Grandma Ham

For those of you who get my email updates, I got my internet back and my pictures all sorted out :) It took an hour and a half to get it up with the internet issues, I got rained on, a massive spider landed on my head after getting dive bombed multiple times by a giant flying worm, and the cat brushed up against me in the dark giving me my fifth heart attack of the night, but TIA... So I hope you all enjoy :)

On Saturdays, the children here are at the carepoint for most of the day, so we decided to get to work on a big part of my work here, assessing and making health histories for all of our orphans. I'll just say that trying to assess 260 orphans in an unlit church hut in Africa is not something that was explicitely covered in nursing school :) It took us a while to get a system going, but we ended up getting 33 kids done in a little over 5 hours... It was a looong hot day, although luckily the rain came in and made our last couple hours a little more comfortable (and after Dustin hung up his video camera light on the straw ceiling, we could see pretty well despite the rain clouds :) So I guess I have my work cut out for me for the rest of this week!

Unfortunately, after my long day of work, I came back to the mission to find out that my sweet grandma had died earlier that day. She was 94 and my mom had told me about a week and a half ago that she hadn't been doing well. Even though it was pretty expected, it was still a veryyy sad day. My Grandma Ham (as we affectionately call her) was absolutely one of kindest and gentlest people I have ever known. It tears me up to not have been with her in her last days and to not be with my family now, but I spent my day today living the way Irene Betty Hamilton lived...

She referred to everyone as "dear," one of my favorite sweet grandmotherly things to call someone. She'd always say things like, "Love you, dear," "God bless you, dear," and "Thank you, dear..." So a lot of the children I played with today got called dear. Even if they can't understand me, I'm sure they knew I was calling them an affectionate name :)

Especially in her last few years, Grandma Ham wasn't the type of person who always needed to be entertained. She was completely content just to sit and enjoy someone's company. I was fortunate enough to be able to do that with her a few times in the weeks before I left, to just sit up in her room with her as I organized my medical supplies and wrote up lists for my trip. So today, on our leisurely day of rest, I decided to spend some time down at the bore hole (where everyone comes to pump their water). I took some pictures and played with the kids, but mostly I just watched what was going on around me and enjoyed the people as they came and went.



Unlike my first trip to Uganda, I haven't made a habit out of snatching up random babies whenever I laid my eyes on them. But one of my grandma's most favorite things in the whole world was getting to hold sweet little babies. So today in church, I rocked my little Bruno to sleep and just squeezed his cute little body. Then as I sat down at the bore hole, a little girl who was probably about 7 was carrying her baby sister. She let me hold that tiny baby and she cooed and stared wide-eyed up at the first Mzungu she'd probably ever laid her eyes on. It's certainly not hard to understand why my grandma loved to hold little ones soo much...



One of my favorite stories of Grandma Ham is from when my mom was a child... I don't remember all of the details, but I think my Aunt Mary somehow managed to break a whole collection of my grandma's fancy dinnerware. Mary was sure she would be in big trouble and that Irene would be terribly mad at her, but instead she took a breath and said, "It's ok dear, they're just things." So today as we sat in church, Bruno picked up my Bible and started flipping through the pages. As he tried to turn the pages individually, his fumbly little fingers ended up crinkling up the whole page and tearing part of it. I thought about taking it back from him and setting it back on the ground, but instead I smoothed the page back out, flipped to a different section, and helped him as he continued to flip the pages one-by-one, still putting folds in most of the pages. After all, it is just a "thing."



And my last grandma moment for the day... In her last few years, Grandma Ham was so appreciative of every little thing each day and always so pleased by what people would do. She would say things like, "that was the best meal I've ever had," "that's the best bonfire I've ever seen," and "this is the best Mother's Day ever." Even if it was something that no one else would be impressed with, she was just tickled with whatever she had. So today, the team decided to go for a walk before it started to get dark. As we were headed back in from being way out in the bush, we looked up and saw this... The best "almost-sunset" I've ever seen :)



Love and miss you all,
Caitlin