On every trip to Uganda, we always include a day or two in Mukono. Mukono is a rural village about 40 minutes outside of Kampala where we built a school about 18 months ago. If you remember from our stories and videos, it was the “school without a school”. One of you paid to have the school/church built and many of you have helped them with food and school supplies. We also took our dentist friends there and ran a free clinic for the children and the community. On my last trip there in November, I took my friends, Paul and Mike, to Mukono where we had lots of fun handing out treats and doing magic tricks along with teaching about the deception of witchcraft which is extremely prevalent in Mukono.

 

We always look forward to going to Mukono because it is beautiful, lush and peaceful, a big contrast from where we usually spend our days, in the busy, crowded and dusty city.  I’ll never understand why people leave these spacious communities and move to the city where they inevitably end up on the streets or living in the slums. The locals tell us there is no future for them in these villages: no jobs, no money, and no life. But there is family land, crops and fruit trees and beauty. I wish they could really see what they have instead of a life in pursuit of things the MTV videos at the bars tell them they should want and have. They want the bling instead of the real thing, not much different than here is it?

 

On this trip, many of you made a big impact in Mukono. You paid for uniform T-shirts for the Mukono school which is so much more important to those kids and teachers than you could ever believe. You paid for lots of school supplies for Term 1, you bought all of their food for Term 1 and you gave 6 micro loans to the staff to help supplement the meagre incomes they receive from the parents of the students. We also saw the school toilets that were finally finished and met the replacement pigs we bought to help Pastor Charles, who runs the school, to support himself. The first pigs we bought him were poisoned by a jealous witch doctor. Will he poison them again? Maybe, but it’s become a game to me now. Can I afford to buy more pigs than the witch doctor can afford to buy poison? We’ll see, I have been told I’m stubborn but I like to call it perseverance. I’ll keep you updated on the “pig wars”. 

 

 We were able to identify several families living in dire housing conditions and began construction for many of them thanks to you guys! We previously gave out blankets and nets to the families of the kids in the Mukono school, next time we hope to be able to get them off of their cold, hard and dirty floors by providing them with mattresses.  

 

 Please click on the youtube link to see some video of Mukono.