I have been meaning to share.

Patrick and one of the kids at his house.

To catch you up:

We work occasionally with our friend Patrick who started a house for street children and abandon kids. Patrick who is 19 years old along with his friend William who are both former street children themselves started taking in kids when Patrick was just a boy himself. Now with 40 children in his house and many, many others still living on the streets. Patrick makes his way to Kisneyi slums twice a week to care for basic wounds and mentor some of the boys and chat with the young girls about life among, many other hardships they are faced with daily. The boys spend the days sleeping in piles of trash, sniffing glue to get high and fighting each other, mostly because they really have nothing better to do. The girls sleep through the daylight, traveling to Williams St. at night to make a few thousand shillings (nearly a dollar) by sleeping with a man or two. As casual as it sounds, it truly is their reality. None know if they have HIV and refuse to know their status. Life in the slum is a side of Africa very few see. A place few “Mzungu’s” (white wanderer) would wander.

As you walk through, you first try to make sense of it all. But you can’t, it doesn’t make any sense. Why should anyone have to live like this? Why should girls as young as 12 years old have to submit themselves to such things? Why should each day young children be forced to serve a death sentence? Why must they go hungry? Why must they be fatherless and motherless? Why does the world look at them as a generation that has no hope?

On some level I feel blessed to be strong enough and bold enough to take a stand against it, on the other I am angry that our world has let this happen. But as my emotions and thoughts run ramped in my mind I am reminded there is hope in the little things.

We were packing up for the day and a group of boys called us over to see one of the children that had a high fever and shared with us that he hadn’t moved in 3 days. They looked at Patrick and said, “Look at all of us standing here, we are all sick, we all need something, but this boy is going to die”. In an instant I was reminded why I am here. Not to say that “I got to do anything” but that I was able to be there today. As a witness to the very things we are wrongfully letting slip through the cracks. I was reminded in some way that now that I have seen I am responsible. We took the boy who was lying in a pile of burning trash to the closest clinic; bought him a juice and he received fever reducer and got a malaria test. He is now on a drip (an IV) and has the opportunity to live another day.

As we were about to leave I asked everyone if we could stop and pray. Patrick translated to Junior (the boy) in Luganda some of the hardest words I could have heard someone speak to anyone little lone a young boy hanging on to the last moments of his life. It was in that moment I realized that tomorrow isn’t promised and that my work here really is day by day. That neither I nor anyone else that comes here will be able to save anyone from the tragedy of this world. But that God will, that he has and he will continue to. That my work here begins new each day.

*photos courtesy of Tess Safty to learn more about Patrick and his organization

Raising Up Hope Uganda visit: www.raisinguphope.ning.com