A visit to the Namatala Slum

Monday we visited with one of our partners called Child of Hope in the Namatala Slums. You can only imagine what a "Slum" of a third world country is like. There is a school there that Help worked with last year called "Child of Hope." This school works with the local governments to find the poorest and most needy families to go. Child of Hope is an awesome organization that is based out of the UK that runs the school here. They are doing what they can, but the need in Namatala is obviously overwhelming. The average family size is 7, and they pick one child to go to school. They feed the child at school ( probably the only meal the child will get all day.) There are about 20,000 people living in these slums. It was an incredible experience to walk around this community. Very hard to describe. I asked a volunteer Ryan (extensive world traveler) if he had ever seen poorer people. He said no, because you can't survive on much less. I saw a family of 10 who lived in a hut smaller than the size of my room at home. The children had most likely never seen a white person before, so they would run out of the village yelling "Muzungu, Muzungu!" They were SO excited to see us. Most of the time we had 30 or more children following us. They wanted to hug us, and touch us, and they LOVED when we took pictures of them. They would want to see them as soon as we took them. They were facinated by the cameras, they had never seen them before. They would curtsey as they shook our hands, which our guide said was a sign of respect. I still don't understand where such love and admiration came from. We started curtseying to them. I didn't see a child with shoes on all day, and it was rare to see more than one piece of clothing on a child (underwear or shirt or pants). They were so beautiful and their eyes just melted your heart. When we came home from visiting the slums, there was almost a reverence that came over the volunteers. That experience did something to us. It was difficult to eat our dinner that night, knowing it was much more than those children would eat in a day. I said something like "If I ever complain about anything...ever.. please smack me. I have no right to complain about anything in my life." Coming back to our house was difficult to, knowing that our house by their standards would house 40 or so. I am excited to have the opportunity to work there.  There are a lot of projects that we can do we just need to develop them.  There are plenty of problems that have project possibilities:  water sanitation, prostitution, child abuse, abandonment by the fathers, etc.  I don't think there's one member of our team that doesn't want to return to Namatala and work to improve the conditions there.  The experience yesterday did something to all of us.  We sat in a circle at dinner last night pondering what we'd seen and feeling a reverence for these people. They are remarkable people and they deserve any help we can give.