My life this week (well, some of it...)

(Note: I wrote this blog on Thursday, but due to extensive computer problems, was unable to post it until now, saturday night).

Yesterday I was working at Joy, doing daily rounds with Jan and Dinah, one of the nurses, when I realized that the bed that had been occupied by Geoffrey the entire time I’ve been at Joy (the 18 year old boy with bone cancer that had progressed into his lungs) was now occupied by an older woman. I asked her what happened to Geoffrey, already knowing the answer. Death is all around you here; everyone has lost a close family members, it’s a part of life. Dinah told me that Geoffrey died on Saturday night. He asked for his Father and his Aunt to come see him, and told them that it was his time him to go home and to let him go because he was going to see his Father. A little while later, he died peacefully.

Today I spent the day at CRO: Child Restoration Outreach, which is an NGO (non government organization) that works with the street children in Mbale. Joshua, a guy I met while at the conference in Jinja, has spent the last two months volunteering with CRO, so he invited me to come and visit them. In the morning, we walked through the town looking for street kids and we collected 8, which is more then they normally do—usually it’s closer to 3 or 4. There are other street children in Mbale but they are not interested in coming because they want to stay where they can possibly find some work and earn a little bit of money, or because they are not interested in getting off the street.

We brought the 8 kids back to the CRO building where they were fed breakfast. Then, we interviewed the new children we had collected that day. The first little boy was 13, although he looked much younger, I would have guessed 8. He had left home 6 years earlier because his stepmother was abusing him and had told him he had to leave to find a job and pay for his own school fees. He ended up in Mbale staying with his cousin, finding odd jobs where he could to earn a little bit of money. His cousin sells Chapatis (an African flat bread similar to a pita but fried) on the street to make money and buys food for him but does not make enough for school fees or clothes for him. He told us that he wants to go to school and become a doctor so he can help people. Following the interview, Peter, the CRO worker who had interviewed the boy with me, told me that they would most likely enroll the boy in their rehabilitation program, where street children spend a year, and following successful completion of the program, CRO pays for the school fees and uniforms for the children all the way through university, if the child desires to go that far.
At lunch time, all the CRO children who were in school came to the office for lunch and devotions. There were about 150 children all together, it was so neat to see how many lives are being changed through this program—all of these children would have no future if it was not for CRO working with them.