Kampala to Gulu

Heading to Gulu

It has been a good day, but I would say that we are all exhausted. It is 8:30 pm , we just finished our debrief, and most everyone has headed up to their rooms. If I don’t blog now, I know that I probably won’t have another chance to do it until tomorrow night. The wifi is quite weak and I’m not sure that I will be able to post a blog until tomorrow evening.

We started the day by meeting at the lobby at 6:45 am to drop off our bags in the lobby and then go to breakfast. We left the hotel at 7:40 for the WVU main office about a 15 minute drive a way. We were some of the first to enter the chapel for devotions, but the room soon filled up. It was great to see Vincent who is in charge of spiritual development for WVU and who led worship. We sang a number of songs and then we were introduced. I was the quest preacher and preached about ½ hour (the amount of time that the speaker normally is expected to take).

After devotions I met the new director of WVU, Gilbert, and he welcomed our group to Uganda. That followed with a security briefing and an overview of some of their work. We headed out to pick up some box lunches and then headed north for Gulu. The trip took about 6 hours. The condition of the roads is pretty good the first half of the way, but the second half they are not in good condition. My own sense is that they have gotten worse over the course of the time that I have been coming to Uganda. I suspect that at least in part, this is a function of the large trucks that are using the road transporting goods from Sudan through Uganda whose destination is Kenya. The traffic increased significantly over the last several years. 

After arriving at the Bomah Hotel where we will be staying the next four nights, we immediately went to the market to buy goods of the families of the children that we are going to visit. We purchased rice, maize flour, salt, sugar, matches, onions, beans, cookies, cooking oil and bars of laundry soap. We returned to the Bomah Hotel where we met with the WVU staff from the Gulu Cluster. Freddie, Arthur, and Godfrey greeted us and shared dinner with us at the hotel restaurant.

Tomorrow morning we head to the Gulu Cluster office for devotions, and then we spend the day visiting our sponsored children, something that we are all excited about. Oh, and by the way, we dropped off all of the gifts for the children that members of the church sponsor at the Kampala office in the morning so that they can recorded properly and then delivered to the children.

I forgot to mention in my previous posts that Irene is the WVU staff person who arranged our itinerary and who is accompanying us on the trip. She is a wonderful guide and has done an excellent job. She did a great job negotiating prices for the things that we bought at the market.