Like usual, this trip has been fascinating as I can feel that every step along the way has been totally led divinely. As you can tell, the things that we have been doing were not exactly advertised in magazine or on a website... it is only by running into the right people and having the right conversations, asking the right questions, and having faith to follow the rabbit down the whole that we have been able to have the experiences that we have. This trip has been absolutely perfect in every way so far. The last couple days have been the most enlightening of the trip so far. We have been traveling with a guy named Peter through Kenya and he wanted to show us his home town in a place called Matoso. It was a bit of the beaten path (later I came to know how far off the path it really was), and Nelson and I both felt that he kinda just wanted to show up to be like... check it out, I have American friends... so we were super hesitant to go and kinda dragged our feet... we were ready for Uganda... regardless, we went along. We crammed ten people into a very small sedan as well as all our gear and all the stuff from the other passengers. Peter told us it would be half an hour, forty minutes max. 90 minutes later, after the most uncomfortable ride, over the worst roads that you could possibly imagine we showed up the the much spoken of, edge of Lake Victoria town of Matoso. We were less than thrilled to be there. It was something that we really could not have been prepared for. The lake front was disgusting... cow manuer and otherwise was scattered all over the place. Piles of trash lined the streets. Dirty naked kids, with those bellies that look like they are pregnant wandered the steets. Other kids that did have clothes were all too obvious that they NEVER changed them... no more than rags, barely hanging on. I felt bad, but I had to push all the kids away as I was litterally afraid of what I would contract... EVERYWHERE else I loved the kids and picked them up and played with them, but not in Matoso. Palsied and dieing elderly lay in their homes, abandoned and the adults walked around, or lay around with little hope in their eyes. It was sad and discouraging to the core. It was an energy sucker and I could hardly take it. I began to become angry and I did not know why. At first I told myself that it was because I had wasted so much time and did not want to be here in the first place, but later I realized that it was something much deeper. I was ashamed with myself. I wanted to run. I wanted to leave this place, forget all about it, and never come back. I wanted to be home with my Bimmer and In N Out and my surfboard, where you don't have to worry about typhoid of Hep A when you walk down the street. I wanted to tell myself that they were not people, they were not saveable, there were too many of them and there was nothing that I could do. I felt all these things and I hated myself for thinking them. The moment that we arrived, Nelson and I looked at each other and we knew each other's thoughts... FIRST thing in the morning we are out of here... a couple hours later something happened that started to change my heart... the last stop on our walking tour of Matoso was to visit his grandmother... with decrepid, blind, crippled, malaria infected grandmother... when we showed up she was laying by herself, in the dark, on a pile of rags and you don't want to know what else on the floor. I could hardly believe my eyes. He spoke to her for a couple minutes, then she reached out her hand to greet us, I was terrified of what might be on that hand, but I engaged regardless, sending a strong look to Nelson, saying, you are going to shake it too, If I die, we both die together!... as we were on our way out of there, she asked us for money for medicine. As my policy of not handing out money, for the most part, has been important to me , I told her that we would go to the pharmacy and buy some for her. We walked across town and found a little shack that was little more equipped than a first aid kit of a boy scout troop. We bought some drugs for her malaria and headaches for about two dollars. Something felt right and my heart started to soften a bit... then we went back up to our hosts home and hung out as the sun set, waiting for dinner. I have not yet mentioned that when you show up to an african town off the beaten path, you are quite the spektical to the children, within a couple minutes we had a loyal following of about twenty kids, like a heard of sheep everywhere we went. As we waited for dinner, which I did not expect to be much more than a couple grains of rice and some fishheads, (they often sell the fish they catch and just live off the heads), my main objective was to keep the kids from touching me. I was sitting down in the dirt and they were closing in on me. As tactfully as I could I kept pushing them back... you can't believe how dirty they were, they were coughing on my, and the little ones would just sit there, naked and deficate on the ground. One time as I urged them back I realized that they were all standing/ sitting in a semi-circle and for a moment I was sent back to singing time. I thought, and my heart became more soft. I took a deep breath and touched my pinky finger to my thumb, and then pivited to alternate to my other finger and thumb. As I had hypothesized they mimicked me... I brought my fingers down like rain and they did the same. I brought my hands above my head and they mimicked the action and I repeated the first gesture again. Within minutes were were all singing the "itsy bitsy spider!" The ones who spoke english sang along and the other just repeated the melody. They were laughing and giggling and clapping and cheering. My heart was changing and even thinking about it is making me emotional. Next we stood up and I got them in a big circle. We did it slow, but when we got the the line, "and do the hokie pokie..." they would shake and dance like there was not tomorrow. It was amazing. I sang for them every kids some I could think of and then they sang me there's. We played follow the leader and some form of red light green light. We were all laughing and giggling. They transformed into the most adorable group of kids I had ever seen. We had them race in different fashions between Nelson and I and on the last trip across, back to me, I said that this was the most important race, and whoever got to me first won... "ready, set, go!..."... they started running to me like a tidal wave of little black kids and right before they got to me, I turned and ran... they chased me through the streets, across people's yards, through the workers and the fishermen and through the little shops... it was a sight to see. All the adult were laughing and we were having more fun than I have had for a long time. One the oldest girl caught me, we worked out way back to Peter's brother's home. There we sat there as it got dark, and after a thourough lesson, we sang "I am a child of God" together. I was hooked. Dinner was ready and we went into the home of Maurice, the leader of the village. I almost cried when I saw how much food they had prepared for us. We ate and talked together for hours as I questioned them on all the issues of the town. I learned so much of what the causes of the problems were and what the solutions would need to be. All along the way of the conversation I thought... oh, we could help with that... yeah, we could surely help with that... and so on and so on...

The next morning they took us sailing. Now this is the most liberally I have ever used the word in my life. The boat was litterally some pieces of wood that somehow managed to float, with perpetually bailing of course, and the sail resembled shredded sheets that must have been a hundred years old with more area of holes that of actual sheet. I could not believe that it actually worked, but it did, and we observed there livelihood, fishing on Lake Victoria (the biggest lake in the world, by the way). Later that day we had a meeting with Maurice again over lunch. We discussed more thouroughly the issues of the town and the things that could be done by the town themselves to change and the things that they would need help with. We spoke for hours and discussed the loans that the potential business men and fishermen would need... we are talking a loan of a couple hundred buck can change whether or not a kid dies of diseases related to malnutrition. Another couple hundred bucks and we could build a school and pay for a teacher ( the kids presently walked about an hour and a half everyday to school, obviously many did not go, and that resulted in more idleness than you can imagine... even to the spreading of AIDS among nine year olds, if you understand)... They needed suggestion on what do do with their waste and their fecies, so that it did not all run into the lake and cause an outbreak of typhoid every year during the wet season. Basically, we drew up a plan to revolutionize, within extremely reasonable mean, the entire town and Maurice and his assisstants were smiling from ear to ear, saying... yeah, that needs to be done... yeah, we could do that. We spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing people and taking pictures. Nelson and I committed to go home, gather the troops and come back in a couple months. I knew that coming to Matoso may have been one of the most important trips of my life. The next morning, at 530... we got on a series of buses taking us around the lake, and by 8pm we arrived in our new home, Jinja, in Uganda.