For many months now, I have been working with a group of medical students studying to become doctors at Gulu University Faculty of Medicine in Gulu, which is located in Northern Uganda. Most of you are aware of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which actually is not in any way related to God, but rather is evil and has delivered terror in all of Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan and other areas nearby for the past 25 years. Children were abducted by LRA soldiers and boys were made into “children soldiers” and girls turned into sex slaves. Families were brutally murdered and anyone who spoke against them had their lips cut off and their faces mutilated – there is still much obvious evidence when you simply walk down the street.
I spent much of my day on Thursday hammering through a number of documents for the purpose of registering the student association as an NGO so they will have the ability to begin receiving funds, performing projects and become officially recognized as a Non-Governmental Organization in Uganda. Already they have been performing some medical missions, community education and other work. One local radio station has agreed to provide the students free airtime to broadcast educational programs geared at teaching the local population about disease prevention (malaria, HIV/AIDS, Typhoid, sanitation practices to reduce digestive tract and respiratory diseases, etc). NOTE: The way that the connection with the radio station manager was made is that the lady who runs the radio station has a car for hire which Obura rented to come pick me up from New Hope Uganda. As they were preparing the paperwork for the car, they got discussing the work the students are doing and she had a heart to help, so offered the free airtime – God continues to surprise me in the ways He works!!!
I will spare you the grueling details of 10 hours of editing documents, suffice it to say we made a lot of headway and have the revised version ready for all of the initial board members and the lawyer to review. Thursday evening, I hosted a dinner for the team at the hotel I was staying in – the Acholi Inn in Gulu. It was an amazing evening of listening to the students share stories of why they were wanting to use their skills to help in Northern Uganda. Each spoke with passion and conviction of serving God and helping the people who are in such desperate conditions here. Hundreds of thousands of people fled to IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camps and
have lived there for many years.
The government has recently ordered all IDP camps closed and people are returning to their villages to find no infrastructure, medical care, water – and little hope. While Obura was picking me up at New Hope Uganda, we had a chance to meet with the leadership team of NHU to see if there are ways that the students can work with that ministry – either providing medical care or broadcasting educational programs on their radio station. Obura learned the story of how NHU got its name and was touched by it. So much so that we decided to rename the project, which was initially called “Quality Health for All” to “Health to Hope” (H2H). The idea is that we can bring spiritual, physical and emotional healing which will lead to hope for a people who have been lacking for so long.
Friday was a busy morning with meetings. The first was with a catholic nun named Sister 
Rosemary who runs a school and clinic in Gulu, as well as being well connected with many people in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan providing medical care. Just listening to her for a short time, you could hear the passion she has for providing care and the underlying determination to do even more. She told me stories about the lack of medical care and how hard it is to get anything even close to quality health care here. Sister Rosemary is working with an organization called Pros for Africa as well as having a close relationship with both the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. (NOTE: I truly believe the sister is very smart in this as she kind of smiled when she said something about “using the inherent competition between the two universities” to encourage them to do even more!) UO & OSU provide medical and law student medical teams. In addition to the Universities, she has gotten many medical professionals from Oklahoma to partner with her (remember the Due Unto medical team we met in Kacungwa?).
We talked for nearly an hour and agreed that there are many things that the Hope to Health team can do to work with her and Obura will continue to develop this relationship. The sister is in the US frequently (in fact will be in Oklahoma next month). The first picture I ever saw of sister Rosemary was with the Oklahoma Thunder basketball team – she looked even shorter than the picture above with me. She laughed hard when I told her that and she said that she has never felt so short as when she was with the basketball team.
Next I met with an organization called BOSCO-Uganda. BOSCO stands for “Battery Operated Systems for Community Outreach”. I had learned of this organization through internet research in preparation for the work I’m doing here. They continually seemed to pop up and when I saw what they did and where they were located, I decided that I should try to meet with them (they just happened to be located in Gulu, conveniently located between sister Rosemary’s school & clinic and the hotel I was staying).
This organization provides computers and training to Northern Uganda’s desperate communities. They have built their own microwave network to connect these communities tied to a central datacenter and also providing internet access. They use solar power to provide power to the computers and focus on Web 2.0 technologies for teaching students (Google Apps, gmail, etc). They have developed extensive training materials and also train local people in the community to run the lab and provide training to their community.
A sign in front of the BOSCO computer lab in Gulu; the “Digital drum” hanging on the wall outside of the lab; a couple of the dedicated people at BOSCO Uganda that I met with.
They have worked with UNICEF to come up with something that they call the “digital drum”. It is effectively a 55-gallon drum cut out and equipped with 2 computer workstations. It is completely self-contained and also completely weatherproof. I couldn’t get too good of a picture myself of the one they have in their office because there were so many people gathered around it. This organization, in many ways, is touching on exactly what I had envisioned – using technology to fundamentally improve the quality of life for people in Uganda. One innovative thing that they have done is to create a “digital marketplace”. It is a simple intrAnet application that allows people to advertise goods and services for sale. They include their phone number or other contact information for people using the system to respond to. It was reported to be very well used and loved by the people there.
While this visit was not directly related to the work with the medical students, as we talked, we learned that there is the opportunity to incorporate the medical education with the technology education programs in the communities and their web site. This is certainly something that I will be following up on and pray that God will use this in a positive way.
Finally, it was time to leave Gulu and head to Pakwach for a day of Safari in Murchison Falls National Park. More on that later, but we did have a couple of very scary “too close for comfort” encounters with elephants! Below are just a few of the pics from our encounter with one elephant and others from our time in the park.
God bless you and am anxious to get home!
Dave
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