Saturday started with a leisurely breakfast at 8am. Neither of our hosts showed up to pick us up- at first. Joseph our driver from East Uganda brought us to Watoto Church where we picked up Roger who then accompanied us to the Watoto Baby house, the Bulrushes. It is a beautiful facility, surrounded by gardens, with a bright courtyard and rooms all around that couryard where many bunk cribs are lined up. There were many high chairs and saucers and jumping seats lined up, toys, medical supplies, bottles- it was quiet the sight.
The Bulrushes houses all Watoto babies that are medically at risk, the premies, sick kids that might need immediate medical attention. (The hospital is right around the corner.) When babies become more stable, they are transfered to the baby house in Suubi village. The ratio of caretaker to baby is 1:4 and the nannies follow their babies until they leave the house, so the babies can bond with one person until they are transfered. All the babies are on a strict feeding and napping schedule. One volunteer from New Zealand mentioned that the nannies stick to that schedule no matter what. There were a couple white girls volunteering at the house when we visited. They are there for different intervals from 4 weeks to several months.
Our team helped the nannies feed bottles to the babies, held them, played with them in the garden, fed the one year olds hard boiled egges and fresh fruit/vegetable juice. I helped the nanny put all the one year olds on potties after their snack. They just started to potty train them a week ago and some of them really did do their thing :). Immediately after putting a new diaper on them we led them to the sink where these little guys all washed their hands.
Watoto gets babies through different channels. Sometimes the police drops them off after finding abandoned babies on garbage piles, others are refered through social services. One of the premies we met was an abortion surviver. The mom tried to abort him at 6 months but he survived. Another baby that is being taken care of right now has a syndrom where his tongue and chin and ear are deformed. His name is Benjamine and he is being fed through his nose by a feeding tube. He had the most incredible eyes. It is heartbraking to see theser little ones struggeling to live but praise God for Watoto and their willingness to give these children a chance at life.
Many of the one year olds that I was helping with actually have family members that come by to visit them. There were twin girls whose mom died in childbirth and whose dad cannot take care of them. He comes to visit them often. There are babies whose moms after giving birth have a mental break down (sounded like post partum depression to me) and where put into a mental hospital to recover. The Watoto nannies take those babies to the hospital once a week so the moms can see them and hopefully after they recover take their child back and take care of it.
There was one toddler whose mom (now 17 year old) was actually working as a nanny at Watoto and taking care of her own and the other babies. She and her baby were referred to Watoto because the mom didn't know how to take care of her baby so she is being trained to be a good mom and works there now to support herself and her cute little girl. Quiet a few of the babies have HIV/Aids or were sick with fevers and colds.

After this rather emotional visit we went to have ice cream at the outskirt of the mall. The store was really more a bakery than an icecream shop and they had lemon and a little bit of pistaccio icecream. The lemon icecream wasn't bad, the pistaccio icecream was very green, had peanut pieces in it and didn't taste like anything in particular. Baskin Robins had real potential here :).
We then got back on the bus and proceeded to go to Suubi Village for our traditional lunch with the kids. We got split up into groups of four and all were hosted by houses in cluster 7. The houses in Suubi are arranged in circles, 70-79 is cluster 7. The house Brett, Brynn, Sherry and I were hosted at was led by house mom Mary. She is taking care of 8 boys age 8-13. The house moms have a kitchen that is approximately 6 x 6 feet. There is no fridge and they cook over a little over one foot high cast iron stove that is lined with clay (to hold the heat) which they fire up with charcoal. I don't know how they did it, but we had five or six different kind of warm dishes, rice, matoke (the staple food of starchy, green bananas that we see sold everywhere, steamed), a beef dish with a lot of bones, green beans cut into tiny pieces in a yummy sauce, plantanes, yams (here they are purple and very starchy as well), a great ground nut sauce that was also purple and served over the rice, in short a feast. Our sponsor child Ben ate with us and told us that on Sundays they'll have that kind of feast in the houses, but during the week the dinners are more simple.
The houses in Watoto get their fresh food delivered once a week (Mondays) and the charcoal (2 large bags) once a month. I don't think they have hot running water in the houses as I didn't see any hot water tanks. It was great to interact with the kids at the houses and chat with the house moms. The team had brought each house mom a cute shoulder bag that Avery had made filled with goodies for the kids.
After about 2.5 hours at the houses we had run out of time to spend more time at the Suubi baby house. We just went into the baby house to change into our church clothes and went back to down town Kampala to attend the Saturday evening service at Watoto church. It was a great, lively service, lots of great worship songs, most of which we knew as well and a great dance performance during offering. We then proceeded to very nice Chinese Restaurant around the corner from church and the Watoto Children's Pastor Dora and her husband hosted us there.
After returning home the team got ready to leave for their safari at 5 am.

Petra Johnson