All Good Things Come to an End

Well I’m sad to say that we left Kibaale on Monday, November 16. I haven’t really talked about what I did for the rest of the week so I’ll fill you in briefly.
Wednesday was a full day! We went with Shannon and Jamie on two more home visits. Dennis was one of the houses we visited and it broke my heart to hear that their family had no food and both the parents and one of the five children are HIV positive. The father is too weak to work and therefore cannot earn money to buy food. We also visited another home but this one was different from the other ones we have visited. It is a child headed household and in this specific situation the mother had 8 children and took off with 3 of them one morning. The parents always fought and some nights it was so bad that the children slept outside. It’s so sad but the good news is that Kibaale steps in and helps a portion of these households by providing them with food, education and medical access.

But I think the ultimate highlight of Wednesday was going on the clinic outreach! With my interest in paediatrics, I jumped at the opportunity to go with the Kibaale clinic to a rural village and see them give baby immunizations. I was so excited! We went with some of the nurses into little village where there was women everywhere arriving with their new babies. Each baby got weighed and then received two shots and one oral medication. It was the craziest thing just to see the nurses set up in the middle of nowhere outside giving all these babies their shots. Although we weren’t able to help much, we were able to hold some of the babies – and OH MY GOODNESS it was hard for me to give them back. We were there for a few hours and everyone left with immunized and healthy babies! It was so great!







The next few days were pretty low key. We played with the kids at recess and lunch and also visited with some of the secondary students. I was so happy when Ivan and his mom showed up on Friday to visit me to say thank you for my sponsorship. They even brought a bag of bananas for me, which was so sweet.



Oh and I have a funny story about Saturday night. Well, it’s funny now but it wasn’t funny at the time. It was late Saturday night and we just finished watching a movie in our room (Erin, Megan and I have our own little building with our own room and bathroom). Megan was in the bathroom when she came like bolting out and jumped right into the bed. She said she heard noises and heard a tap on the bathroom window. The three of us freaked out and jumped into the big bed. To calm ourselves down we watched an episode of “The Office”, pausing it occasionally when we thought we heard a noise. We all ended up sleeping in one bed and it was the worst sleep of my life! It was so hot and uncomfortable but we were all too scared to sleep by ourselves. We barely slept because we kept hearing banging and strange noises and of course being the only ones in the building we didn’t want to fall asleep. The next morning we were all exhausted and when we went next door to the next room, we discovered that a bird had somehow got into that room and had been in there the entire night. Yes – that was the thing making all the noises that kept us up all night! Needless to say we were SOOO tired at church the next morning!

Sunday, we attended church and then visited a few more houses for our friends in Canada. They wanted us to visit and take pictures, so we were able to do that. We also made it our goal to climb Kibaale Hill once before we left, and we decided Sunday would be the day. It was so hot when we started to climb I thought we were going to die. But as soon as we got to the top it just started to pour and pour. There was a beautiful rainbow but we got completely drenched and we looked like complete idiots trying to make it down the slippery and muddy hill. But it was so much fun and something we can definitely laugh about!






Now, we are in Kampala (one of the main cities in Uganda) and we’re staying at a guest house for a few days. We’ll probably be relaxing most of the time, and visiting markets and seeing around town. Today we went to the mall and it was the weirdest thing to see other white people! And I was a happy camper because I finally was able to eat an apple! That’s something I’m looking forward to when I get home. Anyways, we leave early on Thursday morning for South Africa so I will talk to you then! Oh and one more thing - I tried to upload some pictures but it takes forever, hopefully I can upload some more soon.