Jen’s Gulu Report
I’ve met thousands of orphans in the six years since I began Sweet Sleep. These children have moved me to tears, broken my heart and inspired me to action. But nothing has shaken me to my core quite like the forced child soldiers and child brides of northern Uganda. Over Christmas and New Year’s, a small team of us spent three weeks in the Gulu region, where a time of peace in the 22-year war has enabled more ministry efforts like ours to be possible.
Your generosity this Christmas allowed us to give 454 beds to children in the Gulu region of Uganda. Forty-five went to an orphanage with youngsters who are former child soldiers for the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), child abductees or child brides-turned-child-mothers to LRA commanders. The other 409 beds went to children in displacement camps who have lost parents or grandparents to the deadly rebel raids that have haunted these villages’ nights for two decades.
It was a Christmas like none I have ever experienced. Our day began by going to church with 13 orphans and the directors of their orphanage. It was a wild time of celebrating Jesus — with a lot of cardio tossed in! We were hosting the children at our hotel for a Christmas feast. When we pulled up to our hotel, I picked one little boy up out of the van and held him while the others piled out. As I was standing there holding him he fell asleep in my arms (see photo on front page). He slept in my arms and my lap for more than an hour. I prayed over him while he slept…
Later I would learn this little boy was born "into captivity" to a mother who was forced to be a child bride of an LRA commander. His mom escaped with her baby boy and went to live in an IDP camp. The commander husband came to get them and she told her "husband" she had AIDS. He strangled both of them and rolled them in papyrus mats. People found them later — the mom dead, the baby barely alive. That baby is now 4 years old. And on Christmas day, he was sleeping in my arms.
There were other children, too, like the young boy who survived his life-threatening bout with cerebral malaria earlier that week. I found him lying on the ground by our car one day. We took him for medical care and he tested positive for the cerebral malaria, which is fatal within two to three days if left untreated. He spent two days getting treatment and thankfully, on Christmas day he was healthy.
As we continued to work with children in IDP camps, they shared with us how they spent Christmas fetching water, cleaning their huts, washing their clothes, searching for food or simply eating millet grain. Quite different than most of our Christmas stories.
There were lighter moments, too. I asked the children how they felt when they first slept on their new six-inch foam beds instead of on the ground or their straw mats. One little boy raised his hand right away. He answered in Acholi (northern Uganda’s language) and all the children absolutely burst into laughter. We turned for translation…. he said when he laid down he felt like he was “sinking and sinking and sinking.” This is such a change from sleeping on the dirt!
Part of Sweet Sleep’s bed program in Uganda includes distributing mosquito nets to protect kids from the rampant malaria. We visited their camps and shared with each precious little soul how the beds represent God’s love for them and how to have a relationship with Him. We also had to teach every child how critical it is for them to care for their nets, not to catch ants with them, and to protect them from tears and holes from the straw roof in their thatched huts.
I asked our first group of about 100 children how many have ever had malaria. Every single hand shot up. As we continued at other camp meetings, hundreds of children told us they have had malaria. We developed close relationships with around 25 or so people during our three weeks there. In that time, six of the 25 people contracted malaria.
The reality of how prevalent malaria is in their lives was shocking to me. More people in Uganda die from malaria than from AIDS. But, we were also able to see how the small steps Sweet Sleep is taking have already changed children’s daily lives. We revisited an orphanage that we gave beds to last summer. I visited the dorm of a 16-year-old named Henry. I asked what he likes most about his bed. He said, "I like having a mosquito net so the mosquitoes don't attack me and I don't get malaria anymore."
No child I talked with at that orphanage had been sick with malaria since receiving an $8 net from Sweet Sleep. I want to form a “Malaria Militia” to help protect these children. It’s something we can do to continue making a difference together. Stay tuned for more information on this.
This year, Sweet Sleep is continuing our momentum from 2009 with great hopes you will help us set new records in providing beds to children in need. On the back side of this newsletter, you’ll read about our new initiative to help resettle Ugandan orphans who are currently living in displacement camps back to their native villages. Sweet Sleep has committed to three of our partner organizations to provide the bedding for each resettlement kit. Seven hundred children will be resettled over the next six months.
I invite you to a one-of-a-kind evening at the Adventure Science Center’s Sudekum Planetarium in Nashville on February 20 for our “Sweet Sleep Under the Stars” event. You’ll be awed by experiencing a Ugandan constellation and I’ll share more stories and pictures with you as I announce what’s ahead for Sweet Sleep in 2010.
