We traveled 15 minutes on a main road, 15 minutes on a farming road, and then we came to the end of the road and the driver said: "we must walk from here." "Walk?," I said to myself. "I have all of our money for our trip home, all of our passports, Zuri's adoption paperwork, and all of our carry-ons in this van." Should I take it or leave it in the car with the man that I do not know? "Walk where?" I hid our stuff as best I could and we began the walk up the narrow path. Gayla holding Zuri as we walked along between tea and sugarcane fields up into the place where Zuri was born. I say "place" because it really was not a village, but a tiny compound of a few mud huts (please watch the videos). "Are we really experiencing this," Gayla and I thought to ourselves. "This is where she was born and we are getting to see it." We nervously approached the compound because we were told that those living here were known to have confrontations with white people, so we should not be surprised if we had one too.
When we arrived no one was there so we were able to take some quick photos and look around, but soon a man and a woman came carrying big loads of sugar cane on their heads and were surprised to find us awaiting their return. Both the man and the woman were distant, but when the woman found out who we were, and noticed Zuri - she warmed up quickly. This was the lady who saved Zuri's life - and there is no hyperbole in that statement. What we came to learn this day was that Zuri's birth mother was dying and so she came here to give birth and so she was born in a mud hut much like the ones that you see in the video. The reason you will not see the actual house is because her mother was forced to sell the tin roof of that house in exchange for money so that she could purchase medicine to comfort her as she was dying. We were able to see the plot of ground where the house stood at this time last year and we saw the plot of ground where her birth mother is buried - she died two weeks after Zuri was born. There was no marker, just a memory of where they had buried her.While in Uganda, we learned that the plot of orphaned Uganda infants typically follows one of two paths. The first is that a neighbor or relative takes them in and cares for them as their own. The other path is abandonment and death and this is the path that Zuri would have travelled were it not for one special lady. The sacrifice of this young woman brings tears to our eyes almost every time we talk about it and even as I type this blog. I can assure you of this-money is hard to come by in this area and this sweet lady had to use some of her precious resources to hire a motorcycle driver to carry them to the orphanage that someone had told them about. Her actions and her sacrifice are why Zuri is alive and why Zuri is in our home, in our family, and in our arms. Because of fear of the appearance of child trafficking, we chose not to give her anything, but we sure pray that God would bless her for this act of kindness and I am confident that he will do so.
Walking this path with my family was an unbelievable experience. The life that Zuri would have had in the fields is drastically different from the life that God has for her here. I am not saying that her life there, if she were taken in by neighbors, would be awful, but it would have been awfully hard, and she may or may not have survived being premature and malnourished. Her life there may have been fine, but the canvas of opportunities would have been very small. The life God has for her here is one where she has an enormous blank canvas. She is the center of the attention of five faces. She is loved. She is cherished. She is pampered and she is adored. Not a day passes that I do not think about so many biblical parallels and how I was without hope, but God predestined that he would adopt me. I was lost, but he found me. I was malnourished, but God nursed me back to health and when I see her - I see myself. Outside of Christ, I have no hope, but because of Christ - my hope has been made complete.
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