Back to Ug

Back in Uganda, and am LOVING the chance. A few bumps along the road getting here, but all is well!

I met up with my coworker and good friend McCall in the London airport, and we got to run around town for a few hours with our 12 hour layover.  Then on the way over to Africa, I bit into a roll (yes, bread) and half of one of my molar teeth just… fell out. So weird.

We landed in the Nairobi airport, and due to a miscommunication, our local ride that was going to pick us up didn’t…. so we had to navigate our way to a hotel in the crazy bustling city with 5 huge suitcases in tow. I next found my way to a dentist’s office for a root canal! Yeah. Such a singular experience. It was a Christian dental clinic, so when the chair reclined back for the dentist to check my teeth, there was a poster plastered to the ceiling that said “I am with you always.” Between this and the 90’s Christian rock music (a fusion between Amy Grant and Air Supply- priceless), I was feeling good about life. We ended up staying in the home of this wonderful girl named Oprah, who is an LDS girl around our age that is now running an orphanage that we got to visit.

She also took us to this cool organization in Nairobi (Kazuri Beads) that employs over 300 impoverished women from the slums to make this gorgeous clay bead jewelry (got you one, mom!). I asked the man that was showing us around a bajillion questions and had some good take-home lessons to help us in running Musana Jewelry in Uganda. And I pet a cheetah.

Which contributed (though the Nairobi traffic was the main culprit) to us missing our flight to Uganda, resulting in some crazy large fees that I still don’t want to talk about. So pretty much, Nairobi rocked us over.

Being back in Lugazi, Uganda is a little piece of heaven. And I kind of mean that literally. I imagine heaven to be a place of the most joyous reunions with people we love. This time returning to Uganda, I have realized that perhaps beyond any of the work we do here, it is the personal relationships built that are the most important and impactful. It is actually pretty limited what "mzungus" (foreigners) can really affect long-term around here, but being able to connect with and work alongside and learn from local people (the real change-makers) is maybe why we come. I think foreigners often promise to return, but often (understandably) can’t. So that may contribute to these reunions being that much more sweet.

McCall and I got to spend our first day walking through the town with Pastor Francis, one of the most forward-thinking, genuine, pure-in-heart people I know. This man is radiant. We were hunting around town to find housing for the HELP team coming in a couple of weeks, but the best part was getting to chat and laugh with him. Within no time, he was asking and then counseling me in my dating life. We are that tight. This man has such a realistic vision for the progression of his community. I love asking him about his ideas. These range from turning garbage into fuel pellets, to empowering women in the home through teaching men about their societal role. His favorite book is “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and he shared with me some things he was personally working on to implement into his life from the book.

Wilson and Luta are dear dear friends around my age who have been managing Musana Jewelry. My first encounters with each of them included a lot of jumping and hugging and laughing with disbelief. Luta kept pinching me and saying “Is it really you? You are really back?!” These are guys that have not come from lives of privilege, but have been able to find ways of getting to college while also running projects to empower youth to serve within the community through an organization they founded "The Youth Outreach Mission."

Yesterday, Luta took me around to visit each of the 7 women employed by Musana Jewelry. I personally knew Eve, Florence, and Christine in 2009—so showing up at their door was such a treat. I’m not sure if heavenly reunions including screaming, but everything else was there. The other 4- Rosette, Betty, Susan, and Harriet- were hired on after I left, so I have only seen pictures and heard stories about them. Rosette was so cute, as she met me for the first time, she exclaimed “Melissa, I really love you!” and I replied that I had loved her for a long time without having met her. Harriet made some very touching comments about how her life has been affected since working for Musana. She is HIV+, and explained how it is near to impossible for her to get a job once people know her status. She was elected from among the women as the women's Representative of Musana, and is by far the hardest worker, and has done amazing with her new responsibilities to lead the women.

I visited the Musana ladies this morning as they were hard at work in the rented storage unit. These women are masters at the womanly skill of multi-tasking- rocking babies, chatting (in English! Many of them couldn’t speak English before they started with Musana, but have learned through our English classes), while creating gorgeous jewelry.

In fact, our new line of jewelry has recently been featured in a photo shoot with a French model. It resembles jewelry you would find for $200 at Anthropologie back home. And it is really unique in Uganda, so we are starting to scope out potential tourist and ex-pat hot-spots that we could sell it at here locally.

Many of my buddies are working on convincing me to stay forever. Maybe I will.