Maddie - Update 8: Debrief Blog 2

Mm. Just one lesson? Okay. The experience and images that come to my mind don't form a beautiful, clear printed story - they are a memory that has changed my life. One of the days of the SLAM service week that we put on in East Africa, I helped Joseph (EA Trainee, cooperative, and friend) to lead a service project at a nearby widow's home. We walked there with a group of 6 SLAM youth and a few other EA Leaders. Our time with the widow started with us joining her in preparing her afternoon meal. We shelled beans, peeled sweet potatoes and started a fire for her. We talked and asked her questions as we worked. She was such a sweet woman, and I was really touched by the conversation and by the immediate maturity and responsibility that the SLAM youth showed by acting as her translator because she only spoke Luganda. 

After we completed the meal prep task, the boys went into the nearby bush to gather and bring back firewood and the girls and I grabbed the 5 jerrycans and went to fetch water. I followed one of the younger EA Leaders because she grew up near the widow and she knew where the water source was. We walked about a half mile downhill through the bush on a little footpath until we reached our destination. There was a broken water pump in the small clearing in the maize field where we stood and there were two 6 by 2 1/2 foot shallow pond puddles. They were springs of some sort but they are nothing like what images usually come to my mind when I hear the word. They were stagnant and green algae and moss growing completely over the bottom and part of the surface of the water. There were spiders and bugs swimming around and in the one that had less dirty water there was a massive dead millipede that one of the youths saw.

I’ll remember the image of the broken pump and two pond pools surrounded by maize forever I think. The girls asked me as we submerged the cans in the murky water if I would drink this and I struggled with what to say…I didn't want to be offensive but also it was certainly not drinkable water so I said something like, “If I had to, but I know I'd get sick.” Once we filled the cans we walked back up the half-mile trek, uphill. It was really hard. And I just had one 5-liter jerrycan…one of the youth girls carried two and I was so impressed and she encouraged me that I was doing so well. It was unusual for them to see a white person carrying a jerrycan. It was an experience, a tangled vibrant memory. It leaves me feeling so sad and heartbroken that that is a community's only water source. It needs to be changed. And it also leaves me so impressed and grateful for the SLAM youth I got to know and serve with.They really displayed character and God's love.