Traveling and Arrival

So, it’s been 3 days. But it kind of feels like we’ve been here for years. Its indescribably different. I can’t really express it. We got in on Friday at 1pm, totally exhausted, of course. Francis, our driver, picked us up and drove us to City Annex, our hotel. We found our room and then walked to Garden City, the mall, and bought a cell phone, groceries, and dinner. We walked home in the dark. The traffic moves faster than in Mexico and we’re always having to run across busy intersections where the cars are driving so fast it almost feels like were running across a highway.

On Saturday at 9 a.m. we called Rabinah, the woman in charge of Purse of Hope in Kampala, and we waited for her to come pick us up until midday (noon). We loved that there’s no strict time schedule in Uganda and that you just come when you come. Lauren and I had a really special morning together reading the Word and catching up on life. When she picked us up, she had a friend, Stuart, driving her around and one of the girls from the house, Doreen. She offered us each a banana and we went to get the paper the girls make their beads out of. Driving was extremely scary. Every turn someone almost crashes into you or you almost run over a pedestrian or a boda-boda (the motorcycles they take around everywhere). When we got to the house we met the 9 girls who live there. We ate an authentic Africa meal: beans and porridge-like stuff. We listened to gospel music and talked to the girls for a long time. We all danced together, or they danced and we tried to imitate. We taught them “down-by-the-banks” and 4 square and they taught us a millions of their games. In the afternoon we had a bible study. The girls are mostly 13 or 16 but range everywhere from 12-19. They are so sweet and loving and hug you as soon as they meet you and are so, so happy to have us there always thanking us for coming and asking us questions about ourselves. One girls, Prossy, told me that she had TWENTY siblings. 10 from one mother and 20 from one father.

 When Rabinah drove us home that night she told us about the current rescue she had just done with a pimp in Bwaise (the slum of Kampala where the girls live). It was so hard to believe that those beautiful, innocent, godly children had really been through brothels and prostitution. She had been forced to buy 3 girls in the situation, a rare thing. She said these girls choose to do it when they are so young because they have siblings to feed and no other way to do it.