This morning as we woke in Soroti, it really felt like our trip was coming to an end. The long drive to Kampala felt like the beginning of the long trip home. Bobby by this time had been gathering great footage for days and days. So he and I spent some time in the lawn of the Soroti home this morning talking through the places we had been and catching some more footage of me highlighting the different places we had been.
Our first stop on the way out of Soroti was the Widows' Hospice that TCON operates. We were able to sit with about 20 widows dying from HIV, cancer, and other conditions. We held their hands. We spoke in English and they spoke in their tribal languages. Beyond that, there was much that I didn't understand. I don't have a concept of what it must be like to lay waiting to die. One lady was holding my hand and talking up a storm. I didn't understand what she was saying but, looking into her eyes, I was seeing that she was in pain but had the joy of salvation. At one point in her story, she said, 'Jesu.' Then she leaned into me, buried her head in my chest, and rocked back and forth saying 'Jesu, Jesu, Jesu' again and again. Another woman there made a lasting impression on me. From her chin to her nose and up one side of her face, cancer had eaten away her flesh. She was on morphine, but it looked like an intensely painful condition. In her hand was a small yellow plastic mirror, like what a little girl would use to play dress-up. She kept looking at herself in the mirror.
On the drive south from Soroti to Mbale, we stopped in a small town in the district of Bukedea. There we picked up Christine, who works with TCON and the Tesso Widows Development Iniatitive. She herself is a widow and the mother of five, one of which who died as a child. Her husband died of the virus. We heard her story and of the great restoration that God is bringing to her and her life as she stays healthy and gives herself to the down-and-out. She took us to a very remote village. We were driving our ATB (all-terrain bus) on what looked like walking paths. We were going to visit a Child-Headed Household (CHH). William, age 18, was taking care of his 5 younger siblings. His mother died when he was 13 and his father had died a couple years earlier. In our days in Uganda together, we had seen some very challenging things. Abject poverty. The effects of HIV/AIDS. Malnutrition. Infants and widows in hospice. But the spiritual and emotional weight of William's story and the desperate, blank stares of his sisters made a profound impact on our team. They were lost, alone, hungry, uneducated, hopeless. But in partnership, HopeChest can care holistically and long-term for William and his siblings in Bukedea. In this district there are twenty-seven children in 6 child-headed households. Through sponsorship, mission trips, prayer, and letters, an American church, business, or online community can be sure that these children are educated, fed, discipled, mentored, secure, and prepared for adult life. Email me at daniel@hopechest.org if you or your community would want to get involved in the work in Jinja, Bugiri, and Soroti - sponsoring orphanages, Care Points, and child-headed households.
We continued our drive to Kampala, stopping in Mbale, a major city in eastern Uganda, for lunch. Then we arrived late in Kampala, checked into Hotel Africana and met for a team meeting.
Pastor Jon from Westwood Church led us in devotions and communion and then we shared some impressions from the trip and what the coming weeks, months, and years would be like for us now that we had looked into the eyes of so many orphaned and poor children. This part of the Vision Trip is always so special, so provocative, so compelling, so humbling.
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