Lukas goes to Uganda

Last week I went to Uganda on business, something I do a fair bit. But this time I brought my eight-year-old son Lukas along with me. The idea was to show Lukas how people live in other parts of the world, and teach him to be compassionate. Our trip was filled with lessons even before we left – having to get shots before you go to a place is a major lesson in the physical challenges facing the world’s poor!

“Dad, what’s typhoid?”
“Well, it’s a preventable and curable disease that kills 600,000 people every year, and these shots will make sure we don’t catch it.”

While I ran about between meetings in a suit in 30˚ weather, Lukas was working at Sanyu Babies Home (a long-standing member of our Kampala network of projects) helping take care of 16 abandoned babies. Having the CEO of a charity for a dad means you hear lots about orphanages, but actually being in one changed Lukas’ life. Not only was he overwhelmed with the concept of babies having been abandoned by their parents, but he was overwhelmed with the task of taking care of all of them! He spent a day and a half playing with the babies and doing crowd control while the Sanyu ladies fed them. “How was it?” I asked him at the end of the day. “Noisy, but well-managed” was his very serious reply!


One day Lukas went to school. He went to classes for the day at one of Kampala’s boarding schools. Out of 1,500 students there was one white boy – Lukas! He was an object of keen interest and curiosity all day, but had a wonderful time playing with his new friends.

On another day I had a meeting with the leader of a local project. We spent the first little while talking business and roasting in a concrete office block, until I couldn’t handle it anymore and said “How about we go and see some children?!” So she collected Ernest, the largest man I’ve ever encountered, and together with Lukas we all went down into the slums.

This was a huge shock for Lukas. I could see the questions registering on his face: “How many people live in this awful place?” “How do you live off £1 a day?!” We walked through streets lined with rivers of raw sewage. It’s rainy season, and everything was covered in red mud and the smell of hot, wet people /animals /furniture /filth. We stopped in at the home of Lydia, barely four feet tall, mother of four children under five years old, and AIDS sufferer.

Lydia and her kids share a room in a three-room hut with other tenants in the other two rooms. Your bathroom at home is probably larger than their little apartment, and probably has more furniture in it too. I’m sure my enlightened readers have heard of families living in such tiny homes before, but imagine an eight-year-old English kid seeing it firsthand, for the first time. There was one chair shared between all the tenants in the house, and that was brought out for me (to my extreme embarrassment). The room reeked of sweaty humans, soiled mattresses, and hot mud. Lukas bravely didn’t fuss about that.

With translations from Ernest, Lukas heard how Lydia supports her family. In the morning she goes out and buys plantains (“They’re like bananas,” I told him). Then she puts them into her enormous pot, cooks them and mashes them up into ‘matooke’ (pronounced mah-toe-kay). This requires her to collect wood and keep a fire going all day. Then she somehow carries the pot – and I can’t stress how enormous it is, and she’s just the tiniest lady – out to the main highway, where people on their way home stop and buy scoops of matooke for dinner. On a good day she makes about £1. And that has to be enough for everything she and her four children might need.

But wait, Lukas, there’s more! Lydia is getting evicted tomorrow, because her landlord has decided to take down the little mud-walled house of squalor and build something nicer. Lydia doesn’t know what she’ll do; she can’t miss a day of work, she doesn’t know how she’ll dismantle the bunk-bed that her children share, and she can’t afford the deposit of three months’ rent (the equivalent of £12) on a new room. It’s rainy season, where will they go?

And to top it all off, her three-year-old daughter got her eye poked with a stick while playing with some friends. Her cornea has been half ripped off, and her eye is oozing pus. Lydia took her to the hospital but of course couldn’t afford treatment, so the doctor gave her a little bottle of salt water to pour over it. It’s been a few weeks now and the little girl is going blind. Lukas was in a shock of grief over the various horrors going on in this one little family. The thought that this kind of story was common in Uganda horrified him more.

In beautiful, simple, child-like generosity Lukas immediately emptied all the money he had in his pockets (amazingly, about £12 in Ugandan shillings!) and gladly gave that to Lydia to cover the deposit on a new room. And Ernest rounded up some people to help the family move the next day. I was actually in a meeting later on with representatives from our city-wide network and asked if anyone knew an eye doctor. Thanks to the joint efforts of many of the network projects, the little girl went to see a doctor on 7 June and received proper treatment, paid for by the network. (A grand total of just £3! But such a price was impossible for Lydia to spare. And because they could see she had little money, the doctors just never gave her time of day to realise how simple the procedure actually was.) Due to the long time spent without any treatment, though, the little girl might still lose her eye.

So, overall impressions from Lukas? Seeing kids his own age living in squalor, with diseases and constant hunger, broke his heart. But the amazing positive attitude of these kids, who have so little, impressed Lucas and made him appreciate what he has here in Oxford. And that’s why I brought him along … mission accomplished.


~ Patrick McDonald, Viva CEO


Viva is working really hard in Uganda. To find out more about our work there visit www.viva.org/vivaafrica.aspx

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