Hospital visits

Monday, March 8th.  International Women's Day!  The banks even close for this!
Our verse today is 1 Peter 4:10-11

Today we were suppose to head out to another IDP camp but it is a Holiday here, so we changed our plans.  This IDP camp is pretty much disbanded but they can come back for special gatherings.  Watoto goes around to the villages and lets them know what's going on in the camp.

Carol, Pastor, Cindy G, Rene & Jerry went shopping for shoes for the House of Hope. There were some sizes we were missing. They brought the shoes and the gifts of the mamas.

The rest of us went to visit a couple of places that we were not planning on even going.  First we went to St. Jude's Children Home.  This is not a Watoto sponsored home but is similar to House of Hope or Suubi but bigger and not as nice.  It's 2 complexes as one. The second one is for disable children.  Between both houses there are 17-22 children per mama and there are 17 mama's.  We handed out bibles to the English speaking staff and beanie baby's to the children and foam stickers, which they tore in small pieces and stuck to their ears.  We only stayed for about 2 hours.  This was hard emotionally for a lot of us.  These children need so much and it was hard to leave.

We went to the Acholi for a picnic lunch. 

The next visit was to Gulu Regional Hospital to visit the children's ward and the maternity ward.  It is a public hospital.  When you go there - you should bring someone with you because they don't feed you, so there are people hanging out in the hall ways. Julie, Marrie, Cathy, Claudia and myself went to the maternity ward.  We asked if we could pray with them and we brought boiled eggs and a bar of soap for them and gave the extra soap to the head nurse - who's name was Florance and she was dressed in the white nurses outfit with the matching cap. Cute.  There was one women there in labor.  She was on a big metal table, with a black plastic bag on it and she was in the room by herself.  Family was in the hall and when I say hall - it's outside. 

Holly, Katie, Cindy P, Betsy, Karen, Virginia, Anne and Shay went to the Children's ward.  They visited 3 wards.  The 1st ward had mostly children of various ages with malaria and their mamas were with them.  Some were responding to the meds but there were others that were not.  Bracelets/necklaces that were made by Sophia Shad from 1st Baptist were given as well as beanie babies.  The group prayed with the children and also mama's had specific requests for their children.  The 2nd ward was the malnutrition ward.  There were more requests  from the mama's for their children. More gifts given.  The 3rd ward was mostly infants that mostly were crying.  Gifts and prayers were given to the mama's and baby's but when we tried to give the gift - the infants were afraid of us.

The power in the town is very unpredictable.  The hotel has a generator but some times that means nothing.  That also applies to the Internet.  So just in case ...our schedule for the next few days is.

Tuesday: head out to an IDP Camp and have a VBS sort for the children and also spend some time in discipleship with a group of about 100 adults that have gone thru the trauma program.  Answer questions etc..

Wednesday: Back out to the same IDP camp and do the second part of our programs.

Thursday thru Saturday:  Leave Acholi Inn at 5am for chimp tracking, Murchison Falls and head over to Jinga.  Not sure of internet access there.

Sunday: Church in Kampala and head for the airport - Going home.........


Notes: I would love to post more pics and I might do that Wednesday.  The internet takes so long to load when I have all the pics on.