Separation Anxiety

We recently passed the two-month marker on our African adventure and experienced another event that has caused me to start thinking about the sadness of separation and joyfulness of reunion.

On Monday, March 26^th, we woke up to what we thought would be another “ordinary” day in Uganda as we kicked off the second one-third of our six-month adventure.  Within a few minutes, we realized that things had taken a decided turn for the worst.  At some point between 11:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m., the Gregstons (our Twin Family) had been burglarized in their apartment immediately below ours.  While they slept, a thief had crawled in through a window of their ground-floor apartment and stolen a wad of cash, four laptops, and several other valuable electronic items, leaving through a sliding glass door.  Needless to say, this shook all of us up quite a bit.  You can read the Gregston’s post about it here.

Over the course of the next week, the Gregstons prayed about it and decided that they needed to move to a more secure apartment complex that was nearer to their home base for their medical mission work.  After having lived most waking moments with them for the past two months, we are experiencing a good bit of separation anxiety.  We understood their decision and will likely still see them quite often.  For the time being, since we are on the second floor, and since the place we are staying in beefed up its security measures following the break in, we are planning to stay put.

This week also marked the kick-off of the juvenile justice pilot programme (that is how they spell it here) that I have been working on, and those of us who are involved are pretty excited about the prospect of curing the separation anxiety that the juvenile inmates feel as they wait in prison (many of them for more than a year) for a chance to go to court.  Phase I of this programme is officially underway, and we just learned that the prosecution is going to dismiss one of the fourteen cases immediately because the evidence is insufficient to proceed.  One down, thirteen to go.

On the legal guardianship front, the top-notch attorneys for the Doyle family filed yesterday the formal response to the US Embassy’s prior unfavorable notification with respect to their attempts to bring home baby Eden.  I have posted about them before here, and their heart-wrenching blog is here.  Eden just turned one last month and has been here in Uganda separated from the Doyles (who were granted a legal guardianship order over Eden in November).  I just learned that the Doyles have boarded a plane and are on their way to Uganda right now.  It will be good to meet them in person after having exchanged countless e-mails with them and having spoken with them on the phone several times.  Please be praying that the US Embassy will rule quickly and favorably so that they will never have to be separated from Eden again.

Late last week, I met another family from Atlanta who is here in Uganda in conjunction with their hoped-for adoption of three orphan siblings.  After the Skype conference call between the Ugandan attorneys and American attorneys I wrote about here, the family’s Ugandan attorney realized that the way the events were playing out could potentially put the family in a very difficult position with the US Embassy after the Ugandan court was awarded legal guardianship over the children to the family.  Accordingly, their Ugandan attorney had them contact me, and I connected them with the American attorneys who are now working with this family to ensure that the right procedures are followed between now and their application to the US Embassy for a visa.  It is heartening to see tangible evidence that the connection between the Ugandan and American lawyers is paying dividends for these orphan kids and the would-be adoptive families.

Finally, our family’s separation anxiety from the United States was temporarily diminished when Shane Michael (one of my former students and colleagues here in Uganda) brought back a few bags of chocolate chips after a brief trip he made to the United States.  We knew we were missing chocolate chips, but didn’t know how much until we were able to make a fresh batch of Nestle’s Tollhouse cookies.