You know the disappointment you feel when you are expecting to eat something hot, but it’s cold?  Or when you’re expecting to drink a glass of milk, but get orange juice instead?  Neither of those is a pleasant surprise.  But I had a very pleasant surprise on our final day of clinic in Uganda when we went to the slum of Namuwongo.

I was expecting to find the same church where we set up clinic last year.  The walls of the building were made of loose boards with gaps large enough for children to stick their hands through, the roof was a sagging old orange tarp which cast an orange glow in the church, the dirt floor was . . . well, dirty, and the smell from the nearby latrine filled the room, which didn’t seem to bother the flies.  So, my experience last year in Namuwongo was very memorable.

As our van squeezed between shacks and vendor stalls, trying to avoid hitting small children that were calling out to the mzungus, I was looking for the familiar orange roofed building.  When we drove up to the place where it should have been, we found a very much improved building.  The church had a new metal roof and the boards had been reinforced and painted blue outside.  On the side of the building the words were painted, “Namuwongo Ya Yesu”, which means “Namuwongo for Jesus” in the local language.  When we entered, we found that the dirt floor had been covered by a new concrete floor, and the walls had been decorated with beutiful fabric.  All of the building improvements had also improved the smell and temperature inside.

But one thing had not changed . . . Pastor Abbey.  He was the same joyful and welcoming leader of this congregation that I met last year.  The Pastor and I have been keeping in touch via email since I left Uganda.  He has been a source of encouragement to me with scriptures he sends me and with updates from his work in the area.  He once again welcomed our team and helped us to communicate with the community surrounding the church.

We quickly assessed the improved building and set up registration, pharmacy, area for doctors (Dr. Jay, recent Ugandan med school graduate Joseph, and nurse Katie from Nashville), and blood lab (located in a small back room that I think was a storage closet).  The people were anxious to receive treatment so we got to work.

 

We were able to give medical treatment to about 150 people (and 31 of them accepted Jesus as their Savior during spiritual care).  If we had more time, we could have seen many more.  But we needed to leave by 4:00 so Jim, Jessica, and I could make our flight home.  Before going to the airport, we had to go back to the guest house to shower and pack our bags, visit two young patients at a hospital where they were having surgery for burns, and have our farewell dinner with the Gregstons and Kyle.

We have loved our time in Uganda, serving the people in need and reuniting with friends.  We are so thankful that God lead us to Uganda and to the Gregston family.  Our lives have been forever changed.

In February of 2012, I made a promise to my oldest daughter Jessica.  My intent was to fulfill that promise before we left Uganda in July of 2012.  To my shame, I failed.  On Monday, I finally made good, as I accompanied her (and Joline and the Gregstons) to work.

About five years ago, my son Joshua had surgery on his ear to remove some scar tissue that had accumulated from prior surgeries.  Due to a genetic anomaly (must have been from my wife’s side), the upper wall of Joshua’s ear canal was missing a patch of bone.  This hole exposed a small portion of the sack holding his brain fluid to the surgeon’s tool that was scraping the inside of his ear canal (behind the ear drum).  As a consequence, the sack was punctured and Joshua started leaking brain fluid through his ear.  This negative development landed Joshua in pediatric intensive care for a few very tense days.

Along with the rest of the family, Jessica, who was about thirteen at the time, spent lots of time in the hospital with her little brother.  She watched the pediatric nurses do their thing with such grace and professionalism that she developed a secret desire to become one of them when she grew up.

But there was one small problem.  Her aversion to needles dwarfed my aversion to heights, and that is saying something.

I clearly remember accompanying her to an appointment to have her blood drawn at around that time.  Jessica was so irrationally afraid of the appointment that Joline exercised her prerogative to send me with Jessica, rather than accompanying her herself.  Jessica cried most of the way to the appointment, and shrieked in excruciating pain when the nurse . . . swabbed her arm before inserting the needle.

“Um, Jessica?  That was a soft rub with cotton.  You think that hurt, just wait for the fat needle coming your direction.  You need to quit your crying . . . or I’ll give you something to cry about.”  I was quite adept at compassion in those days.

After a while, Jessica gave up on her dream of being a pediatric nurse because she couldn’t fathom the idea of interacting with needles – on either the giving or receiving end.

Fast forward to February of 2012.

Joline and the kids were planning to work with Sixty Feet in a juvenile remand home during the six months we were here in Uganda, but fate (providence) intervened.  God closed the door on that opportunity and opened another one.  We had met our Twin Family (the Gregstons) the prior month, who were also going to be in Uganda for the same six months we were there.  They graciously invited Joline and the kids to join them on their mobile medical clinics.

At the end of the first week, a Ugandan doctor declared that Jessica and Jake Gregston (both 16 at the time) would need to learn to draw and test blood for HIV and Malaria.  Jessica’s feeble protests were ignored.  To everyone’s surprise – especially her own – she faced her deepest fears and conquered them.  She credits God for giving her the momentary courage it took to pick up the needle the first time and just go with it.

Given my past interactions with Jessica and needles, I was quite stunned to learn of her leap of faith.  I was also quite concerned to hear she was interacting with infected blood, which required my own leap of faith not to object.  This opportunity she was given to get involved in providing medical care to children in need reawakened her long-suppressed dream of being a pediatric nurse.  She absolutely thrived in the pharmacy and blood lab in these daily clinics.  She was so proud of herself and wanted to show her daddy how far she had come.

This all brings me to the promise I made.

After a few weeks in the clinic, Jessica asked me if I would be able to accompany her and the Gregstons on a medical clinic one day before we left Uganda in 2012.  “Of course, I will,” I promised.  But my work was also busy, so I pushed it off until the last week.  I was all scheduled to go, but then the clinic was cancelled due to something beyond anyone’s control.

Anyone who has broken a promise to a child knows how crappy it feels, especially for something as important to the child as this was to Jessica.  She really wanted to show me what she and the others did all day while I was working with the courts.

Yesterday was spent on Redemption Island in the middle of Lake Victoria.

OK, it was actually wasn’t called Redemption Island.  In fact, it wasn’t even an island, but a peninsula.  But we did take a boat there and it did provide me much needed redemption.

The morning started out with a boat launch from Fish Central in Gaba.  I hate fish.  I hate the taste of fish, the smell of fish, and the sight of fish.  Stomach acid migrates northward even when I type the word.  In fact, my iPhone has an app that changes the word “fish” to “chicken” whenever I type it.

While we waited at the launching point, fish odor washed over me like making me vomit was its job.  I held breakfast down, though, but not without some effort at pretending that the fish were simply water chickens.  I knew it was a bad sign when the captain of S.S. Rickety Spit was bailing water as we stepped into the boat.  His 30 hp motor coughed and sputtered as it tried to push forward the 30-foot wooden craft that appeared to have been fastened together with bailing wire and duct tape during the Amin regime.  At least we had life jackets for the thirty-minute putter across the murky waves.  Oh wait.  No life jackets.

Fortunately, we made it across without incident, though my back filed a motion for reconsideration when I was told that the ride back would be much choppier.

The patient queue grew at the sight of the arrival of eight mzungus carrying plastic trunks.  The Royal “We” set up the clinic near the shore in a church that made the boat look spanking new and a work of fine craftsmanship.  I watched and tried not to get in the way as a registration “desk,” a pharmacy, an examination “room,” and a blood lab were established.  Within a few minutes, I reached my highest and best use as I planted myself next to Joline at the registration desk.  One of the three Ugandan nurses joining us for the clinic was the first intake person.  She spoke to the patients in their local language and wrote down their name, age, and gender (not always immediately obvious with kids, given the nearly uniformly shaved heads and failure to observe gender-specific clothing rules) on a registration sheet the patients would carry with them as they moved from station to station.  She then handed this form to Joline, who entered the vital information in the log book and then handed it back to the patient after I finished my highly important jobs.  My jobs were to weigh and de-worm them.

Little known fact – those who don’t speak your language will be able to understand you if you speak slowly and loudly, at least that is what I read on the internet and it sounded good to me.  So I accomplished my first task by pointing to the scale and saying, “P-L-E-A-S-E  S-T-A-N-D  H-E-R-E.”  It must have worked because it only took a few words in Luganda from the nurse for them to confirm they understood what I meant the first time, because after she spoke to them, they dutifully stepped on the scale.  For the babies, I used my superhuman subtraction skills to figure out that if the mother weighed 77 kilos with the baby, and 70 kilos without the baby, the baby must weigh 7 kilos.  It is a good thing they brought me to the clinic that day because they would have been flummoxed without me running the weighing station.

I accomplished my de-worming duties without even wearing gloves.  Fearlessly, I reached in deep (sometimes with my entire hand), felt around until I pinched what I was after between my thumb and middle finger (I usually couldn’t get the kind of grasp I needed using my index finger), and then tugged.  Most of the time, it came out whole.  A few times I only got half.  And a few times I had to physically break in half what I had removed myself.  With a smile, I handed the de-worming pill I had retrieved from the jug-sized pill bottle and handed it to the patient.   “Gaya,” I said, which I was told means “chew.”  Those six and older got a full pill, and those between one and three got a half.

After mastering the art of weighing and de-worming (it took me less than an hour to get this down), I decided to share my considerable talents with the pharmaceutical team, which was being co-run by Jessica and Jake.  Dr. Gregston and Dr. Joseph (Ugandan) were seeing patients and then practicing the lost art of writing ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on the patients’ registration forms.  Jessica and Jake acted as the interpreters as they and two other Americans on the team filled the prescriptions.

After a few minutes of watching, I jumped in.  After a few minutes of counting pills, I realized I had missed my calling by going into law.  Counting pills is actually fun, especially when you get to use the pill-counting tray and a little spatula to divide them into piles of five.

“I need thirty Amoxicillin,” came the call.

5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 – “Here they are,” I would say.  And I was pretty “stat” about getting them counted.  I could have done that all day.

But my reverie was rudely interrupted by a sick lady in her late thirties whom the doctors feared might be HIV positive.  I followed Jessica and Jake over to the make-shift “blood lab,” which consisted of a bench near the church doorway so the outside light could shine in.

“Shouldn’t I glove up, also?” I asked as they put on rubber gloves and prepared the needle and testing strip.  Their annoyed stares wordlessly answered my question.

I couldn’t help myself from delivering repeated warnings to Jessica to “be careful” and “watch the needle – it has a sharp point” as she effortlessly found a good vein in her crook of the nervous patient’s elbow, cleaned the insertion area, inserted the needle, withdrew the blood, and squeezed a bit onto the test strip Jake had prepared.

My kids inherited my lack of musical talent, so this was our version of me being the proud papa at a piano recital.

“How long does it take before we know the results?” I asked as I shined my phone’s flash light on the test strip inside the dark church.

“About ten minutes,” Jake responded.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“A single line in the first area would be a positive test, which would be a negative result.”

“Got it.  Let’s pray for a negative test and a positive result.”

I watched, and watched, and watched.  No line!  Jessica had the pleasure of informing the patient she had tested negatively.  The patient clapped with delight after the translator relayed the news.  Unfortunately, Jessica has had to deliver the opposite news to others along the way.

By the end of the day, just under 200 patients had been seen and treated.  This was just one day of six weeks this summer (and six months last year) for the Gregstons as they serve those in greatest need here.  You can follow along with their life-changing work at www.dueunto.com.  Less importantly, though still very important to me, I had a chance to spend the day with my daughter participating with her in what has become her chosen occupation.  Time will tell whether she pursues a medical degree or whether she focuses on the nursing she dreamt of doing so many years ago.

This wonderful day, however, ended rather like it started.  The restaurant where we ate served only fish and chips.  The literally had nothing else.  I ate a plate of chips and held my nose as the others ate what I kept telling myself was water chicken.

Still no Chief Justice, though the chatter is increasing about what will be done to resolve this mounting crisis.

We returned “home” to Gaba on Thursday night.  We had a couple of days off clinic to catch up.  Since Jim and I had missed our 23^rd wedding anniversary while I was on the road, we went on a long date on Friday.

On Saturday we took a trip to Jinja.  On the way we picked up our California friends, Beth and Kate Kirchner, who have been volunteering this summer with various organizations in Uganda.  They will continue helping in Uganda, then Zimbabwe before returning home.

At a coffee shop in Jinja we ran into Spencer Bogle (a former Pepperdine classmate of Jim’s younger brother Jerry).

Next we visited our old friend Franco the monkey at Katie Davis’s Saturday program.  We also enjoy visiting with Katie and her girls.

 We ended our day in Jinja with a visit to Ken and Pastor Henry.  The local children really enjoyed our visit and so did we.

 

On Sunday we visited with friends at Gaba Community Church, then picked up our friend Henry (who is in his second term of Secondary School) from his boarding school to go shopping and have lunch.  He needed a formal outfit for his end of the term leaving party.  It only took seven guys to help him pick out the perfect suit, tie, shirt, and shoes.

We then met the Gregstons at the Garden City Mall for lunch.  We were happy that John Niemeyer (who knew Henry from Restore Leadership Academy) could also join us for lunch.

After lunch, Henry went back to school and we joined the Gregstons on a visit to Mulago Hospital, where a little boy named Jamil (who they have been helping) is recovering from eye surgery.  On the way home, we stopped by the National Theater Craft Market to do a little shopping.  Back at the guest house we visited with Shakib (another little boy the Gregstons have been helping) and his family.  If you want more updates on Jamil and Shakib, please visit the Gregstons’ blog at www.dueunto.blogspot.com.

This is our final week in Uganda.  We will have mobile medical clinics in Bethany Village on Monday, Konge on Tuesday, and Namuwongo on Wednesday.  Then we will leave for Los Angeles on Wednesday evening.  It’s hard to believe our time is almost up.  But we are looking forward to seeing Joshua and Jennifer again!

On Wednesday, I had my first Kamp’ing’ experience in Uganda and did not like it at all.  I loved camping as a kid.  As an adult?  Not so much.  There is something about being the one responsible for setting up the tent that sours the entire experience.

For the past three and a half years, I have devoted significant efforts in Uganda to expedite the time it takes to get to trial for juveniles confined to remand homes in advance of trial.  Many of those who plead guilty or who are convicted after a trial are released because they have already been confined in the remand home for longer than the sentence they receive.  But those who are given sentences longer than the time already served are sent to the National Rehabilitation Centre (British spelling intended).  This Centre is commonly referred to as Kampiringisa.  (See how I cleverly apostrophized the word to make it Kamp’ing’??)

For about two years, I have been intending to visit Kampiringisa with Sixty Feet, who sends a team out there every Monday and Wednesday, but the timing never seemed to work.  Well, it worked on Wednesday.  With the Pepperdine team safely back in Los Angeles, and with Joline and Jessica still on the road here in Uganda, I finally had a chance to join the Sixty Feet folks for a visit.

It was as bad as I had heard.  Not only are there more than thirty juveniles serving sentences there, but there are also about eighty other kids there on “care and protection” orders.  “Care and protection” means they are there not as prisoners, but as homeless kids.  Some of them are there because their parents don’t want to look after them anymore, or because they were causing trouble at home.  But most of them are from the Karamojong tribe, and they have arrived at Kampiringisa after being rounded up by the local governmental authority when they periodically clear the streets of begging children.  Most (perhaps all) of these kids are on the streets begging as a result of being sent or sold by their parents to work as part of group of beggars for an adult handler.

The Karamojong (or K-jongs as they are called) are considered by the other Ugandan tribes as the lowly outcasts of society.  Indigenous Ugandans can easily distinguish them from the others and routinely single them out for mistreatment.  It is quite sad.  The same is true at Kampiringisa.  The other children don’t interact with them, and the local government authority won’t let Sixty Feet provide mattresses for them to sleep on, so they sleep on the concrete floor.  When food is served, they are served separately and last.  They are the most malnourished among the inhabitants of Kampiringisa.  Sixty Feet takes active steps to counter this, including relocating many of them to another location (with express, written approval) to be nourished back to health.

All of this I had been told in advance of my arrival.  When we arrived, Kelsey (lead Sixty Feet intern) gave me a tour of the property.  Sobering doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Whenever new inmates arrive, they are put into a cell for about two weeks in order to break their spirits.  There is no bed and no toilet facility, only a plastic can in the corner of this eight-by-ten box.  They are not let out at all during this two-week period.  From there, the prisoners are transferred to the “black room” where they stay about thirty days, until they are adjudged sufficiently docile to be able to roam the premises.  In the padlocked black room, there are about twenty beds, toilet facilities (a hole in the ground), a television, and a place to bathe.

Situated throughout the rest of the property are a smattering of buildings, some of which are used for administration and sleeping, and some of which are abandoned.  The children mill around all day.  Some play soccer with plastic bags tied up with string, some cook posho and beans over large pots, and others just sit and stare into nothingness.  The K-jongs stay together in small groups.

After the tour, Kelsey and I joined the others in the medical clinic they set up each Monday and Wednesday.  Any kid who is sick or injured gets treated by the combined American and Ugandan nursing staff.  For close to an hour, I held a very small girl with an ear infection.  She weighed less than ten pounds, but was between eighteen months and two years old.  She was badly malnourished and the nursing staff feared she had AIDS.  She didn’t even have the strength to cry (or wince) when they pricked her finger and tested her blood.  We held our collective breaths as we awaited the results.  Negative.  Thank God.

Her ear was oozing puss, so the Ugandan nurse twisted some cotton and thoroughly cleaned it out.  The devil’s-tailpipe smell of what came out raised the bile in my stomach to dangerously high altitudes.  I barely kept it down.  She didn’t even whimper.  Later, Sixty Feet requested and received permission to move her and older brother to another location where they can be nursed back to health.

From the medical clinic area, Kelsey and I returned to the black room and played cards with the kids for about an hour.  Everyone in Uganda, it seems, plays the same card game, which is a variation on Crazy Eights.

I left there more convinced than when I came that something needs to be done about Kampiringisa, and it needs to be done quickly.  At the very least, those serving sentences for crimes (such as defilement of children) should not be allowed to roam around young kids brought there for “care and protection.”  Perhaps that will be one of my next projects . . .

Thursday was a day of meetings, including one with Regent Professor David Velloney and Uganda Christian University Professor Brian Dennison.  They are jointly running a summer program at UCU that has ten students, six of whom are from Regent, two are from Trinity, and one each from Florida State and Southwestern Law Schools, respectively.  We all had lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and talked about Pepperdine’s efforts to advance the rule of law here in Uganda.

I also had a chance to catch up with the lawyer who served as local counsel for my oral argument on behalf of Henry in March.  Third-hand hearsay suggests that we might be getting a ruling by the end of July.

Joline and Jessica arrive back in Kampala tonight, so it will be good to finally be with them for the first time in nearly two weeks.

The team took Monday to catch its collective breath after running at full throttle for the prior ten days.  The group that returned Sunday night from gorilla trekking on Saturday bubbled over when they described how cool the rare experience was of spending an hour hanging out with the mountain gorillas.  The eight in our group who trekked had been broken into two groups and tracked two gorillas packs, one of which caught more than a glimpse of energetic efforts to enlarge the herd.  Yikes.

While the rest of the Pepperdine team in Kampala (not including the students, as they returned to work for the judges on Monday) slept, exercised, and explored in the morning, I met with a couple judges about the status of our projects and about their thoughts on the newly rolled out Sentencing Guidelines.

We reconvened for lunch with five of my favorite Ugandans at an excellent Chinese restaurant.  Each of these five judges has worked closely with Pepperdine teams over the last few years, so it was fitting for us to thank and honor them, while at the same time introducing them to the team who came out on this trip.

After lunch we spent about an hour with Justice Mukasa, the head of the Criminal Division of the High Court.  As we were waiting for the meeting to begin outside his office, I was caught breaking the law, breaking the law.

We talked about the Sentencing Guidelines, plea bargaining, the upcoming juvenile session – July 15^th for 29 kids awaiting trial, and strategies for increasing the efficiency of the criminal justice system.  I was heartened to learn that one of the primary recommendations in my July 2012 report has come to fruition – a committee of internal stake-holders has been appointed to oversee the statutory implementation of plea bargaining in the adult realm.  The Principal Judge is chairing this blue ribbon committee.

Also during this meeting, Judge Doyle and Professor Chase continued their discussions from lunch about what role they might play in the future in Uganda, both in person and from abroad.

As we were getting ready for dinner, I decided to pull the car around.  My streak of accident-free driving came an abrupt end as a scraped another car as I backed out.  I asked the hotel guard to track the owner of the other car.  A few minutes later, he came out to inspect the damage.  After he surveyed the damage, he named his price and I paid it – 30,000 Uganda Shillings (about $12).

We dined with four of the Sixty Feet team.  Our dinner companions were Kelsey (lead intern who has been here for two years), Aaron (recently arrived intern who joined our team in Fort Portal and is now seriously considering attending Pepperdine this fall), Abby (legal intern with whom I worked last summer and who is working closely with David and me on all things J-FASTER), and Ambassador Edith Ssempala (former Ugandan Ambassador to the United States who serves on Sixty Feet’s Ugandan board).

I love introducing people I know and love to each other, and a good time was had by all.

Tuesday was leaving day for the Pepperdine team, so we had only one official meeting before I took them souvenir shopping.  We met the Principal Judge, who is the head of the High Court.  We had productive and promising discussions about the new Sentencing Guidelines, the Plea Bargaining committee he is chairing, and the new rollout of mediation (for the first time) in the Civil Division of the High Court.  They have had mediation in the Commercial Division for the past four years, since Pepperdine Nootbaar Fellow John Napier was the country’s first.

It was exciting to plan for new points of collaboration between Pepperdine and the Ugandan Judiciary.  Our relationship continues to expand and we are eager to continue to seek to be helpful to them.

Joline and Jessica are still on the road – they return to Kampala on Thursday evening, where we will all remain until the following Wednesday.

Tomorrow promises to be another interesting day as I join Sixty Feet for my first visit to the Rehabilitation Centre, which is where children who are convicted serve out the remaining time, if any, of their sentences.