February 12th Update – An Epic Adoption Story

Well, we’ve spent Tuesday through today in Busia. Some has change, but much has remained the same. The gas station in front of The Cool Palace was just having its foundation dug when I was here in 2007, and now it is doing business. The church has begun a school and has 320 students enrolled. Most of them cannot afford school fees. I got tours of a fish farm, the new orphanage building, the tree, pineapple, and coffee farms, and of course the school.

On Thursday I went with Lucas, Francis, and Kelvin to a village deep into the Bugiri District in the village of Bukatu to do some fundraising. It was a long trip over some pretty difficult terrain (about five hours round trip). We had a worship service first and then went into a fundraising effort where goods like eggs, casaba, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, detergent, soap and maize were brought as offerings. These offerings were then auctioned off to the highest bidder. A Ugandan auction requires the whole congregation to participate. Instead of hearing the auctioneer call, “Going once, going twice…” he repeats the bid in concert with the congregation and on the third repeat if someone calls out a higher bid then it begins all over again. There was a lot of showmanship and storytelling that went into each item in order to coax people into bidding.

As the auctioned carried on I went outside to be with the children eventually coaxing them to sing some songs thanks to Samuel’s leadership. He’s the one with the soda on the far right. He’ll be hard to spot, but the Mzungu should be easy. I tried to win some friends by sharing a Cliff bar, and belive it or not I was able to split it in about fifty parts. Lunch was Mzungu rice (the most expensive because it is stone free), chicken, broth, bread and a coke. I found myself even more appreciative of Lucas’ work here.

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The next real time update…