I was suppose to stay up there until Friday but I was up the whole night Wednesday with a migrane, body aches, fever, and sore throat. Thursday I headed back to town and did a self examination of my throat and it was definitely full blown strep. The project directors wife called her friend who is a nurse and told me what I needed to get, so I went to the pharmacy and got the drugs. No prescription necessary. Huh, a month without writing and that is what I have to talk about. Well that only fills two of three categories I hope to cover with each blog posting. I can check off mind numbing and irrelevant. Now I just need something that is mildly offensive. Here it is- I can't stand it when people are rude to people in the service industry, as well as when mzungus(white people) are rude to Ugandans. So, I told a Canadian who was being rude to some Ugandan wait staff at a restaurant that I like to refer to her country as America's hat. She was not happy. Mission accomplished.Now on to some worthwhile happenings-
I have been reading 'Unveiling Islam' which is written by two former Muslim brothers who are now Christian. There are mosques all around Jinja, hence a lot of Muslims as well. Even the Mayor is Muslim. If there was ever a chance to speak with one of them, I wanted to know a little more about why they believe what they believe and I also wanted to be a little less ignorant. last Sunday before I became ill I went to the Jinja Hospital with some people from church and Jeremy(fellow intern) to pray for the patients. We went to the accident ward which was its own building. I wouldn't even know where to start to describe this place, but there is one room for the men and one room for the women. Each room has 10'x10' 'cubicles' that were separated by 4 foot high walls. Each cubicle had about 4 patients in it on a metal spring bed with an old mattress. Each patient had a few family members there, and some slept underneath the patient's bed. The hospital doesn't really provide food for the patients, so family members have to bring them food. If someone doesn't have family members there, the hospital will sometimes feed them. We actually went to a village after we left the hospital to look for the family of a young woman who was there alone. We smuggled in some food for her(if they found out mzungus brought her food they might stop feeding her completely because they think that she will be taken care of all the time.) Unfortunately we didn't find her family on that trip, but they eventually were found. The only staff member I saw in the hospital was a nurse who was as pleasant as a root canal, Lord bless her, because even though she had this hardened exterior, the fact that she was there helping these people without much other help or supplies was pretty incredible. To the hospitals credit, the stitches/burns/injuries and wound dressings all seemed
to be surprisingly clean(maybe to a nurse or a doctor it would be a different story.) A lot of the accidents were motorcycle accidents and most people were passengers when a car hit the motorcycle they were on. There was one boy there who's arm had been amputated for other reasons though. He actually had cancer in his arm. His family was with him, and they showed us pictures of the boy with his arm before it was amputated. In the photo he was wearing Muslim clothes, and I was wondering if they would let us pray for them. The people we were with did most of the talking just to make it easier to not have to translate everything. They asked the family if we could pray for the boy. The family was very nice and seemed grateful to have us pray for him. Someone in the group asked me if I would pray for him, so I said yes, put my hand on my shoulder, and closed my eyes. Even though they had no idea what I was praying for(but it was mostly for the boy to experience Jesus as well as his family) I hope they could feel the difference between praying to God, who desperately wants to have a relationship with all of us, including this family, than to the god that they have been praying to. We went to another 'cubicle' and prayed for another man who was Muslim. He was very friendly and his wife and baby daughter were there as well. He was in a mutatu(minivan sized bus they use here for public transportation) accident where he was the lone survivor. He had the number 318 written on the wall beside his bed because he has been in the hospital for 3 months and 18 days. He was talking about his chance at a second life. These two experiences helped develop a new heart in me for people of the Muslim faith. It was great to see how open they were to us(which is not a mandate in their teachings). It is also funny how I happened to personally meet people of the Muslim faith so soon after starting a book about how to talk with them, but all I did was pray with them.
