Beginning and Ending in Prayer

Saturday started off really early, though not intentionally.  I have previously written about my troubles sleeping in Uganda, and they re-emerged on this trip.  It is hard to discern whether the challenges stem from the natural difficulties adjusting to the ten-hour time difference, the excitement and busyness of my schedule while I am in country, or from the loud-speaker encouragement from the local Mosque to spend some time praying – right then and there.  Sounded like a good idea to me.  Does it count if I was praying that the power source for the loudspeaker would miraculously fail?  By 4:30, I was up and up for good.

When I rolled out of bed and flipped on my computer, I realized that the power in the house in which I was staying was, indeed, out.  I stumbled to the window and look down into the valley, enveloped in darkness, speckled only an occasional fire light.  I guess my power failure prayers had been answered.  And yet the blessed loudspeaker blared on.  Unfortunately, the Mosque’s generator squelched my sought-after miracle.  The public national holiday on Friday corresponded with a Muslim holiday that apparently necessitated some serious chanting while I was trying to sleep in order to be carried to fruition.

After doing some writing and answering some e-mails, I hopped into the driver’s seat of my newly acquired Toyota RAV4 and drove to the Garden City Mall to pick up David for our first meeting of the day.  This meeting was with Mark Riley, who relocated with his family to Uganda from Wales about two years ago to work as a UNICEF consultant on orphan and child protection issues.  Mark is embedded with the Ministry of Gender, which oversees the Remand Homes.  Mark’s focus is on developing and implementing an alternative care framework for how to deal with Uganda’s substantial orphan population.  We became close during my prior stay in Uganda after our paths crossed in conjunction with both my work on the J-FASTER program (he shares an office with someone at the Ministry responsible for implementing various aspects of J-FASTER) and with some advice and assistance I was providing on an ad hoc basis to American families seeking to adopt Ugandan orphans. Mark has proven to be a good friend and an invaluable source of information and insight into Uganda’s orphan challenges and what the best solutions might be.  In fact, my weekly interactions with Mark (and others) inspired me to lobby for Pepperdine Law to host an international conference on Inter-Country Adoption, which will take place in early February of next year.  More information on that conference is available here.  It appears likely that Mark will be attending and speaking at this conference where those on all sides of this important issue will exchange ideas and propose solutions to the world-wide orphan problems, with special attention on how Christians and other people of faith should or should not respond to this global challenge.

We next met with Isaac Obiro, who is one of Uganda’s most influential adoption lawyers, and who represented many of my old and new American friends who were granted legal guardianship over Ugandan children.  I have previously posted about cases where Isaac provided legal services to the Ribbens family and Brown family here and here, respectively.  A touching story about the Ugandan orphan boy adopted by the Brown family was recently published in Pepperdine’s Law Magazine here.  Isaac updated me on how things have been going over the past couple of months in this realm, and we chatted about the upcoming conference.  Isaac embraced the opportunity to speak at this February conference in Malibu, and he looks forward to reuniting with many of his clients from around the United States who will be attending the conference.

From lunch with Isaac, David and I went to see Henry at his boarding school where is in his penultimate year of secondary school and is studying to be a doctor.  Henry will be familiar to those who have kept up with the Gash Family’s Ugandan adventure, but for those who haven’t, Henry is a big part of how and why we ended up moving to Uganda for six months earlier this year.  I first met Henry in the Masindi Remand Home in January of 2010, and we have been close ever since.  More on who Henry is here and here.  We spent an hour or so together at his school, and I am picking him up Sunday morning for a four-hour excursion away from school.

We ended the day with a great dinner with a wonderful group of Americans who were visiting Uganda on a mission trip.  David and I especially connected with a group of six from a church in Huntsville, Alabama, with whom we laughed, cried, and prayed about what God was doing in Uganda and in our respective lives.  We are grateful to our friends from Sixty Feet for introducing us to these faithful seekers of God’s will for their lives.

I am also grateful to you for wading through this quick and often-meandering update.  Sunday should be lots of fun – four hours with Henry, and then a quick trip to meet up with some very special friends in Jinja.