Pastor Abbe, he's one of the residents of the house I've been staying at, has been asking me to come visit his church and it's members for some time now, and I finally got the time to do so on tuesday. After work at Wentz, I came back to the house to meet up with Pastor Abbe. Our first stop was a visitation at Kampala International Hospital. Fred, a electrical plant worker and a member of Pastor Abbe's church, was involved in an accident and received extensive electrical fire burns on his arms and face. Pastor Abbe refers to me as Dr. Chris or doctor, all the time, and even though I've explained I'm not a doctor or technically even close to being one he still introduced me to Fred as a doctor. So, naturally Fred went on to explain everything that had happened to him, what the doctors were doing, and how he was doing. It broke my heart hearing all that he had to say, knowing that there was very little the doctors there could do. But Pastor Abbe prayed for him and that was about all we could do.

On a side note, i was able to talk to a few of the nurses and a head doctor at the hospital. While none of the employees really knew how many beds there were in the hospital it seemed like they might have had around 200 inpatients at the time. They have staff on the clock 24/7, however the specialists aren't on a usual schedule, instead they are on an on-call basis. Because it's an international hospital, there was a surprising number of non-africans there. Overall, not a bad facility considering where I am.

Next we went to what Pastor Abbe called "an alter" which was basically a meeting place away from the church location. To get to this area, we had to walk through two separate huge marketplaces, dozens of random alley ways, and actually walked in and through two homes to get to this open meeting place. Apparently he had told his church that I was coming that evening so when we arrived, there was a welcoming party of 30 women and children that sang traditional African songs for me. 

After talking through Pastor Abbe (he translated for me) for a bit, we moved on to the actual church location where I thought there would be a church. Instead it was another open section with a few rickety old benches amidst the clutter of the tiny houses. I was a again greeted by a few of the church members and leaders and spoke with them for a bit. Then went on out way home. The feeling and experience of the people I met that night was very similar to that of the other churches, welcomed, appreciated, praised, and undeserving of all of it.

Yesterday and today were typical days at Wentz, helping with whatever I could at the reception desk, the usual immunization help, and occasionally sitting in with the  doctors. Everything is back to I guess what could be considered "normal" haha..