Leaving for Adjumani - Take Two

I feel badly to be blogging literally right after Dax updated, so be sure you scroll down to read Dax's update about Tenderfeet!

Tomorrow morning we (Edwin, Christine, Jeremy, Lexie, Robina, and I) will leave on Zawadi bus for Adjumani. We booked the tickets Saturday afternoon, and found out Sunday morning that there are reports of a Zawadi bus stuck in a pileup of buses that are trapped in the mud between Gulu and Adjumani. Of course we knew that this was a possibility, but we're praying, fervently, that we get through on the first try. We heard that there are people spending up to two nights on the road. Please pray with us. We're leaving at 6:30AM (aka 7:30PM Pacific Coast Time) and will probably be reaching the trouble spots around 2:00PM (or 3:00AM Pacific Coast Time). So when you get up on Monday morning, pray for us! We might be in mud up to our knees!

However, to recap the past several days:
We did the standard things that always have to be done, like applying for and retrieving Sudanese visas, changing money, riding the first boda-bodas, etc, but we also got to do the fun things, like play with balloons or beads or our tattoos and arm hair (both of which are fascinating to the little kids). We've had prayers and worship a couple of times, and watched a couple of movies with the kids on their nights off from school. Jeremy and Lexie taught one girl to play the card game "Go Fish", and have been stalked by cries of "Can we play?" ever since. Lexie has been pleasantly surprised that the children enjoy playing with her, as her experience in the States has been that of children running away in terror, apparently. Jeremy has been using his skills as an artist to copy his tattoos onto the children in ball point pen.

Today was a big day for us, as we visited a Sudanese fellowship this morning for church. Afterward we traveled to the music studio of our friend Emmanuel Lasu, where we got to hear some of his music and Jeremy recorded a little ten or twenty second instrumental piece on Lasu's keyboard. We bought sodas and crisps (aka pop and chips), and chatted for a while before returning to Mama Susan's home for lunch and packing for tomorrow.

Jeremy, Lexie, and I got the opportunity this afternoon to sit with Mama Susan and hear stories about the children in Kampala House and Amazing Grace Orphanage. Those stories were tragic and sobering at the same time that they gave us hope and encouragement. Laced throughout stories of disease, war, suicide, murder, abandonment, and divorce were threads of beauty, hope, and very much love.

For instance, I love this story. When Mama Susan and many other Sudanese were living in refugee camps because of the civil war raging in Southern Sudan, she was walking one day and heard a baby crying. She and her friend found a small girl crawling around in the bush beside the road, hungry and weak. Mama's friend told her that the girl was the niece of a widow nearby who had eight children of her own, and spent the entire day in the bush gathering firewood to sell. Mama Susan's heart went out to this child, and began searching for a place for Konga to live. Eventually it became clear to her that there was no place for the Sudanese orphans to be cared for, and she made the decision to sell the jewelry and gold bangles that her deceased husband had given her in order to purchase a piece of land to start a home for these orphans. The first one admitted to Amazing Grace Orphanage was that first small girl who captured Mama Susan's heart, a girl called Konga Robina, now a strikingly beautiful thirteen year old, and whose education is now sponsored by a friend in New Mexico rather than Mama Susan's gold bangles.