Home

An elusive concept, but after six days of strenuous travel I am grateful to be in our little house in Bundibugyo tonight.  My weary soul looks forward to being here, at home.  Some highlights of the week  :

+SWIMMING with a hippo:  yes, we jumped into a crater lake at our first stop, the water was chilly and refreshing, but as we surfaced we noticed a broad shiny head with twitching ears peering out of the reeds about 30 yards away.  Lake Ninyabulitwa is mysteriously home to a lone hippo.  We took a small row-boat clear across the lake with Grammy, who was a real trooper in roughing-it kind of travel.  Seven of us in a double cabin pick-up over dirt roads with only the bushes for bathroom stops . ..

+HIKES, and more hikes.  We took an hour trek to a garden-like viewpoint above the lake the next morning.  This was a warm-up for two more strenuous hikes.  Mt. Sabinyo, an extinct volcano on the southern border was probably the most beautiful trek we have ever done anywhere.  God gave us a cool - breeze, clear sunny day to hike from about 8,000 to nearly 12,000 feet (officially 3669 meters), through bamboo and then forests hung with feathery moss, above the tree line into the rare equatorial alpine habitat of lobelias and tussocks.  At the top-most point we could stand in Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo at the same time.  The 14 km of steep scramble did not phase Luke and Caleb, but Jack and I were pretty beat by the end of the 8 1/2 hours!  Lastly this morning as Scott headed to Kampala with my mom, the kids and I were joined by two of Luke's friends, as well as Ashley and Sarah, to hike back to Bundibugyo over the Bwamba pass.  We saw a handful of blue monkeys, were enveloped in cloud on the topmost ridges, and then descended into the valley of Bundibugyo.  It is a other-worldly way to come home, and the kids once again did great, about 15 km of steep up and down in 5 1/2 hours.

+ANIMALS, up close.  We took my mom game driving in Queen Elizabeth, and were basically charged by an irrate elephant.  Later Luke the Lion Spotter found us two groups of lions, both moms with young ones.  He's amazing, the rest of us would never have noted the distant silhouette of brown ears in the tall grass.  It was very fun to take a picnic breakfast to the savannah, and to take Grammy on one of our favorite family adventures.

+GAMES--except the hikes, we were able to take my mom on all our adventures.  Whenever there was a lull in the travel action she played games with the kids.  This was a good week of conversations and togetherness.  We all soaked up the privilege of spending our days together.

Home.  As we spent the last two weeks with my mom, the reality of the cost that missionary families bear really pressed in on me.  We make choices that affect our kids, but also our parents.  Because of our life and ministry here my mom does not get to see her grandchildren the way she would like, or live within an easy visiting distance.  It is a high cost she pays, made higher by being widowed.  I had a cross-stitch over my bed as I grew up that read "Heaven is my Home."  We try to carve out a reflection of that Heavenly home here on earth, but having families divided by oceans is one way that we fail.  So while I am relieved to be back home in Bundi, and to have this place that my children consider to be their home, I realize that the very fact we have settled here for so many years destroys some of the dreams of "home" that the rest of our families in the US have had. And that is hard.

Grammy on the Go

We head out in the morning to take my mom on a six-day tour of western Uganda, so the blog will be quiet. . . but keep praying! For good family focused time as we go. For the many patients left behind, some like little Kato tantalizingly close to cured, others like Bwambale frightenly fragile. For the loose ends we have not quite wrapped up. For our student Basiime Godfrey who MAY have a chance to go to University (pray for a merciful decision from the registrar to forgive a missed deadline . . ). And for our hearts, stretched, needing a bit of rest after the non-stop summer, having to say goodbye to my Mom next week too. Beauty and quiet, distance from demands, in these we hope to find the healing presence of God.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Luke graduated today. We realized a bit belatedly that the term-end at RMS (Rwenzori Mission School) was in effect a major milestone for him, his last day of school in the little four-room school house with the other missionary kids, after 10 years of study. I was so thankful for our team, who rallied to plan a ceremony for him. We all met at noon, sang both the Uganda and the US national anthems in true-third- culture-kid combination, then hummed Pomp and Circumstance while he walked down the short path to the door and received a lovely diploma Miss Ashley had made. We prevailed upon her to recap the great speech she gave as guest-of-honor at her old high school's graduation in May, and as the last of a long line of faithful teachers here she rose to the occasion (Miss Sarah, who actually TAUGHT Luke since January, was accompanying her parents to Kampala and missed the festivity, which is a bit sad since she actually suffered through Paradise Lost and Precalculus . . . ). I took the Dr. Seuss book and re-worked it for Luke (opening line: Congratulations! Today is your Day! You're off to Great Places, to begin RVA!). Then we distributed a stack of old photos to everyone, and made a timeline of all the teachers and team mates and milestones of the last 15 years so that people could take turns taping up old photos from the Heather era all the way up to the current year. Interestingly Luke included his favorite Christ School teachers as well. AFter prayer we enjoyed cookies and samozas provided by the team. I wanted that closure for Luke, a recognition of the transition, and a concrete moment for the younger kids to understand life's trajectory. But though we planned for Luke, I think the hour gave testimony to the rich history of this team, to the many faithful and capable teachers who have passed through, to God's provision, which encouraged all of us. Mission schools can be tricky, as JD used to say . . . after all we care more about our kids than other aspects of our ministry, so if you throw together 3 or 4 or 5 families with their different educational priorities and expectations, it requires prayer and grace and lots of plain old work to make it run. I'm thankful to say our team has risen to the occasion, and though Luke's education is truly unusual . . . his "graduation" today is a testament to the fact that it has worked.

August Prayer letter available for download

Our August 2008 WHM Prayer Letter is available for downloading (pdf file format) through the sidebar link labeled "Downloads".

More on pain, suffering, sorrow and lamentation...plus a review of the summer's ministries...and lots of color pictures.

Hosting

Having a visiting family member from America is an important event in our lives, as a family and a mission. And with Grammy in residence we have become a popular group! On Friday we were treated to a feast at Ndyezika and Juliet's new house, which somehow ballooned to involve both a passel of uncles and cousins from Ndyezika's side, and an equal contingent of CSB teachers and friends of Juliet's. Grammy presented Bibles to the newlyweds, we told stories of our long history together, everyone who had attended a boarding school away from home gave Luke advice, and we ate piles of rice and matoke and cassava and potatoes, sombe and cabbage and gunts and meat, as the light ebbed out of the neat little house and candlelight illuminated our faces. Saturday we enjoyed various team-mates coming by as well as an impromptu lunch on the porch for seven of the young men whom we sponsor with school fees, because they had been released from their school term that day. In the evening Melen and her youngest three kids joined us for dinner with Ashely, Pat and her two "nieces", the daughters of her friend who died of AIDS almost exactly a year ago. Many friends lined up to greet Grammy at church, and tonight we'll be hosted by our neighbors in her honor. It is nice to take a pause in the press of life to just acknowledge the significance of relationship, to look back at the blessings of the many years. We are thankful that my mom's health and energy have held up so far, it is no small feat to thrive in Bundibugyo after two major surgeries in the last year. And though she is getting a heavy dose of grandchild attention and connection, her presence for two weeks perhaps makes the painful reality of the many years of separation more visible.

Gracious encounters

We received an official delegation this afternoon, Monday Julius and his bride Alice, accompanied by his three brothers. They came to thank us for our support of Julius during Ebola, for our contribution to their wedding, and mostly for choosing him to be a recipient of the Dr. Jonah Kule Memorial Leadership Fund scholarship for medical school. Scott reminded them that the money does not come from us, though we'd love to sponsor him ourselves, but from the many people who gave in response to Dr. Jonah's death as a way to continue his dream of providing medical care to the people of Bundibugyo. We had baked a celebratory cake, and after sharing tea and visitng, we prayed for them. Alice is beautiful, articulate, confident, a midwife working at a Church of Uganda Hospital on the other side of the Rwenzoris. Julius is one of the most pleasant, hardworking, and trustworthy young men we've encountered. What a privilege to be a small part of God's provision in their lives, to see them at this young stage and hope for the many years of faithful service their marriage and professions will afford Bundibugyo.

Juno and Jeneffer

Contrasting stories: the hollywood version was in a DVD we saw this
week, the story of teenage pregnancy, a cute saucy articulate 16 year
old who chooses to carry her surprise pregnancy to term and give the
baby up for adoption. Juno is a great character, and while the movie
has some raunchy moments it generally chooses life by acknowledging
the incredible value of an unborn baby, and sympathetically portraying
the longing of a childless woman who waits to adopt, and the paradox
of being a normal teenager who is required to also be a responsible
adult. The movie asks the question: can two people really love each
other for life? And answers with hope, in spite of all evidence to
the contrary. And the baby ends up well cared for and loved while the
teenagers are figuring all this out.

Now the Bundibugyo version. Jeneffer also showed up this week, 15,
quiet, on the margins, dutifully bringing her scrawny infant for
care. We weighed him in at 1.45 kg, not even three pounds, though
he's more than a month old. She agreed to stay admitted with him, but
on the second or third day it dawned on my that she was sleeping on a
bare hospital mattress with no sheets, and had none of the usual
clutter about her: no pans, no food, no relatives, no extra clothes.
The nursing staff got her story for me: she had been a primary school
student, living with an aunt after her parents divorced, and agreed to
sex with a secondary school boy who promised to marry her. When her
aunt saw she was pregnant she angrily ejected her to the care of the
boyfriends' parents, who were not so thrilled. He went to school
every day and she dropped out. Eventually she ran away to her
mother's home (about 10 km), but her mother had remarried and the step-
father was not interested in taking in the pregnant teenage daughter
of another man. So they told her to leave, and she went to her
father's house. Here the reception was not hostile, but her father
lives across the border in Congo and is busy with his new wife and
family. So among these four homes (aunt, boyfriend, mother, and
father) there is not one single adult who seems to have noticed that
this is a girl with a starving baby and no help, that she came for a
check-up and never returned. Meanwhile she sits on her bed on the
Paediatric ward, half-heartedly breast-feeding her pitiful skeletal
little boy and spooning milk formula into his mouth when the other
mothers take pity and allow her to use their pans to boil water. I
help her with some food and blankets, one of the nurses sometimes
brings her a meal. I don't think she expects the baby to live, and
I'm not sure I do either.

The contrast must carry some clue . . . in the America version the
girl is smart, goes to school, gets medical care, has friends and
family who support her. She makes some bad choices, and some good
ones, and life goes on. Her pain is another's blessing, which carries
seeds of redemption. In the Bundibugyo version, the girl's bad
choices define her and seem to defy her any chance of escape. The
proverbial African family which should provide a safety net for her
landing has instead been found to have holes, and she has fallen
through, dropped by her relatives, by the education system, even by
the medical system. No one is looking very blessed at the moment,
least of all her child. Juno is aggressive and active in pursuing
what she thinks is right, even at high cost. Jeneffer is passive and
fatalistic in waiting for help that trickles her way. I have often
read that poverty is the lack of choice, and this seems to hold in
this story. How can we give Jeneffer choice, which is probably more
important than giving her milk for her baby? And is it fair to try to
get her to take hold of a life that is so massively stacked against
her? Does she have real options, or only illusions of them? When I'm
dealing with a mother the age of my oldest child, it is a wake-up call
that something is very very wrong. Both girls would have done better
to wait for sex until the commitment of marriage in the context of
maturity. But they didn't, and I'm interested in the contrast in what
happens then. I suspect the girls' fathers are key in the contrast,
and the disconnect between fathers and daughters in this culture is
one I have not thought enough about.

Arrivals and Departures

After dreary and drenching days on end, today the sun broke through in time to firm up the grass airstrip just enough for a very important landing. My mom, Judy Aylestock, and Sarah Reber's parents and sister arrived, and midwife-intern Larissa Funk departed. It is a world- intersection moment when our families can set foot in Bundibugyo. Melen, my two neighbors, Ndyezika and Juliet, and church elder and friend Bamparana all formed the Ugandan welcoming delegation, and almost our entire team came as well, for a swirling crowd of hugs and tears, of joy and emotional overload. In the excitement of travel there was not much rest, so today we are allowing them to catch up before the grand tour of Bundibugyo starts tomorrow. It has been more than five years since my mom last reached this far (my parents' last trip stopped in Kampala) so the kids and the trees have both grown quite a bit . . as well as the house (we added a porch/room on the front). Praying for a meaningful visit for all.

HIV/AIDS Awareness

Data can drive programs, decisions, push money in the right direction,
move hearts and minds. So in that spirit, here is a fascinating web
site called Global Health Facts, which compiles data from the UN and
from individual country reports, and maps and ranks it for meaningful
thought: http://www.globalhealthfacts.org/topic.jsp?i=6. This
particular link takes you to children living with HIV/AIDS. I was a
bit surprised to realize that Uganda ranks fourth among the over 200
countries and territories of the world in absolute number of kids with
HIV. The adult prevalence is higher in southern Africa, but the sheer
number of infected kids centers here, right where we are. There are
lists and maps and numbers for maternal mortality, childhood
malnutrition, TB incidence, malaria (where Uganda ranks NUMBER ONE in
case rates, with 477 cases per 1000 population . . .meaning half of
the people in the country suffer a case of malaria every year, and
fourth in the world in the number of deaths from malaria). This kind
of data should of course drive health services. Why not send the
doctors and nurses and malaria medicines and hospital equipment and
public health research and educational outreach to the epicenters of
disease? Well, the maps for health workers are actually the INVERSE
of the maps for disease. Uganda ranks 129 of 135 countries with data
for physician coverage, with 0.08 doctors per 1000 population, and
only 39% of births attended by skilled personnel. I hope that medical
schools and mission agencies spend time reviewing data like
this . . . .

X-ray

This may help you understand some of the challenges of accessing care in Bundibugyo.  A year ago Jack injured his heels by running cross country, too far and too hard, in poorly-padded used tennis shoes.  He was a big strong 9 year old running with mid-adolescent kids. Though we did once go on line to look for age-related distance limits . . .he is the kind of kid that pushes, and is able to do too much.  Plus we did not take his occasional complaints of pain in his feet seriously enough.  By the time we realized it was a problem, he had done damage to his growth plates.  Thanks to our good friend who is an orthopedic surgeon we learned his diagnosis, calcaneal apophysitis (Sever's disease).  And his treatment:  rest, no running, pads in his shoes, stretching exercises.  For months we've been slowing him down (we even tried crutches briefly to keep him still), no football, no sports, no hikes, always banning bare feet or hard shoes.  For an athletic kid like Jack, the result has been frustration, and it probably has significantly impacted his ability to enter into school life and have friends, and been part of his general discouragement.

The good news is that this disease will go away as he reaches adulthood and stops growing . . . but that is still a long way off.  It has been hard for him to be patient with the slow process of healing.  Recently though we've seen the benefits of his rest and his heel pads, and he has not had nearly as much pain.  So he has been allowed a limited amount of activity .  And our doctor friend in the US suggested follow-up xrays.  Since Jack is very worried about all this, and looking for good news, we really wanted to comply and get films.

Sounds simple.  No xray film in Bundibugyo.  So a month ago, our only weekend out of Bundibugyo this quarter, I went to two hospitals in Fort Portal with Jack.  In one the xray machine was broken.  In the other there was a line of patients a mile long, and we had a car full of people waiting for us, so we had to give up.  So then Scott bought a box of xray film and took it back to Bundi.  The xray tech has been unavailable, and the machine only works when the generator is running which is a few hours a week.  Finding an overlap between the xray and Jack's school schedule has not been easy.  We thought we had one today.  But no fuel for the generator.  So we had to drive to Bundibugyo in the rain, buy 10 litres of diesel fuel, find the xray technician, give him the box of film, get the generator started, and take the pictures.  Just revving up the machine and arranging it all took over an hour.  When the films were finally developed they were a bit light . . . the tech apologized that the chemicals for developing were old.  

A simple xray of the heel is never simple.  The staff say that the fuel issues stems from the fighting between politicians, which is freezing all the bank accounts for the district, so the hospital has no money. We have resources and resolve, but you can imagine that for most people the barriers of film, fuel, and passive-aggressive foot-dragging, would be too high to surmount.

We are praying that Jack's heels are healing . . . that he will be increasingly able to move normally, good for body and soul.  But the dreary process of accessing care also reminds us to pray for justice, for relief, for the many who wait for help and healing that never comes.