Hello Everyone,
I hope you are not getting sick of hearing from me! I am just so excited about my experiences here that I love to share.... First of all, thank you for your emails and updates from home. I love to know what everyone is doing there. Well, I have completed two whole weeks here... The days are so long, yet the weeks are flying by. I am going to give you a little recap of my last few days.
I believe I already mentioned earlier this week the eye camps we helped to facilitate... That was absolutely amazing and so wonderful to see people recieve care they were so much in need of. It cost $1,000 only to have about 330 eye exams ,18 cataract surgeries and over 150 glasses were handed out.
Then Thursday was quite an outrageous experience... I am not sure if that is the greatest word choice, but let me in the best way possible describe our day. We are working with and a women's group here called CCWA that helps with AIDS outreach and sponsoring orphan children to go to school. We had invited 6 primary schools and 2 secondary schools to a Soccer tournament, during the soccer tournament we would be doing trainings with parents (if the children had them), teachers, students... Well, we were trying to just invite portion of the schools to have a total of 240, but instead we had over 1,200 students. But, we adjusted and succeeded. The trainings were awesome, the food was amazing, and people were recpetive. We also, played a soccer game CCWA vs. Muzungus (white people) you would have thought it was the world cup... People were cheering and yelling and we won! Exciting! It was a fantastic day... I taped the children cheering they were wonderful.
Friday, was probably the hardest day I have had here... We coordinated/organized an dental camp for a school that had over 900 orphan children that had never visited a dentist before. We brought down dentists from Kampala that donated services and we provided all the supplies. These children had never seen a dentist before and many had rotten teeth. I helped all day in the room where the children were walling/screaming because they were so hurt and scared. They had rotten teeth and they could not just give them a filling, so they had to extract their teeth and sometimes it was more than just one... It was overwhelming. But, It was preventative medicine!
Anyhow, things are so good... Hard yet, good! Funny story, yesterday we were at this school where the head mistress made this huge lunch... I mean huge heaping amounts of Ugandan food... It was the hardest thing to eat the posho, matoki, meat (not sure, I think it was goat) I wasn't eating fast enough and she told me get eating it was very scary... I didn't want to insult them.. So I pretended to eat without gagging it up!
Last, amazing event... Last night we attended a goat roasting/ bonfire at a local elementary school... There is nothing like dancing Ugandan children singing and clapping.. It was so wonderul. I have never smiled so much in my life... it did make me extremely nervous hoping that students were not going to fall in the fire. But, the dancing and singing was so special.
Well, I need to go... I love you all so very much... Thank you for all your prayers and love and support! I hope to hear from you soon! I am excited to go to church tomorrow... I hope mom, dad, and Rachel had fun at camp. I can't wait to hear about it... I hope Rebecca and family are having fun. And kids swim lots and make sure there is a lifeguard. Love you so much!
Love,
Jen
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