Kisoro - Our Return

It’s been a busy 3 weeks back in England. The main ‘features’ were:

1. The ‘stag do’ for our eldest son, David. This included Malcolm’s first attempt at skiing, and he had the dubious honour of being the only person in the class to fail the first, beginners’ lesson – something to do with not doing a ‘ploughshare’. He doesn’t know if he will resit (although he insists he did some ‘resitting’ during the lesson.). He also managed to make up for this by achieving at least one strike whilst 10 pin bowling

2. The dedication of two of our grandsons at their Baptist Church in Cambridge


3. The wedding of David to Sarah.



Whilst in England we managed to stock up on a range of items, including a microwave oven, a laser printer and 6 cartridges, an electric drill and a jar of Branston’s pickle. We carried so much that we had to repack our bags at the airport and carry several items in our coat pockets as our luggage weighed too much!!

We returned to the relative warmth of Kisoro on Tuesday.

We also returned to a bit of a crisis at the Potters Village home for abandoned and vulnerable children. On the day before our flight 3 babies had been admitted. Joshua (one month old) could not be cared for by his mother due to her mental illness and his grandmother had been found drunk in the streets having left Joshua alone at night. Esther’s mother had died soon after giving birth, and the baby weighed just 1.4kg. Emmanuel had acquired AID’s at birth and was dieing from pneumonia. The hospital did not have the facilities to staff to help him and due to his weakness had not been possible to insert a canula to provide strong enough anti-biotics. Unfortunately he died on Wednesday in Irene’s arms.



For more details about the work of Potter's Village:

http://www.pottersvillage.org.uk/

We also returned to some of the same challenges we left. So far we have had one major power cut with no electricity for more than 24 hours. The shame is the more you rely on modern conveniences (e.g. microwave, laser printer, the Internet) the more you miss electricity.

The ‘sign’ this week is from Potter’s village, being part of a large mural painted by a previous volunteer on the wall of the building that will be the Medical Centre when funds allow.