Our Neighbors

Every day, we drive about 20-40 minutes to work (depending on the “jams” as they call it here in Africa).  This is actually one of my favorite (and the scariest, which I’ll write about later…) parts of the day as we get a chance drive through the neighborhoods of Kampala.  “Neighborhoods” here are what most Americans would consider slums.  I have been told we will be taken to visit the actual slums sometime in the next month.

As we take this drive, we see families with multiple generations living in a one room shack.  Mothers carrying their goods to sell for the day on their heads with a babies tied to their backs.  Children lying asleep in the streets (some, I pray that Watoto social workers find and send to a children’s village because they have been abandoned or abused).  I realize that some of the babies I care for likely come from these neighborhoods.   I take this time to pray for these families that we pass, not because I feel they need prayer anymore than the people in my neighborhoods at home (in a lot of ways, Africans seem a lot happier than many Americans), but because I feel it is the way I can best serve them.  I pray for their health, I pray that they would come to know Jesus that they may not know poverty and sickness when they come to glory.

I realize that I am truly experiencing the realities of a 3^rd world country.  Although I have been on mission trips to many countries in South America, I have never encountered poverty like I have here in Kampala.