The Why’s of it all?

I am back in Kampala, Uganda, taking a simply day of rest in one of favorite small African Hotels called Marble Arch Hotel…nothing fancy, but it feels like home to me…today it is a time of reflection. The past few months have been almost unreal to me, a daughter getting married and preparations to come back to Africa once more, this time a longer period and a lot of things that I unsure of have entered my world.

My mother asked me a question before I left “Warum Afrika? (Why Africa?)”   I answered with two words, the name of a man and it made sense to her, “Albert Schweitzer.”

As a child, especially I was laid up with scarlet fever; I had read Albert Schweitzer, a man who gave his life for one cause “Africa.”  His hospital in Lambarene touched thousands and made an impact.  I told my mother that he was there until his 80’s and gave himself to a cause.  (Albert Schweitzer, like all of us was far from perfect, his views would often be considered controversial from his reverence for life, to his views of Africans that was and is a huge negative.)  Yet there was a cause in his life that he lived and died for and was driven by. 

Since the early 90’s I have been returning to this place called Africa, for some time I felt that my last trip would be the final trip at this part of my journey due to grand children that would love grandpa to tell them stories about far away places, places that are filled with animals not found in the USA, ways of living and relating that are foreign to the West and yet there was always an inner longing for a place that I have learned to call home, Uganda, East Africa my home…A country that many its people would like to leave, where also some such as myself come too. 

Call it an inner thing, or maybe it is just the celebration of life itself, different from the West, the vibrancy of life, short as it might be, or maybe it is the constant laughter, the view of time and space.  There was however something else…I was editing some of my pictures of the last five months in Uganda when I came across a few that caused me to think as to why I came to Africa in the first place back in the early 90’s…Africa’s children…I have crossed East Africa from South Sudan to Rwanda, from Kenya to Uganda working with children, seeing that they, especially the girls receive an education, have food, a place to call home, a quality of life that would never come there way without people from across the world giving that hand of compassion that empowers a child to break out of the cycle of poverty.

The pictures that caused me to book my ticket back to Uganda were the images of a little girl in a dress coming to one of the children gatherings on a Sunday morning…She seemed like she was staggering down the red clay path to a patch of grass, when every so often she would simply crouch down and remain there for some time and then get up and slowly move down the path, looking like she would fall down as she would sit down again.  I walked up to her, taking her tiny hand into mine…I could see her eyes widen…fright seemed to be there, she almost withdrew her hand and then kept it there, we began to slowly move at a snails pace, every so often she would stop, crouch down…I said nothing, our hands together, I could see she was ill, maybe malaria, maybe she was one of the 25,000 children that each year face their world from birth having AIDS transmitted by their mother, even though a Ugandan doctor has come with a simple and inexpensive way of having the children of mothers with AIDS come into this life without it, maybe it was dysentery due to the lack of clean water and soap, whatever it was, I could see she was in pain…nevertheless our hands stayed together…

She stayed with me, listening to music, watching children dance and play, I saw a slight smile come across her face, all the while we held hands, I started to move to the music and she slowly joined in…as the singing and music ended, she looked up at me, this tiny little tot, wide eyed, smiling now, she took her hand away from mine and wrapped her arms around my leg, just holding and smiling at me…This little girl represented something even beyond herself, she was in a sense doing something that had been taken place within myself, the touch of Africa’s children upon my heart…

Yes, there are other things that I do in Africa such as working with Guesthouses, selling safaris and transportation, but all of them support what really touches my heart, Africa’s Children…some of the profits of the above go help children…

Back in the 1990’s I worked with an organization that had the means and ways to raise large funds for Africa. Today, there is no large fund raising mechanism, just a simple website, hearts touched by some of my stories about the children and people who respond out of compassion.

There are times when I wish I could do so much more. The needs and opportunities to do more are so many, simple things like teaching hygiene, a bar of soap, clean water can eliminate 40% of the causes that kill the children of Africa, one wishes that one could do more…but then I have this simple principle, “What is one your plate?”  In other words what has been placed in front of you, for that I am responsible for, that I can do, for that I have been given the power to do something about.

That little girl had been placed in front of me for a reason; this was not an accident, but a reminder of “why?” I was here once again...jon

What can you do to help a child in Africa?