Goodbye at Richard's Orphanage & Blood Drive

Goodbye Party at Richard's Orphanage

Lyndsay here..

After a long night of traveling back from Kenya, we finally arrived back to Bushika village at noon on Monday (remember our bus left the night before a little after 11pm, 13 hours of travel, that's Africa baby). We stopped in Mbale to jump on a matatu and picked up some suckers for the kids at the orphanage for our goodbye party, details on the sugar high to come… 

For those of you who may be behind on reading our blog, we have been volunteering at Nangako Orphanage every Monday teaching the children various topics from handwashing to setting goals, careers to proper behavior and relationships. The children range anywhere from 3 to 10 or 11 years old. Richard, the community health outreach coordinator at the clinic founded this school/orphanage, and it has by far become our favorite activity over the last 2 months. We have grown so close to the headmaster, chairperson, and teaching staff, not to mention all of the students there. We organized a goodbye party, including lunch, sweets, balloons, music, singing, and dancing. We just wanted to give the kids time to relax and simply have fun. So many of them are forced to grow up faster than they need to here, caring for younger siblings, working in the fields, or selling in the markets or on the streets. We simply loaded them up on sugar via suckers and juice and let them go crazy. The older girls organized a few traditional African singing/dancing numbers for us which we loved. We never knew 6 year old hips could dance like that! We blew up several large balloons for the kids and had a mass chaos form of "monkey in the middle", passed around silly bands, and simply sat and held/cuddled each and every one of them. 

After tearful goodbye's and thank-yous we headed home just before the rains set in, a perfect beginning to our final week in Uganda. 

Tuesday Blood Drive

Kristen speaking.

For the past 4 weeks we have been contacting a man named Moses that works for the Red Cross in Uganda. the conversations usually went something like this:

Moses: I'm sorry I missed your call- I was in the field. 

Lyndsay: Oh ok… So… we want to have a blood drive in Kikholo

Moses:  How is your life?

Lyndsay: My life is good, thanks. How about this blood drive?

Moses: I will have to call you back.

A few days later:

Moses: Madam, Are you in Mbale?

Lyndsay: No! I'm in Kikholo.

Moses: OHH you know they have a clinic there- we should do a blood drive there!

Lyndsay: Exactly.

Right… so we were definitely excited to meet this man. 

We had a clothing drive with volunteers' donations scheduled for the morning so we trekked up the hill at 8am to set up. The Red Cross had told us they would arrive at 9:30 so we figured the clothing drive would draw additional blood donors. In true African fashion, our plans did not go as intended. When the Red Cross didn't arrive by 11am, we called. Their truck was in the shop, etc etc. T.A.B. 

The clothing drive was a success. A lot of our clothes were gone and we raised 97,210 ugandan shillings for the clinic which is equivalent to about 50 bucks. All the proceeds went to the clinic funds for basic supplies, medications, and other odds and ends. Not to mention, there are many finely styled Ugandans and babies running around Bududa.

The Red Cross finally arrived at 1:00pm and hit the ground running. Lyndsay and myself were the first in line to donate. For the most part, it functions like the Red Cross in America. But they have pretty heavy restrictions on who can donate or not: like,  you can't be taking any kind of medication (including our malaria prophyalaxis), have menstruated anytime in the past 7 days or have donated in the past 3 months- no exceptions. Dr. Lisa had to go give them a-talkin-to. Even so, it prevented several willing donors to be hesitant to give blood. Lucky for us, they don't have any travel restrictions so we wanted to take advantage of it since we wont be able to donate for a whole year after we return from Africa. We considered any amount of pints a success because so many people don't donate blood- whether due to misconceptions about the process or inability to mobilize people to the blood drive. Michelle, Leenisha, and Doug along with other co-workers in the clinic and surrounding community members were able to donate (Lisa's iron was unfortunately too low).  It was a success!!! 

We finished the afternoon after enjoying our crackers and soda but remained semi dizzy or light headed until we trekked down the hill to home and drank some of our new crystal light packets (THANK YOU, KEVIN!!!) and ate some of the delicious guacamole flatbread that Michelle and Lynds made.

Food cravings: raisin bran cereal, blueberry yogurt, and pickles.



Michelle Donating



First time donating!

Kristen after donating

Clothing Drive