Dirks fabulous adventures in Uganda: my return to Africa

It was pretty hot in my room but fortunately they had installed fans since my last visit, so it was bearable. I got up early in the morning, took a nice shower and made some notes about the topics we had discussed the night before. We then met for breakfast where we developed the most promising strategy for the meeting with the Bishop and the project coordinator of our orphanage project "Children's Home of Joy". The Bishop soon arrived with his staff and after he said a prayer we started the meeting. It was my turn to explain a few things about the purpose and the projects of our foundation Light for forgotten children. We wanted to make clear that it takes a lot of work to raise all the money needed to support our projects. We also wanted to make sure that they become aware of the fact that – over the year – more than 300 people were usually involved in our fundraising activities where our friends and families spend hundreds of hours of their spare time in order to make these projects possible. We then continued discussing all the topics that we had prepared that included organisational requirements, current and future investments and the children’s education. I think it was a good meeting, very constructive, even though we also had some tougher things to discuss. After struggling with our previous projects in Uganda, we feel quite confident to having found the right partner this time. I mean there will always be things arising from time to time, but we generally found ourselves in line with the Bishops picture of what this place ought to become. After another prayer the Bishop left with his staff. We discussed the meeting, had lunch and went back to our rooms for a siesta. After that we were going to visit the kids, yeah!

final preparation of the meeting with the bishop

I couldn’t wait to meet the children again and therefore was early prepared for our short travel. We soon took off by Boda. Even Claudia took one which I had never seen her doing before. It only took a few minutes to get to the "Children's Home of Joy". I became a bit nervous when I got to see one of the houses from afar. The drivers stopped at the roadside where they were paid their fare.

We headed towards the main house where I spotted a distant but well-known face. The place looked pretty tidy as they had slashed most of the fields where they used to grow cassava, maize and other stuff. As we approached the kids left their rooms to welcome us. It was so good to see all those familiar faces and to get to know the new staff and children. We started out with six that we had brought from our old project in November 2014. In the meantime we count responsible for 18 children. You couldn’t believe how relieved and happy I was when I realised that the children looked very healthy. Some of them were very sick, suffered from skin problems and malnutrition but they all seemed to be fine now.

We took a short tour and checked all the improvements to the site. It looked a lot more cosy compared to my last visit and it was pretty obvious what still needed to be done in the future. We then returned to the kids who had brought plenty of chairs to the veranda and waited for us. Stefan brought coloured pencils, felt pens and Swiss Toblerone chocolate which he handed to the kids. How fun it was to watch them suck the molten chocolate out of the wrapping! After they had finished the sweets they sang and danced for us which was very cute. Then Stefan showed them a movie that Ellen, who volunteered at the "Children's Home of Joy", made during her stay last year. The movie showed a typical day at the orphanage. The kids amused themselves very much as well as we did watching them watching the movie about them. After chatting, playing and taking lots of pictures we left the orphanage in the late afternoon. This time we decided to walk back to the hotel. We were shown a typical short-cut which took us even longer to reach our destination than it would have had we taken the main road. But anyway, it’s always very interesting to walk a bit off the track as we got to see how the local people lived their lives.

Back at the hotel we had supper, reviewed the day and previewed the next day’s program. We wanted to surprise the kids with an excursion to a swimming pool nearby. But now: Bedtime!

Boda ride to our orphanage "Children's Home of Joy"