I will never be the same. I have aged more today than I have in the past 20 years preceding. Today I visited the Katanga slum outside Kampala. It is in all purposes of the word a big mess. I visited 4 different families in the slum. I sat in their houses, kissed their children, rubbed their feet, listened to their stories, and wiped away their tears. I came to Uganda for today. Each of the four families that I met with consisted of a widowed mother and her children. Their husbands died of AIDS, cancer, and war. Not one family had less than 5 children. Three out of four of the families had at least one family member with AIDS. I didn’t need UNICEF to get me those statistics. I could describe to you for pages about how horrible the conditions of this slum are but since pictures are worth a thousand words I’ll just let them do the talking.
The slum is smack dab in the middle of a swampland.
This beautiful woman has AIDS and probably won't live much longer in the conditions she is living in.
These girls put on clean clothes for the first time in their entire lives.
There is only ONE organization doing (minimal) work in this slum. Why is the church having parties with bounce houses and cotton candy machines when our brothers and sisters are living like this?
This breaks my heart and brings tears to my eyes. I was just saying today how bored I was while I was sitting in my air conditioned house in front of a tv with about 300 channels on it and eating a hamburger and a hotdog. What more could be wrong with that?
ReplyDeleteI can only pray that others see the horrific conditions that these people are living in and decide that it is time to make a change. I'm so glad you posted these pictures.