Oli Malungi Nyo

Today, Melissa (our country director who is 25 and the most enthusiastic, responsible, and amazing person in the world) and I have been drawing out plans for a project we are going to start here in Lugazi that focuses on the mentally and physically disabled. Here, if you have a disabled child, it is looked at as a curse or embarrassment. It's so sad! An amazing man here who is a Cobbler, has only one leg, uses a walking stick for support but is amazingly agile and fast, is on a soccer team, and who is very involved and concerned about helping the children with disablitites walked and showed us about 7 different children in huts throughout the village. In each one, when we went in and sat on little wooden chairs we had to wait a few minutes for the parent to go into the back room in the house where the child would stay and never leave the house. Each of the parents were so incredible and so happy for us to even talk to them. We will be visiting each child a few times a week helping with physical therapy, baths, speech pathology, teaching school, helping to make them food, etc. Some of their legs were literally the width of two of my fingers put together.

I also need to decide what other projects I want to create here and help implement in the community that can be sustained even when I leave in a few weeks. Melissa says that each volunteer who was here these last two months has focused on one of their deepest passions and has found a and use for it. Hmm...there's so much that is needed here, and so much that I'm passionate about, but I do need to put my focus on only a few to make them effective. As far as my little projects go, I am teaching our cook how to read and how to braid hair, I am teaching a few men from church how to play the piano, and I am still helping build other adobe stoves, mushroom houses, and chicken coops.

Now I'm off to meeting with the town council about a building for a soap business run by physically disabled parents... <3