A love affair with AfricaLeslie Banner — Mississauga, ON In his book, Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis describes his “love affair with Africa.” After six distributions for Sleeping Children Around the World in Uganda, I completely understand his sentiments. Uganda pulls me back to its intoxicating juxtapositions and I am hopeful it is on the cusp of moving beyond the pain of crushing poverty and disease. With the support of our OVO, the twenty-five strong women of the Inner Wheel of Kampala, there is a ray of hope for children and women. They have made a commitment to better the lives of everyone they touch with deeds like supporting a mother with seven children left destitute, raising funds to purchase a bicycle ambulance to ferry women in labour in isolated communities to simple outpost clinics, paying school fees for orphaned children so they might have a brighter future, or, indeed, reaching out to remote villages and the most needy children of Uganda with this year's Sleeping Children distribution of 6,000 bedkits. 
They ventured to villages where few of them had ever been, making countless trips to meet with the village leaders to ensure that the children who would receive the bedkits were truly the most desperate in these small communities. Many of the children are orphans being raised by grandparents or guardians. In two of the villages we heard unbelievable stories about people posing as “charitable organizations” who had promised gifts and support for the children in return for sums of money. However, once that money was gathered and paid, no benefits were ever received. The understandable initial skepticism of some of the members of the community gave way to cheers of delight as the caregivers saw the children with their bedkits. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve … You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” The Inner Wheel of Kampala take the role of “service above self” seriously and when they are notified that a bedkit distribution has been approved for Uganda, they plan for a great part of each year to carefully find the most appropriate articles for the bedkit at the best prices and decide on the distribution sites in a meticulous manner. To travel on the bus with them is a time of great happiness. Singing as we bump along over unending kilometers of bad roads, ending up on paths leading to a small enclave of huts in an area seemingly at what might seem the ends of the earth. In his book, The Spyglass, Richard Evans tells of a king who learns to “see through a spyglass with the eye of faith so that he can see that which is not, but can be.” That is what I felt as the plane lifted off from Entebbe after this sixth distribution. Looking at a Uganda with the history that has brought it to this point in time; with its incredibly fertile soil where fruit and vegetables grow in abundance; with its painful disclosure of HIV/AIDS early to the world; with its need to educate and employ the large numbers of orphaned children; it would be easy to see only the huge task that is theirs. With the help of the women of the Inner Wheel and the support of Sleeping Children Around the World, the lives of 6,000 children and their families were changed forever as hope for the future was given because someone cared enough. |
