Processing - part 2...

Funny how the emotion of such a heavy experience can catch up to you at completely unexpected times... I'm doing my best to keep it together at work today and focus on the task at hand. So much to do! :\

Red Chilli Hostel

Red dirt, mosquito nets, great breakfasts, bohemian culture, goats, dogs, geckos in the showers and early wake up calls from a million exotic birds… That is the Red Chili. It was a good touch-down for the first couple of nights, in Kampala!

It didn’t start out so hot, though… 25 hours of air travel and an exciting drive through the city in the middle of the night will do more than prepare a group of 30-something travelers for sleep. It might just get them a little cranky. So it’s no surprise that our first thought was something like “You’ve got to be kidding me,” when we find out that they didn’t have enough rooms for us upon our arrival.

Suzy and Shawn were troopers but none-too-happy about taking a couple of beds in a dorm with a bunch of traveling girls already asleep in the room. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t take care of, though. They gave us another room in the morning, which Shawn shared with Joseph (more on him later). Suzy shacked up in Suzanne’s room on night two.

Among other things, I’ll remember the Red Chilli as the place I discovered Ugandan pancakes, our morning staple for the remainder of the week. I introduced them to our boys this morning. I think they will become a permanent part of our breakfast repertoire in the Carson house…

I’ll also remember Red Chilli as the place I first saw a Jack Fruit. I haven’t yet had one, but I’m told they taste like Pineapple, but not as sweet and with seeds. They look pretty funky on the tree – kind of like giant green knobby warts, often growing right near the trunk and larger branches…

Processing

After 30 hours of travel – from Entebbe to Heathrow to O’Hare and finally to SeaTac airport – we’re finally home from our week in Uganda. Already, I’ve been asked several times how it was, and I can’t for the life of me decide how to answer that question. “Great!” truthfully doesn’t even come close to describing “how it was.” Beautiful, horrifying, sad, productive, hard, exciting, frightening, hot, sticky, life-changing, too short, long enough, expanding, unsettling, exhilarating, shocking, encouraging, fulfilling, frustrating, touching, edifying… These would all be appropriate words to describe the experience.

Truth be told, I’m tired, and I have a lot of processing to do in the coming days/weeks/months. To experience so much in so short a time leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed. Like this picture of a Ugandan girl picking tiny stones out of a pile of rice, I need to sort through the last 10 days piece by piece until I can truly process all that there is to take away from the experience. And, even then, I have a feeling I’ll be discovering new ways it has changed me many times over in the future.

Stick with me, and I’ll share my experiences as I fill in the blanks, piece by piece, story by story, picture by picture…

The meaning of happiness

Question: Is it possible for a human to have a fullness of happiness when there are other human beings in the world who are suffering in unimaginable ways?

Answer: "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." (Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, 1986) You can achieve true happiness in this world, but not when you're acting out the opposite of love; not at the expense of empathy for the real suffering of God's children - no matter what form that suffering takes. It's counter to God's plan. Love, sacrifice, service, faith, empathy for others = charity = the pure love of Christ = true happiness.

Over the past year, I've read a few books on child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Northern Uganda. At first, I was satisfied to have opened my eyes to the tragedy that is a part of so many people's lives there. Then K and I became friends with a couple - Suzy and Shawn - that did more than read about it. They were doing something to make life better for these people. Suzy had already gone to Uganda twice to serve in orphanages and Internal Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, and was making plans to start up a non-profit aimed at sponsoring the education of orphaned children.

After spending an evening editing an executive summary document for her, everything changed for me. That small investment changed something within me, and I knew I could no longer sit on the sidelines doing nothing but read books and feel bad for these people. I knew I had to be a part of it in a significant way. And that's how life changes in an instant...

Now, I'm a member of the board of directors of African Promise Foundation. We buy products from widowed women, often with AIDS (this helps the women feed themselves and their families; right now it's necklaces and bracelets made out of beads crafted from recycled paper) and sell them for a profit back home in the States. We then feed that profit back into the widows' community to sponsor orphans' education and build a healthy, thriving community around them. It's a simple model - one we hope will ultimately be easily replicable in many communities. And one of my favorite parts about it is that the hero of the story is the women who make the necklaces. Through the wealth created by their own handiwork, their children and their communities will have a brighter present and future.

I'm so excited to be a part of this! This is world-changing work... One person, one community at a time. APF started because of a promise Suzy made to a man named Tiger in an IDP camp in Northern Uganda. I can't wait to one day (hopefully soon) go to Uganda, hold the children for myself and make my own promise to them to do what I can to rally people here who are so privileged to ease their suffering.

Bing "Northern Uganda" to learn more.