Mary, Mary and Kennedy...

On Saturday, Sarah, Helen, Catherine and I went to visit Mary in her boarding school. Mary has been one of the children who lived in Amecet and later in Amun. She finished her primary school and we received support to help her (and some others) to continue with her secondary school. She is in her first year and found it not so easy to adjust to the boarding school life, which is really tough. We tried to support her as much as we could, but she has to do most of the job herself. Every term, there is one visitation day, where the parents can visit their children. They are very strict with that, Mary can also not come and visit us. I asked the head of the school if I could take her out for lunch, and I got permission!! So we had a nice time at the restaurant, Mary enjoyed the spaghetti instead of the posho and brown beans they eat at the school. Mary is doing better and was happy to see us, we had a good visit together.

Sunday morning, an old lady with her grandchild stood at our veranda. The child was Mary, a girl of 10 years old, who has been in Amecet before. Mary is HIV + and has been sick with TB. She has been with us for quite a while. We brought her back to her mother, who was also on ARV medicines and we helped her with school fees. They came to tell us that the mother had passed away that night and the body was still laying on the veranda at the hospital, if we could please help them. Simon went with them to the hospital to get the body and he brought them to their home village where the mother was going to be buried. We talked about the possibility of having Mary back for a while, the mother had told the grandmother, to bring Mary to Amecet when she was dead. Now we are not really for that, but Simon said that he was touched when he saw her sitting next to the body of her mother. The other problem was that when they looked for the ARV medicines from Mary, everything was gone from the little hut they lived in, So we had to organise new medicines, so Mary came back with Simon and is now living in Amecet. She is happy, in spite of where she went trough. Today she went to school with the others.

Then today the police came to bring a little boy, we looked at him and recoginesed him, this is Kennedy! His mother is very young and has a mental problem, she threw him away before and got better and got her son back. Now she left him on his own in the Public Gardens in the centre of Soroti, talking to him that she was going to get a knife to kill him. Some ladies heard her talking and when she left him, one took the boy to the police and the other stayed to see what she would do. Kennedy was brought to us, because his mother is much worse then last year. Kennedy is sick, he has malaria, so we started to treat him. He likes to eat and to drink the juice, I think he will pick up fast. Today we said goodbye to Esther and to Peter, they both went back to their families. Both are doing very well now and it was good to give them back to their relatives. We will see them both back on our "come back" days.

Not a day is the same, we have some sick children Immaculet is again sick and loosing weight, then we have 3 children with malaria. So my days are never dull there is enough excitement!