Words of Hope

A few weeks back I went on Words of Hope visits with Dr. Larry Pepper (the muzungu ... aka white person ... in the pictures and my supervisor), Naboth and Enoch. Words of Hope is a medical and spiritual counseling and outreach program for HIV/AIDS patients from the clinic in Mbarara and is run by K-Nob. We loaded up the Words of Hope van and headed out to Rubindi, a town a little over 25km away from Mbarara.

Our first visit was with a midwife in town. Though she had patients lined up out the door, she still took the time to sit in the van and talk with us. She also helped us find our next visit. We walked back through a narrow alley to a small dirt building with a tin roof and a curtain for a door. Inside this probably 5x10 structure with dirt floors lived the next patient. I couldn't believe that someone could live in such a place, yet here she lived with her kids, day in and day out, no where else to go. And believe me, there's people who have it worse. I thought I had seen poverty in East Austin and South Dallas and horrible living conditions at the Hurricane Katrina shelters at Reunion Arena and the Dallas Convention Center, but American poverty is well off by Ugandan standards and I'd take that crowded arena floor any day over a dirt-floor shack with a leaky roof. I can't imagine how bad it must be in places like Kiberia (Nairobi slums) or the South African townships. It's amazing just how much we have, and even more amazing how much we take for granted.

For our last visit we broke the rules and visited someone who wasn't on the list. Naboth had received a call saying we should visit this lady outside of town and so we went. Followed a dirt road for a ways and then turned off onto a bush path that wound around the hillsides for some distance. At times the path was so narrow through matoke plantations that the van barely squeezed through. How Naboth had ever found this place before is beyond me.

Eventually we passed a ruin of a house and came upon where the lady lived. The view was incredible: had this been West Austin there'd have been multi-million dollar mansions where her mud and dung house sits. We went inside and sat down and she began to tell us her story. She had been living in the house we had passed earlier when her husband died. Not long thereafter the giant tree out front began to drop huge branches on the roof, which you could imagine would do some damage. However she was very fortunate. Instead of taking everything from her and making her leave (which they very well could have and in general most likely would have done), her husband's mother and brother helped her. They let her keep all her belongings and even assisted in building her new house. Though she at times had been very sick her four kids worked hard to take care of her. She had resisted the temptation to visit witch doctors and traditional healers and instead had stuck to the Mbarara clinic and to TASO, a Ugandan HIV/AIDS NGO. She had stuck to her faith and it had carried her through many hard times.

When we first came upon the house all I could think of was how unfortunate this woman was to have to live in a small building made of mud, dung, sticks and tin, with kids without shoes and covered in dirt from working outside. And true, it's certainly unfortunate; however, had I kept focused on that tragedy I would never have seen the incredible way in which God had blessed this woman. And a blessing she certainly saw it to be.