Visiting Mbale.

This news is a month old now, but I wanted to get pictures from Maz before I blogged about it.

I got a day off work and traveled to Mbale on the 3-5 March, which is where Maz is living and working mostly if you haven't caught up on that.

5:30am I left for the bus park. I caught a boda boda, which subsequently flew into town. He was just safe enough for me to not tell him to slow down, although we would have been in a poor condition had we come off on a pothole going 80km/h without helmets I think. There are lots of risks over here, I think you just get used to accepting them, because in many cases you don't have other options. It operates very different to Australia in terms of risk to life.

The bus trip was alright, I had to wait an hour or so before it left. When I first arrived I was gauging travel safety by how often I would get a natural adrenaline rush during travel. But you get used to it and don't get the rushes as much after a while. But there were a few times when even the Ugandans on the bus all made exclaimations when the bus swayed a bit more alarmingly. I can sleep standing up in the buses which passes the time.

So Maz was waiting for me, and we headed to Bushikori where she worked. Apparently we only just missed (thankfully) a guy getting stoned for theft. Maz had some tests at the clinic and got malaria medication because she had malaria.

In general it was great being able to connect faces and places that Maz had told me about. A couple of other things I wanted to put on my blog though.

Anisha is a little muslim girl who lives near where Maz is staying. Shes about three years old. Her parents work from what I understand and she wonders around on her own with neighbors keeping a bit of an eye out for her (but certainly a lot less than we look out for our little ones!!

I can't remember why she came to me, maybe we called her, but she indicated she wanted to sit on my lap, so I picked her up. For about the next hour? she was pretty happy to sit there, and whenever I put her down, she just wanted to go straight back up. Anyway she is a real little cutie, so I wanted to post a picture of her. We are both looking cheeky. She definitely stole my heart.

We also visited an orphanage called Salem Village. They have orphanages around the world and seemed fairly well run from first glances. They even had a minor surgery at their clinic and were constructing a major surgery which is fantastic.

I find orphans are pretty heartbreaking to actually see them and their little individual personalities/lives. Not that we don't have any in Australia, but over here, there are an awful lot more and they can just die. Like Zimbabwe, where 10% of the population are orphans. millions of parentless children trying to raise themselves and their siblings.

At this orphanage they take total orphans, orphans and abandonment cases. The pictures are of some huts at the orphanage and some of the orphans, fairly evenly divided beween HIV/Aids, Abandonment and death-while-giving-birth cases. You could spend a whole lifetime over here just trying to raise these kids and love them. And some people do.

I read George Mueller's biography just before coming over here, and I think it helps me see his compassion and heart more to know practically what the orphans he was housing might have been like, and the routine tasks of changing several hundred childrens nappies? (they grew to 2500 orphans in the end.)

I could tell you more about that weekend but I'll write another post instead, so I'll leave it at that but I'm hoping Maz and I might be able to spend some time at the orphanage together although it might not happen with such limited time. There are always many things to do. :)