Dirty, Sweaty and Wonderful
By HOLLY TABOR
Sunday, April 15, 2007 7:42 PM CDT

Elizabethtown woman helps orphans on ‘eye-opening’ trip to Uganda

ELIZABETHTOWN — Tara Still never had been so dirty in her life. Each time she stepped outside, the heat and dust of Africa clung to her.

In the country, it was mud huts and mosquitoes and, in the city, the smell of trash burning on the sides of streets. Everywhere, it was the swollen bellies of malnutrition that reminded her that she was someplace strange, someplace far from home.

And for that, she was grateful.

“It was an eye-opening experience,” Still said nearly a month later, sitting at the dining room table of her Elizabethtown home, her hair still damp from a hot shower. “It was so wonderful.”

For 10 days, the 34-year-old and a team of about 15 adults traveled to Uganda on behalf of the Orphan Children Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides care and education for orphans in Third World countries.

She left Elizabethtown on March 4 expecting to begin construction on an orphanage in the Luwero region of Uganda that eventually will be home to some 2,000 children. But construction for the project was delayed.

What she and her team did instead was build a waterline to provide safe drinking water to nearly 10,000 people and donate more than $150,000 to existing boarding schools, orphanages and organizations to use for food, supplies and medicine.

“It was so much to take in,” Still said. Upon returning home, “it took two weeks just to wrap my head around it.”

Still raised more than $10,000 of the funds OCF donated and paid between $3,000 and $5,000 of her own to make the trip. It was something she felt called to do and work she hopes to continue

“I was so filled up with compassion while I was there, other things weren’t important,” she said. “I was ready to leave, but I want to go back.”

While there, Still saw the deep muddy water hole to which women and children walked more than a mile each day to fetch water and bring it home to be boiled. She dug into the red sub-Saharan dirt to help build a waterline from the hole in Kyebandothat to carry water through a natural filtration system to pump stations in three Ugandan villages.

She watched women and children make and sell beads out of paper in the ghetto of Kampala, and wait in long lines for rice and beans, and for the first time, meat. She held babies that had been abandoned in garbage cans and left for dead before being found and taken in. She visited schools, which, she learned, often are the only place children can count on getting a meal.

For two days, she and the others went on a safari to see the African countryside. “With that, I saw more of what I thought Africa would be,” she said.

But the other things she saw, experienced and felt made the most lasting impressions.

“You can really feel the struggle between good and evil while you’re there,” she said. “You can actually sense it.”

Despite the conditions Still witnessed in Uganda, she also learned to share their joy.

“They are very joyful people,” she said, “even with all the suffering.”

She was sad to leave, but missed her husband, her bed, her safe running water. She was ready to return home, but getting back into work and her everyday life was difficult.

“At first I felt guilty,” she said. “It was hard to get back in to anything because nothing felt important.

But she doesn’t feel guilty any more, just thankful.

“God has blessed me to be in the position I’m in, so that I can bless other people,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty. I’m just really, really grateful for the littlest things.” Her home-based business, her family, “all these things are so much more important because I have a purpose,” she said.

She also returned with an invitation to be a board member for a start-up foundation that will raise and distribute funding to organizations like OCF and others dedicated to helping children around the world.

Still will return to Kampala in October and hopes to continue to be involved through fundraising and other efforts to construct the orphanage in Luwero, for which the property has been purchased.

For now, she is teaming up with Designer’s Portal Boutique in Elizabethtown to host a charity fashion show and auction to benefit OCF. The event will be Tuesday at the State Theater.

Still looks forward to becoming more involved with the charitable cause that already has changed her life.

“It has opened doors for me,” Still said of her trip to Africa and of OCF. “I just have a sense of fulfillment and purpose, of something bigger.”