Just Another Day In Paradise

This morning I woke up and went to Nsambia. Today is Tommy’s last day in Uganda and he wanted to go to Nsambia and he needed at least 8 people that wanted to go before the ministry would let him use a van. I sacrificed my love of Sanyu to go there for the day, especially since I hadn’t seen it yet.

Nsambia lets you play with and hold the kids more than at Sanyu, so we started off the morning playing with the little kids. After playing for a little while I went to the ICU. There were 2 babies in there. One was a little 5 month old girl who had HIV and some terrible wounds that weren’t healing. She just cried and cried and cried the entire morning until Amy came in a little while later and held her. It broke my heart.

The other little baby is why I went in there. Diana had told me about a 10 month old baby named Scholastica who couldn’t yet sit up and seemed a lot like Francis. Unfortunately, she wasn’t. I couldn’t ever really figure out what was wrong with the little girl. She cried a really painful sounding cry, constantly had tremors, and had really tight muscles whenever she was upset or moved. It almost seemed like she was having mini seizures every 30 minutes or so. I had Jessie and Amy come look at her as well but there wasn’t anything we could come up with. The nurses also didn’t speak enough English to tell us anything about her. I finally just sang to her and held her to comfort her because there wasn’t anything I could do for her.

We played with the kids for a little while before we left and then we came back home. While we were waiting for lunch to get ready, Brett and a new boy named Heath and I went to the market to exchange money and get a snack. I also tried to get some first aid stuff for my foot. I found out that first aid stuff doesn’t really exist in Uganda.

After lunch we had a planning meeting and song practice and then I spent some time working on my paper. Jessie also did some work on my foot. She drained it, and squeezed it, and pulled out some of the infection with tweezers. It hurt, but not as much as I expected it to. The infection is much deeper than I thought. I probably have a pit about a 1/4th of an inch deep in my foot. We also marked the red area with a pen. If the redness spreads any, or if any of the green comes back, I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow. Jessie says that if worst comes to worse, the doctor will cut out the infection and stitch up the hole it makes. I’m not a big fan of this idea, so your prayers would be appreciated.

After having pancakes for dinner, Kevin, Tommy, Jen, Diana, and I went to take Tommy to the airport to go home. It was a good ride. We finally called the “Get Magic” number we have seen on signs around town. As it turns out, its a rip off. How surprising. It was, however, really sad to see Tommy go.

Once we got back I worked on my paper. I’m still not anywhere close to be done, but I am much closer than I was yesterday!

Being a good student,
Jenna