Street Kids, Slums, and Mud

"Papa, can you please kill that rooster?" That was my very weary, peace loving daughters first words to me the other morning. We had been listening to the ungodly honking of that f-ing bird for the last four hours...it was now six in the morning. It was already a very long day. ( I have full confidence that the college guys here have already planned a slow and torturous demise for that bird.)

The earth here is a beautiful red clay color that the locals make brick out of. It's a rich deep red that is really wonderful to see...awful to walk through if you live in the slums. These shanty homes are built on a hillside and when it rains it gouges deep troughs into the earth and through the front doors of the homes there. The crazy thing about the slums is it looks much like what you think a squatters village looks like, homes fabricated from anything you can find and of course some brick sided homes. Still people must pay to live here....crazy how at the very bottom there is still a profit to be made.

A couple of the college guys here befriended a lady whose house continued to wash away during the hard rains that come almost every afternoon. They decided to fund a new home in a better location to help her...that was great as long as they managed to pay off three of the "slum-lords" so that she could have their gift. If they did not pay the extortion price, the slum lords would take it out on our friend. It makes sense to me much more clearly why Jesus was such an advocate for the exploited. No one seems to give a shit...Is there actually a good reason why people live in such conditions? I sit on a stoop scraping sticky red mud from my shoes wondering what a smart bomb goes for these days?

on to the streets When they said we would be doing street kid ministry I thought yeah piece of cake...I grew up in Central LA, the hood's the hood right?

Wrong.

Our time started by watching a herd of cattle sitting in the dirt overlooking the new construction project going on in downtown Kampala..not the same hood.

A soccer ball gets tossed out and things are looking promising. Ghetto kids kicking a soccer ball around a dirt field...this is more like what I thought I'd see. Suddenly the promise of a game stops. Two big thug kids dressed in one piece mechanic outfits have claimed the ball. Our Ugandan friend Mugabe and Jeremy (an American on staff here) go over and negotiate the release of our hostage ball.

Lots of yelling, pointing, puffing of chests...I learn my first Lugandan cuss words....the game is back on.

Standing on the sidelines I notice a kid with a really bad wound on his hand. I looks like an old wound that just not ever healed. This little kid looks like he is eighty years old. He could trick or treat as King Tuts mummy and not dress up.

I begin to clean and dress his wound...he show me two more ever worse. He says he got struck by a motor car. As I work on him, a crowd forms...everyone has nasty cuts and sores...all want "plaster"-bandaids place on their hurts. The crowd starts pushing and shoving. Head down, I miss the moment our camera gets stolen out of Katie's bag. I miss when a group of these kids surround one of our girls and start telling her "I want to sex you." I miss when another of our girl leaders gets felt up. I didn't see when a kid grabs another camera and makes a run for it. I didn't see the crowd chase after him intend on killing him and taking the camera for themselves. I did see and treat the kid who got struck in the head by a thrown brick. I missed when we had to pay ten thousand shillings to get the camera back.

Oh did I mention that all the while I treated this mummy kid's hand, he was huffing gasoline from a rag. He never released it. I bet if I took you to the slums tonight, he would still be hold that green rag.

He will die holding that fucking rag.

peace,john