Grace Community had sent several missions there already to work with Sam Tushabe, the African founder of an organization to treat and educate AIDS orphans. He had begun saving children one by one in his home district of Jinja when he was in his 20s, more than a decade earlier.
Tushabe's mother was among the first to die from the disease, in the 1980s, when it still had no name and locals thought witchcraft brought it on. By the mid-1990s, thousands had died, and their orphaned children wandered through the villages, looking for work on banana plantations or begging door to door.
Tushabe was a 25-year-old student then, when he was asked to take in his first orphaned child. Soon, he took in another, and another, and another, selling his handmade batiks to tourists along the Nile River to survive.
He wrote to friends for help, asking others to take in children. By 2000, he realized he needed more than a collection of individuals to make a difference. He needed a foundation and a system to give these kids more than shelter.
He organized the AIDS Orphans Education Trust, or AOET, to set up a school and offered families housing and work skills if they took children in.
He made a lot of progress in a few years. But this May, when the crew from Grace Community Church showed up, there was still much work to be done and only two weeks to do it.
The volunteers were a mix of ages and experiences, and they came with different expectations. Johnny had romantic notions of manual labor. He wanted to work side-by-side with his wife and feel the nightly satisfaction of aching muscles and a hard day's work.
Instead, he got stuck in an office, charged with making something out of piles of nothing: ancient computer parts and pieces covered in the village's red dust and dirt. He rarely saw Jen, didn't get to interact as much with the kids, and was generally annoyed - until others made him see the value of his work.
"It was miraculous," said Ginny Driscoll, one of the volunteers.
Johnny took the pieces, separated what was workable from what wasn't and built AOET a network.
"He was very, very skilled. When he talked, it was like he was drawing from a huge resource," Tushabe said on a recent visit to the U.S. "He saved us thousands of dollars. I mean thousands of dollars."
And for a while, that was enough for Johnny. He'd done something, he'd made a difference, he'd put his skills to work in a way he never had before. And he was feeling pretty good.
