We just arrived home from visiting Maital and Adam in Uganda. I have to say that this trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, to Uganda, was an amazing trip. I would recommend for everyone to visit Uganda. The people we met were warm, generous, and appreciative of our visit. It was very eye-opening to see such an underdeveloped country. Once you leave the larger towns most people live in mud walled, thatch roofed huts, without electricity or running water. Bathrooms are outhouses behind the house; having a bathroom in the house is an idea foreign to most of the population. All water, even in town, must be boiled before drinking so we only used bottle water. As Maital wrote in her entry we quickly learned that patience is a necessary quality in Africa. Not only can meals take an hour or more to arrive at the table most everything happens slowly or with a logic westerners find hard to comprehend.
The first few days we spent in the town of Mbale visiting with the people Maital works with at the Bushikori Christian Center. We visited the primary school and the clinic that BCC runs. BCC has a small compound outside of town where the school and clinic are located. I was very impressed by the wonderful staff. The teachers and the administration are wonderful people who have dedicated their lives to the care and education of some of the most vulnerable children in the society. BCC provides not only an education for underprivileged children but also is dedicated to working with their families in many supportive ways. Many of these children are orphaned and live in families headed by older siblings or cousins because the parents have succumbed to the Aids epidemic (which Uganda currently has better control of than some other African countries). Since the summer of 2005, when Maital spent the summer working at Bushikori Christian Center (BCC), we have supported a young girl so she can attend school and sent money to support the family of siblings and cousins she lives with headed by a wonderfully, responsible young 25 year old man named Paul. Sponsoring a child’s education only costs $250 a year. Please contact me if you are willing to help BCC by sponsoring a child or help Maital and BCC build a library for the community.
BCC also runs an onsite clinic being administered by a terrific young Kenyan doctor, Levert. The clinic is a bare bones operation that provides vital care not only for the children of BCC but the doctor also provides care for the larger geographic area around Mbale. He provides vaccinations, health instruction, pre-natal and obstetrics services for many people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to these services We spent several pleasant dinners and evenings with Levert.
We spent Shabbat with the Abuyadaya. This is a Ugandan community that began following Judaism about 100 years ago. You can read more about their history by following the links on this blog. They have just set up a new guest house where we stayed. Adam is working hard at helping to organizethe guest house. Our Shabbat with the Abuyadaya was another experience. Our guide, Samson, took us on Friday morning to a local market day where we negotiated on a goat. Yes we purchased a goat at the request of our 17 year son, Ronen, so we could watch the shochet of the Abuyadayah do a kosher slaughtering of the goat, another expert skinned it, another expert cut out the tendon in the back legs (a kosher requirement) and another person cut up the meat for cooking. All this was done outside, involving hanging the goat from a tree, after it was ritually killed. I’ll spare you more of the details but we have pictures of the whole thing.
How can I describe sitting in the village’s synagogue on Friday night and again on Saturday participating in services. Here we were in Africa davoning with a Jewish minyan. We sat at dinner on Friday night and at lunch on Shabbat day with one of the elders of the tribe who told us about the history of the community and many of the current projects; several young girls came by to join us in Zmirot, singing after we ate. The community has their own Jewish primary and high school. It was a heart warming feeling to see this small community struggling to learn what Judaism is, exploring Judaism and committed to teaching their children to be Jews.
For the next three days of our trip we traveled across the country to visit Uganda’s largest national park. It was all and more than we expected, something out of the movie, African Queen. We did a game drive where we saw many varieties of antelope, warthogs, monkeys, water buffalo, elephants, giraffe, jackals and even lions. We took a boat on the Nile River to see the second most powerful water fall in the world, Murchison Falls. We also saw hippos, crocodiles and a lot of other game along the river. This was a beautiful ending to a fantastic trip. We not only have many, many pictures of our time in Uganda but we have a greater appreciation and deeper understanding of what sub-Saharan Africa is and what Maital and Adam are working hard to accomplish there.
