Project Africa 2010 Uganda Clinic trip

We made it. Nine months of planning, fundraising, and preparation and the idea had become reality. Our team of 13 staff and friends of the Lethbridge Correctional Centre boarded our British Airways flight from Calgary to London on May 10, 2010 and from London to Entebbe in Uganda. Our humanitarian effort was underway.

Like a child from conception to birth our project needed nine months of hard work, nourishment, and encouragement before it could arrive on the ground in the village of Akobwait, of the sub-county of Buteba, in Busia District in Eastern Uganda.

It worked. We raised over $53,000 including some professional Architects services donated to us by Al Fritz Architecture and his creative designer Matt Koutsky. Concerts, Firewood sales, banquet dinners, silent auctions in generous Lethbridge pubs, and many donors had produced the results we needed to undertake our goal of starting the construction of phase one of a 30 x 60 medical clinic.

Okay, it's time to put the cards on the table. I don't think we really thought we would pull it off. It looked too daunting. That's a lot of money.Other than myself the team leader, and Steve Bateman who had visited Uganda before nobody else had even seen East Africa and had no idea what to expect. On top of that, even if we managed to raise that much money, how could we dare think we could basically be the general contractor of an 1800 sq. ft. medical facility built according to the standards and availability of materials in a third world country?! Aside from a few of us who have some experience in renovations and general building practices, most of our team are freakin JAIL GUARDS only! We are not builders of structures of architectural magnificence. We tell repeat criminals what to do and when on a daily basis and try to keep one step ahead of the dysfunction and manipulation and not usually successfully. When you work in a jail, it does things to your mind that undermines your ability to dream or be an idealist of any kind. We deal in reality and it's usually ugly! Outcomes for Jail staff are usually visible as failure and repeat human misery. It's part of the job. For Police Officer Jonathan Blackwood (a team member) the same is true. Those of us in the Law enforcement profession deal daily and exist in the rather ugly side of life. We don't normally dream up idealistic possibilities of how we can make the world a better place. Sure we had a few of us on the team who could be considered "do-gooders"... myself as the Chaplain, Michelle as the Psychologist, Gilbert and Velma Eagle Bear as a Native elder and social worker, Steve the Pastor, and Nikki the Bible Camp worker. But even we probably nourished our own cynicism and doubts about what we had gotten ourselves into.

I remember the day the last fundraiser put us over the goal line. Lowater (Scott) who had a hand in organizing that fundraiser was like a giddy kid in a candy shop! The whole team was ecstatic, and somewhat stunned by the fact that we had met our fundraising goal. It felt a little like when you are in the middle of a dream that you had won the lottery. We did it. We raised enough money to go! And it was real.

At that point, and keeping true to a bunch of true jail guards, we turned our cynicism not into joy and confidence, but we moved it from fundraising and onto actually building a clinic in Uganda! Nobody said too much, but I can read faces. I can read souls. They betrayed serious doubt that we could build a clinic in a place we had never even seen, and with people who aside from me, we had never even met! I kept telling them that we have good people working with us on the ground, but I might as well have told them that 25 inmates had changed their ways and reformed their character and became saints from sinners. Not bloody likely! And the real risk and fear was that after nine months of selling our idea to donors, we would inevitably fail and look like a bunch of chumps.

To mask our doubts and fears, we did what Jail people do. We laughed a lot as we boarded Jarrod's Hog.... no not a Harley Davidson but a big Hutterite van that generously offered us the aroma of last weeks hogs transported to the auction market. Jarrod offered to drive us to the airport and we were grateful for that -smell or no smell! So we laughed at each other, insulted each other, made wisecracks about each other, argued a little here or there, and thought not too quietly about all our colleagues back at the jail who not so secretly predicted our impending disaster at the hands of rebel guerillas, AK47 toting roadside thugs, horrible flesh eating diseases, Machete wielding crazy bush warriors, HIV infections, military coup's, and general human misery of a scale and in a world that would look like Mel Gibson's post nuclear Road Warrior game of survival. What can I say? Optimism doesn't really abound in our workplace!

Maybe we even silently agreed with that assessment. So our strange sense of Jail staff humor served us well. Lowater and Clavelle kept their word and shaved mohawks and the rest of us just got into the flow of laughing about everything that was amusing, which was pretty much everything. I wondered about Steve the pastor from E-Free, and Nikki, Jason's wife who works at an amazing Bible camp. Would this strange group of people accept them as one of their own. They had to. We had to live and work together closely for 16 days. Nikki had the advantage of being hitched to Jay, but Steve was new to the gang. Jail staff accept you or they don't. It's simple. No phony bologna and plastic smiles and pretense (like you find in church), but it's all or nothing, and you clearly know which one it is! Well for Steve it quickly became apparent that it was all. He matched their humor at every turn and joined in the cutting up from the get go. He was one of us, and one of them! When a jail guard offers an outsider to come for a personal tour of his jail, it's tanamount to slicing open each other's arms and mixing blood to be lifelong blood brothers. It's a sign of full acceptance. And he had his offers.

We hit London after nine hours on a night flight, and from there Jordan led us to downtown where we enjoyed a fun dinner at the famous Sherlock Holmes Pub. Then quickly back to Heathrow for our evening flight to Uganda. By the way, "mind the gap" is now jail vocabulary as we found out you better mind the gap or the London tube will swallow you but not your backpack if you don't get your ass on the train before the doors close. Steve almost found out what half in half out means!

9 more hours and finally, Entebbe airport and arrival. Douglas Mugabe, Raphael Kajjubi, Edgar Mase, and Paul the Kenyan who were our local partners met us with the bus that would be ours for the entire time. Moses and Madson were the drivers. A team of Alberta jail guards and African partners had finally met. Would it work? Would we get along? Could we trust that they would look after us? Would we mind our manners? Would we end up abandoning them and killing each other? Would our group turn into a remake of Lord of the Flies? Could we make it for 16 days without doing the jail guard thing and open our mouths and say something inappropriate and culturally offend them? What was in store? Would this be a success or one big gong show? Like our jail itself, our trip was simple and held no nuanced subtleties. It would be either yes or no. Thumbs up or down. Success or failure, and nothing in between. The chips were piled high on the table, cards ready to be laid down and shotguns loaded just in case it got ugly. This was no polite and polished church group. It's a jail thing. There's no other way to put it. Stay tuned, I will pull aside the curtains and let you see.