What a year?!

On June 10^th 2012, I arrived in Nsumba village, Ntenjeru Sub-County, Uganda to work as an intern with the Ugandan based CBO, Volset Foundation. My life changed that summer. I changed emotionally, mentally, and spiritually; but the most meaningful change came with the establishment of my 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Future Diplomats Education Centre Foundation. My mom and I created this foundation to serve the ever-growing needs of the orphaned and vulnerable children at Future Diplomats Education Centre Primary School. Our first goal was to bring a dormitory to the FDEC school campus.

This June, I had the extraordinary opportunity to revisit my Volset family and step inside the nearly completed dormitory. Every few days since that trip, I have reviewed the photos of the Future Diplomats and their future home. It just does not feel real. 

Before and After!

For those of you who followed my blog last summer, this is a photo of the same location I once helped bail out the flooded courtyard over this wall!After the flood, they dug a trench and pushed the wall back a couple feet. Then they built a dorm. :)

For now, the girls have moved from the small storeroom where they previously resided, into the girl’s section of the dorm. There are temporary windows, the walls still need a final coat of paint, and they desperately want more beds (to stop sleeping three to one mattress) but for now, they are thrilled to have a new home-however incomplete it may be!

Nearly finished girl's section

Unfinished boy's section

Upon seeing the girls move into their section of the dorm, the boys put up a very big fight! Their section lacks windows, plaster on the walls, and cement on the floors, so they were not able to move in yet. As a compromise, the Headmaster and Jjajja moved one of the classrooms into the soon-to-be boy’s section so the boys could move their beds to a bigger space until the dorm is completed.

As the end of another term draws nearer, I hope to provide enough donations to bring the boys “home” by the beginning of third term in September.

After seeing the project in person, I was able to re-evaluate our budget and identify how much more funding we need in order to finish. In the effort of transparency, I want to share with you, my friends, family, future, and past donors the remaining cost of the project. I have divided it into Three Phases.

Phase One:

$2,000 needed to complete the construction

Phase Two:

$1,500 needed to complete the furnishing (beds, sheets, & mosquito nets) 

Phase Three:

$1,500 needed to install solar power for the dormitory

In recent weeks, we have collected almost $1500 that will assist us in finishing the construction! When Phase One is complete, the boys will finally move into their section, and I will begin Phase Two to provide each child with his or her own bed, uniform sheets, and mosquito net. 

As Jjajja said in a Facebook post today, "Miracles aren't miracles unless they happen. So is the children's dormitory is a true miracle. Thanks to overseers and dream translators like Nankya. "

If you would like to help us finish this “miracle” project, we encourage you to be a dream translator and:

Mail a check made out to “FDEC Foundation” to

FDEC Foundation

PO Box 65141

Vancouver, WA 98663

Or

Click the Donate button below to make an online donation through PayPal

With love and many thanks for your support,

Nankya Kristen

Perspective.

We have been having power and water on at the same time for several days in a row! I mean, WOW! Can life get better than that??? Yeah, of course the majority of my readers are thinking, “Well, yes Kristen…it’s called living in America.” The land of endless power and water.

Even when we go for long stretches without water (e.g.: the first 3 months of my trip) I still don’t necessarily miss that part about home. Not having water puts things into perspective for me. It makes me feel like I’m no different than my Ugandan neighbors. I too must survive the same way as anybody else; using candles/lanterns at night and rationing my biked in water by day.  

The longer I spend here, the more I believe that there is a thin invisible wall between the good life and the hard life. It only takes a small life event for that wall to crack and come crashing down-- forcing a person to make the unfortunate transition from good n' easy to hard. In America, that wall cracks from job lay-offs, debilitating accidents, cancer, death of the family breadwinner, natural disasters, etc. …Here in Uganda, many people start life on the “other side” of that wall, without ever getting the opportunity to know what easy even looks like.

Despite how close some of us live to this invisible wall in America, we easily forget how good we have it. Not too long ago, I was living as a poor college student. I look back at those “hard times” and laugh at myself. I wish I hadn’t complained so much. I wish I had appreciated that even though the dead of winter meant we were cheap and refused to turn on the heat, at least my roommates and I had a clean and safe place to call home. I wish I had appreciated the fact that my constant stress was caused by the pressure of balancing college with a job and volunteer work; going to college was an opportunity not a right; having a job, as a woman at my age is not a universal right (or even possibility). I wish I had appreciated the stability of my family; my parents are still married and alive. Even when times were hard, I ate three meals a day—however often it was Top Ramon, coffee, or bagels.

I am not a wealthy person in America, but I do have a lot of wealth. Living here in the village is a constant reminder to that. The other day, I spoke with a Ugandan friend of mine about the difficulty she encounters as a single mother in Lukaya when trying to budget for her family. She makes a little less than $100 USD a month. Our organization helps pay for housing and covers a fair amount of health costs, but even with that in mind, it is not a lot of money. It is more than fair for Uganda—but there are still many things that cost about the same in the US which seem cheap to me and outrageous to locals.

For example, soda costs 2500 shillings, or roughly $1.00—about the same as at home. Whenever I am out running errands in the village with coworkers, I offer to buy us sodas; they usually respond with, “Aye, Kristen! It is expensive, you don’t have to!” At first my knee-jerk response was, “Are you kidding!? That’s nothing!” Then I finally realized one day that to a person who makes 200,000 a month, 2500 on one lousy non-nutrient rich beverage is an irresponsible way to throw away money. Before the water came back, everyone in the village was paying 500 shillings for the “water-men” to bicycle in a jerry can of water to their doorstep (myself included). My next-door neighbor heads a household of six people, they use about 4-5 jerry cans a day for cooking, cleaning, washing, and drinking…that is 2000-2500 shillings a day. Why on earth would he waste the same amount on a Coke? 

Sometimes these “real life” things take a little while to hit me fully. As I said, not having water or electricity on a regular basis helps remind me of where I am and of the permanent conditions of living for the people around me. Most importantly, these things remind me to appreciate my ability to go home to the land of endless power and water. I get to flash my passport and walk back through that invisible wall in August, leaving my Ugandan friends and neighbors to continue with their lives in the land that requires a lot of sweat, blood, and (occasionally) tears just to carry on towards tomorrow.

Sacrificing Dan-time, ice cream, high-speed internet, delivery pizza, reliable water and power, Girl Scout Cookies, drinkable pre-treated water, fudge, friend-time, my favorite TV shows, eating out, air conditioning, chocolate cake, Target, Thai food, driving my car, Netflix, and spending holidays/special occasions with family for six months seems downright trivial. Lest I ever forget what this side of the wall feels like.

 

With love,

Kristen

Hakuna matata, mpola mpola

I think I officially made progress. 

It is amazing to me that I can work this hard every day and still not feel like I’m pushing forward! Three and a half months later, I can finally see the ball rolling! Thank goodness it is rolling in the direction I want.

This realization came to me this week when I finally made definitive plans to implement an herbal supplementation program that I finished developing about two months ago. When I had the meeting to discuss the implementation, every member was on time for the first time my whole experience in Uganda! Technically, the general manager was late, but he is ironically usually the only other person on time with me, so I let this one time slide. This gives me great hope for the program! Although, the actual implementation isn’t set to take place until Tuesday, so who knows if it is really a victory yet!

I also noticed the ball is rolling in my favor after my meeting with the Mustard Seed Health Team this week. Our first big school-wide project will be a performance to teach the rest of the school about the herbal supplement tea they will (hopefully) be taking in the coming weeks. I had given the kids about 20 minutes at the end of the lesson last week to start writing either a song or a poem to share with the school. As soon as I separated them into groups by preference of performance style, one teacher went to work with the song group, and the other went to work with the poetry group…I didn’t even ask them to! Then after about ten minutes, the poetry group had two nearly completed poems and the song group was starting to practice their wonderful song. By the end of the twenty minutes, the poems were getting polished and the song was being perfected. Since I had a prior commitment during our usual Saturday lesson, I assigned the Health Team to work on their products to be presented to me the following Thursday. Sure enough, at the beginning of Thursday’s lesson, the song group sang and drummed in perfect harmony and the poetry group rehearsed without looking at their notes. 

Pride is too small a word to cover this feeling. If the kids did that much in 20 minutes, I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeves when I give them several weeks for the other health topics!

As they say in Luganda, Mpola mpola…Slowly slowly. I’m beginning to love and appreciate that phrase!  

Also, Hakuna Matata…No problem/no worries in Kswahili; an incredibly relevant phrase that Ugandans don’t use, but it has been running through my head ever since my trip to Mombasa when I heard it actually spoken in a sentence (as opposed to by an animated singing warthog and meerkat).

Despite the mixed languages, I often say to myself, “Hakuna matata, mpola mpola” whenever I get frustrated with the lack of progress in my programs. I need to remember to keep doing what I do and the pieces will fall in place when they are good and ready…even if that often means moving at the pace of a 180 year old Giant Tortoise . 

With love,

Kristen

PS Thank you to everyone who has donated to the dormitory construction in the last two weeks! We are getting so close! Like us on Facebook, Future Diplomats Education Centre Foundation, if you would like more information on how to make a donation!