We woke up again to a very quiet Guesthouse this Monday morning with the rest of the team on safari. Once we stepped out on the veranda things livened up considerably thanks to the concert of the many colorful birds here greeting the spectacular equatorial sunrise. After breakfast our host, the indefatible Rogers, showed up and whisked us away through traffic jams and over potholes to Watoto Church Central. We waited as always in the reception area as Rogers rousted the necessary people to meet with, Watoto's IT lead Suzi and one of their lead technicians named Herbert. We agreed on the plan to pick up the remaining 20 PCs from our supplier InterConnection and then head out to the Watoto Bbira villiage.
As usual in Uganda, even routine tasks seem to take longer than expected so by lunchtime we had finally signed off and loaded the machines. To hold us over on the ride out to Bbira, Rogers scored us some "Obama Chapatis", the ubiquitous Ugandan fried pancakes, in this case from a street vendor named after our very popular president :-S.
Once in Bbira we were greeted with a somewhat different situation than what we had in Suubi village. The primary school computer lab was in a much smaller room and had several more working machines plus some brand new lookng HP towers with flat screens. The biggest initial challenge was clearing away all the non-functioning hardware and finding room for our refurbished Windows 7 machines.
While the Watoto folks worked on that, Petra, Rogers and I decided to visit the home we built with our pevious team in 2007 (see blog: http://watototeam.blogspot.com). Bbira village has been been developed quite a bit over the last 3 years and we wandered past several rows of new teacher apartments and groups of children's homes before reaching house 11-1. We were very pleased to meet the House Mother Margaret and a few of the elementary schoolers who live there. It was great to see how the home is being used to bless 8 children and a very nice lady, who turns out to be the previous house mother of our sponsor child Ben, when he used to live in Bbira as we later found out.
Back at the primary school lab we ended up installing 7 of our "newer" machines and left Micheal there to work on configurations while Herbert and I went over to the recently completed high school to scope out the lab situation. Situated along what used to be forest and pasture along the road into Bbira are 3 big new classroom buildings for the older children. In the last building we found the yet unused computer classroom including a secure teacher office in the back with a few older machines. We quickly assessed that they were not ready to set up the remaining 17 PCs so we decided to store them in the office until Herbert and team could make it back with the necessary network infrastructure.
From there we took some very picturesque backroads over to Suubi where we hoped to meet Ben for one last time (Petra was very relieved to finally make this leg of the trip as the computer work went longer than expected). We ran into Jane Ringel's sponsor son Douglas up at the adminstration building and agreed to head down to Ben's house number 56
together. Sensing that we must finally be close Ben met us along the way. We enjoyed another joyful reunion with our very special sponsor son and his House Mother Sarah. When Rogers sauntered in the back door of the house looking reluctant to interrupt we knew that our time with Ben was finally up - for this visit. We parted with many hugs, Ugandan handshakes and a few tears knowing that we were all so blessed to share this special time together.
Back at the guesthouse we enjoyed a very tasty homebaked lasagna, did some packing and retired early as the bright day faded into a deep purple twilight over Kampala. So sad that we have to part on the morrow, but so glad to be near seeing our 3 dear boys again!
-Brett
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