired to make a difference to this mad mad world.

Photos (from top): Ephraim; Hannah and I at graduation;San Gimignano; Sorrento; the first house a week ago; 12,000 bricks in the making; sweet potatoes on site; Harriet surveying the maize and beans; the first harvest - a bean pod is opened!; Fin in the hole where the bricks came from - soon to be an irrigation reservoir

The Garuga Road II

Life in Uganda has many unexpected dimensions for the newcomer or mzungu (white person). One example is the taste of food. I suppose if you buy organic food in the UK this won't be so true (we could never afford it), but here eating an egg is an explosion of flavour! A chicken here tastes like I remember chicken used to taste before Sainsbury's and frozen ones came along. And so on. A huge delicious pineapple costs about 42p; massive sweet avocado's cost 21p each. 20 bananas cost about 50p.

(The Karamojan dancers)

Christmas Day was moving. We had about 20 Ugandans with us for a big Ugandan meal which included matoke - mashed, steamed plantain - and goat stew. Goat is expensive meat; beef is the cheapest! We had two orphan girls here, one of whom had never ever been off her Ssese Island - never seen a car even. We had 10 young Karamojans who did the traditional war dance in tribal costume and war paints and played the drums; they are so poor that we bought the drum sand the costume materials. They were out of their minds with gratitude. One of them is our security guard. These three, plus our housemaid, were all given presents from us. For all of them these were the first Christmas presents they had ever received. We were all in tears of emotion at the sheer joy and excitement on their faces as they received their presents - before they even got to open them!! One danced around the room with the present on their head. Another danced sort of waltz style holding the present as their partner. The magic of Christmas, the joy of giving, was never as strong or as bright in all my 52 years as that moment.

Everywhere we go people, especially the little children, shout out "Mzungu! Mzungu!" and wave and run after us. The kids want to touch our skin to see whether it is painted on! Many are totally naked and they have almost nothing to do. Children are worked very hard. In the photo they look like they are having fun, but this was a photo-interlude in doing all the family washing in bowls using the water from Lake Victoria just behind me. They have to scrub the clothes with a soap bar and then trample them in the bowl for ages. Then the clothes are rinsed in the lake and then spread out on the grass to dry. One problem her is that the clothes them become infected with the Mango fly. The grubs hatch out and bury into your skin and then erupt out through ones flesh days later! The main task of children here is to fetch and carry water, and this is done using large yellow plastic cans. Tiny girls can be seen almost being run over by cars as they struggle along the roads and tracks with two huge 15L cans.

Top: Typical group of kids; bottom: typical improvised toy

Many kids make toys out of plastic cartons with wheels from bottle tops or anything they can find. This little lad's was quite effective; I saw him at a fishing village near our site where the HIV/AIDS infection rate is probably over 90%. 600 people living in tiny shacks thrown together from bits of rough planking and corrugated sheeting!


Living here I cannot help but be amazed at the privileges that even I, someone always brought up with a keen awareness of the world, have so taken for granted. The need is so vast that unless one is very disciplined and focused one can be overwhelmed with a sense of guilt and hopelessness.


But I can see already that if one is convinced that one is making a difference for the many with one's life out here, then this enables the difficult and painful choice of saying "No!" to individuals. Even so I carry lots of small packets of peanuts with me to give to the endless stream of Karamojan child-beggars in the main streets of Kampala.


Jesus said: "There will always be poor among you", quoting from the old testament. The question is, why are there the poor, and what can we do about it? Or do we do nothing? Do we justify our inactivity with comments about the corruption in Africa, and the missing millions of dollars? Is that the answer? I don't know the answers. I am just trying to plough a straight furrow for some good seed.