I arrived at 8:45 a.m. for the 9:30 a.m. announcement of the appellate decision in the Ribbens legal guardianship appeal.  They had been denied legal guardianship at the trial court over sweet little 20-month-old Nya not because they were not perfectly fit parents (they are), and not because Nya is not an abandoned child (she is), but because the trial court judge interpreted Ugandan law not to permit legal guardianship by non-Ugandans unless the would-be legal guardians also complied with the adoption laws.  The adoption laws require non-Ugandans to foster parent the child in Uganda for three years before an adoption can be granted.  Many trial court judges have been granting applicants legal guardianship to skirt the adoption laws, and so a split had developed among the courts.  Today, the court of appeals resolved that split.

At about 9:15 a.m., Sara and Nya arrived with a friend and we all waited together . . . until 11:10, when the Registrar called them in for their ruling.  The Registrar read the entire opinion – about twenty pages – as we hung on every word.  Ugandan appellate decisions are very thorough, and unlike those in the United States, they don’t reveal how they are ruling until the very end.  As a rule, Ugandans speak very softly, and the Registrar did not violate this rule.  We strained to hear as he read the opinion, which began by thoroughly summarizing the trial court opinion.  It then summarized in detail the arguments made by counsel during the oral argument.  Next, the opinion summarized all of the relevant principals of law.  It then turned its attention to the factual record, describing each of the exhibits, affidavits, and findings of the welfare officers in both Uganda and the United States with respect to the fitness of the parents and the eligibility of Nya under Ugandan law based upon her status as an abandon child.  Surely, we are getting the result next?  We leaned forward, strained to hear with our hearts pounding and heard very clearly . . . a description of the points of error alleged by the Ribbens’ lawyer.  C’mon dude, we are on page 18, give us a hint – did the Ribbens prevail or not?

“We declare Andy and Sara Ribbens to be the legal guardians of Nya with the full right to take her to the United States” (or words to that effect).  Tears.  Lots of them.  Nya slept through the entire thing.

The opinion was unanimous.  And not only did the Ribbens win, but another couple whose case had been consolidated with theirs also prevailed.  And not only did that couple win, but all other would-be adoptive parents in Uganda won.  The brush is now clear for legal guardianships in Uganda.  This case created the precedent necessary to open the doors of the orphanages in Uganda so that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of these orphans will finally have families.

It was such a blessing to be able to be there when Sara called Andy and told him through her tears, “She is ours, she is finally ours.”  I filmed the phone call, but will leave it to Sara to share it if she chooses to do so.

Hopefully, the visa process will run smoothly and the Ribbens family can be united in the United States within the next couple of weeks.

It was a good day.  Thanks for your prayers and well wishes.

To read Sara’s post from her blog today, click here.

As many of you know, I am involved to some degree in two appellate cases currently pending before the Ugandan Court of Appeals.  I have previously written about Henry’s case and that of Sara and Andy Ribbens.

With respect to the first case, Henry is a boy I first met during my initial visit to Uganda in January of 2010.  I have seen Henry each of my five prior visits to Uganda and we have grown rather attached to each other.  The appellate argument was originally supposed to take place in September, but was postponed to November, then to February, and now it appears that it will happen in April.

The reason for the postponements is that under the Ugandan Constitution, petitions related to national elections must take precedence over all other court work.  And since Uganda had its national elections in February of 2011, the appellate courts are now being hit with the appeals.  On the positive side of the ledger, I have been assured that my practising (that’s how they spell it here) certificate should be issued tomorrow, which will officially allow me to be appear in court on behalf of Henry.

With respect to the second case, my role has been rather limited – helping them get a hearing date and doing legal research and writing in advance of the oral argument.  I first met Sara and Andy in November when I was last here, and their story captured my heart and attention.  They have been here in Uganda for just under a year waiting for their family to be officially completed.  This past week, I was pleased to be able to introduce my family to Sara and their three kids when they came over for lunch (Andy had to fly home last week to resume work to support the family).  Sara and Andy have one biological son, one adopted Ugandan son, and one Ugandan daughter they are in the process of trying to adopt.  They were denied the adoption of the girl at the trial level and had the oral argument on their appeal in mid-December.

Earlier today, Sara received word that the decision in the appellate case will be announced on Thursday morning.  Please pray fervently for a positive ruling and for the strength and endurance to persevere if the ruling is adverse.  I will post an update on the ruling on Thursday.

At 10:00 p.m. on Friday the 27^th, our plane touched down in Entebbe.  We went through customs, looking for the person we were told to meet in the airport.  Finally, we found him and he helped up with our ten suitcases.  Exhausted, we were taken to a VIP lounge where we met Margaret.  She had visited Pepperdine a few months ago with some Ugandan Justices.  We were greeted warmly and shown to some cars.  Our luggage was put in a van, and we piled into a smaller car.  We then started the near two hour journey to Royal Suites Bugolobi.  The only words I can use to describe how I felt are ‘culture shock’.  Everything is so different in Uganda.  At night, the city is still lit up and full of music.  I don’t mean that people were using instruments; they were using radios and stereos.  It smelled like burning wood constantly, and there were some piles of burning garbage.  Though Uganda is nearly the opposite of America; for the first time, I am home.

It doesn’t take particularly good vision to see the undertaker’s gravedigger busily excavating a place for the American newspaper business in the graveyard of history next to the plots occupied by the payphone, the VCR, and the 8-track player.  Modern technological advances assure that change is the only thing constant in this world.  At least in most of this world.

Unfortunately, Uganda has proven quite resistant to “modern technological advances” in many ways.  For example, shortages of financial resources and training have prevented almost all Ugandan courts from having any form of contemporaneous recording of court proceedings.  The trial “transcript” consists solely of the judge’s handwritten summaries of the witnesses’ testimony.  The only not-so-modern-technological-advance in recent years came when one courthouse in America donated a small handful of cassette-tape recorders that are being used by a few judges in one division.

Because relatively few Ugandans have access to the internet, much less a smartphone with web access, Ugandans depend almost entirely on daily newspapers for their news.  And most Ugandans (at least the portion of the population that is literate) read the paper every day.  Monkey see, monkey do.  Trying to blend in, I, the monkey, have undertaken to read the paper every day here.  But this actually means reading two papers because there are two competing daily newspapers here, and one really needs to read both in order to get the whole picture.

The New Vision is the official government newspaper.  It is not simply pro-government, it is government.  The second is the Daily Monitor.  This paper is privately owned and produced and doesn’t pull many punches.  About half of the stories each day overlap as both seek to keep the readers informed of current events, but the editorials and investigative journalism stories are quite different.

Earlier this week, both papers ran similar stories about Uganda’s #1 world ranking.  Usually, it is good to be ranked number #1 in the world.  In fact, I posted previously about Uganda’s recent ranking as the #1 tourist destination in the world.  But in the World Health Organization’s recent ranking, (as in the kingdom of heaven), being last (rather than first) would have been much preferred.  Uganda’s 478 annual cases of malaria per 1,000 people place it at the very top of this world list.  While this doesn’t necessarily mean that exactly 47.8% of Ugandans contract malaria each year (some may get it more than once), it does mean that something just short of half of Ugandans do get it each year.  A few more alarming statistics: malaria is responsible for 40% of all visits to the doctor, 25% of all hospitalizations, and 14% of all hospital deaths in Uganda.  Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 Ugandan children die from malaria each year.

As most people who are reading this know, malaria is a parasite that is spread by mosquitos from person to another when they bite.  But only one certain type of mosquito (Anopheles) carries malaria, and that type of mosquito is active mostly at night.

This is why the Gates Foundation and many other charitable organizations have invested so much in mosquito nets under which people can sleep to avoid getting bitten.  This is also why the Gash family sleeps under mosquito nets.  The parasites enter the blood stream, travel to the liver, then reproduce and infect the red blood cells.

Malaria is a treatable disease when it is diagnosed and medications are administered within the first few days of the symptoms appearing.  Among the symptoms are anemia, bloody stools (yikes), chills, coma, convulsion, fever, vomiting, etc.  The disease manifests itself about 10-14 days after the bite.  If left untreated, the victims can look forward to brain infections, kidney failure, liver failure, respiratory failure, and ultimately a meeting with the Maker.  If properly treated with large doses of anti-malarials, the victim can feel better within two or three days.  While malaria has been basically eradicated in the United States, there are a still a number of people traveling to the United States each year who die from malaria because doctors assume that the patient simply has the flu.

Malaria can largely be avoided by taking regular small doses of anti-malarials in advance of contracting the parasite.  The Gashes are taking the daily kind (Doxycycline), which is an anti-biotic that is often used in the United States to help control acne in teenagers – a nice side benefit that makes me positively glow.  While taking Doxy for six months is pushing the recommended time limits because of the slight risk of liver damage from prolonged use, we are determined as a family not to add to the already world-leading cases of malaria in Uganda.

On brighter note, my computer has almost entirely completed its Lazarus-type resurrection and for that I am quite thankful to Pepperdine’s IT folks.  I also had a productive week of meetings and look forward to an even more full calendar this next week.  More on the specific juvenile justice work as things unfold.

The most exciting news of the week, however, is that our Twin Family arrived safely on Friday night and is now living in the apartment directly below us.

After a full day of running various magical retrieval-of-lost-computer-files programs on Wednesday in an attempt to retrieve all of my data files that had been accidentally deleted by his colleague, the Ugandan court IT wizard informed me that he had some good news and some bad news.  Some sayings are apparently universal.

The good news was that he had been able to get back all of the files.  Excellent.  I would have hugged him then and there had the “bad news” not been lurking in the background.  What could the bad news possibly be?

“Almost all of the files are corrupted.”

“Almost?  Which files are not corrupted?”

“The pictures.”

“While a picture is worth a thousand words, I need a different thousand words – the ones I typed into my data files.”  Blank stare.  Apparently not all sayings are universal.

He then asked me if Pepperdine’s IT guys had any software that could uncorrupt data files.  Beats me.  I didn’t even know data files could be “corrupted.”  So I called the Pepperdine IT guy.  He told me that he had a high degree of confidence that if my hard drive could be sent to a specialist in the United States, the files could be uncorrupted.  Hmm, good to know, but not exactly practical.  We then decided that it was time for Plan B.

Plan B was to endeavor to remotely retrieve the files through the outside-vendor-online-backup-system Pepperdine utilizes to see what could be extracted and how quickly.  With the Ugandan IT guy at my elbow on Thursday morning, we connected with this backup system and started fiddling with it.  And yes, the notion of the blind leading the visually impaired does come to mind.

Turns out that this should have been Plan A.  Even I was able to navigate it, and the Ugandan IT guy thought it was sliced bread.

Within a couple hours, I was able to retrieve the relatively small number of files that I needed immediately and was able to gain a high degree of confidence that the vast majority of the others were accessible.  Since the backup system backs up files periodically, I think I may have lost a few days’ worth of work, at most.  And since I was traveling during most of that time, I lost nothing that couldn’t be quickly replicated.

I am a happy dude.

So, why didn’t I retrieve all of my files from the backup system on Thursday?  Because I am a cheapskate and an idiot, which is what got me into this trouble in the first place.  A little background about the Ugandan internet.

The internet in Uganda is both difficult to come by and slow.  Unlike in the United States, most Ugandans don’t have computers.  This is true for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that most Ugandans don’t have electricity.  Consequently, wired networks are in short supply, and wireless networks are in shorter supply.  But everyone has cell phones (often two or three of them on different networks because calls within networks are cheaper), so the cell phone networks are broad-based, pretty reliable, and relatively fast.  As a result, internet sticks (USB devices that connect to the internet through the phone networks) are rapidly growing in popularity (with those who have computers) and are much faster than any other internet connection available.  This brings me to my cheapskatism and idiocy.

Since we have both wired and wireless internet access at the apartment, and since the court has a wired connection at the office, I was seriously considering not getting an internet stick in order to save some money.  If I just would have sucked it up and got “on the stick” right when I got here, then I never would have asked to connect to the court’s tortoise-speed wired system in the first place, and, thus, never would have handed my laptop off to the grim reaper of data files.  The monthly plans for the sticks come in various increments, with the all-you-can eat variety costing about $120 per month.  When all of this nonsense started, I broke down and got a stick, but again revealed my utter lack of intelligence by balking at the $120 price, opting instead for a $65 per month plan for 10GB of data per month.  I am such an idiot.

Today, when I finally got the ability to download my files, I discovered that I had 25GB of files.  So, in order to download them, it would cost me 2 ½ months’ worth of internet data and prevent me from using the stick for accessing the internet for other things.  Oh, and also, downloading 25GB of data files would likely take about a week of constant downloading.  So that is why I only downloaded the files I needed immediately.

All in all, I am quite relieved even though I learned a valuable lesson in being penny wise and shilling foolish.  Thanks for the many prayers and e-mails I have received wishing me luck with this.  Tomorrow I am finally getting to meet with several very important people relating to my work this next six months.