A Message From Abby

Dear friends and family,

Thank you SO much for all of your prayers, support and encouragement. I am sorry that I have not responded to most of your emails, I have simply had no time to get on the internet (because here I have to go to an internet cafe and pay for it) but know that I have appreciated all of the emails you have sent me, they have encouraged me so much!

Yesterday as I was walking with some of the kids William (who everyone thougt was one of the boys kidnapped, although Sharrif our major source of information was the least sure about him although he WATCHED Nicholas and Mukenya be taken) came walking up to me. All the kids went crazy showing him to me and getting all excited. When we told him that we thought he had been one of the boys taken he gave a bit of an off reply saying that he had been sick. Jessie and I are not exactly sure that his story matches up or sounds completely rightso she is going to talk with him more today to see if there is anything else that he wants to tell us.

We know 4 boys were taken, 2 for sure (mukenya and Nicholas, the youngest) that have not been seen or heard of since and 1 who we thought was kidnapped but seems not to be. There is a streetboy named Fupi (another very young street boy) who saw everything happen and knows the names of all the kids but we have yet to be able to track him down in Kisenyi to find out the names of the other boys although we have been trying everyday.

What we do know is that Friday nioght at 3 in the morning 2 westerners,1 man and 1 female (which makes it seem even more like a set up to steal kids) and 1 Ugandan came into Kisenyi (one of the largest and most dangerous slums in Kampala). They were new to the community (which is also dangerous, you are not allowed to go into Kisenyi without the chairmans consent if you are not with someone who is living/involved there) and the kids said that they had never seen them before. I wish you guys could see Kisenyi, especially lately it has gotten so much worse, it is a place that even Ugandans do not go in the middle of the day. It is a very violent and oppressive night. POlice officers do not even go there in small groups at night because they get beaten up. Anyways, they gave out candy and bread to the kids (yes in the middle of the night) and then tried to snatch one of our 5 or 6 year olds, Sharrif. Sharrif is incredibly scrappy and a huge fighter, he fought them off and ran but watched as they carried off his sleeping best friend Nicholas. Nicholas is around 6 years old and a huge sweetheart. He is perpetually sick or tired and is very timid and shy. He is a sweet boy and not someone who would even be able to resist someone taking him because he has about the same amount of strength as a rabbit. He was one of the boys who was supposed to move into our house just 11 hours later. The other boy who was taken was a boy named Mukenya (Who was going to be in our house until we didn't see him in our programs and we had to give his spot away sense we never saw him). Mukenya is another boy who is so sweet and endearing. He is very smart and has a huge fear of abandonment and being left behind. I love him so much and was very close to him. It is especially hard for me that he was taken because Mukenya was a boy that I was very, very close to until he got, "too" close to me and got scared that I would leave him. There was a few times that he had misunderstood something that was said and thought that I was leaving, and he would begin to cry and get upset until it was explained to him that he had misunderstood./ Without any reason he stopped coming to our programs and being really moody. I gave him space because I just knew that eventually he would come around and see that I had never left him and was still right there for him as I had always been. But he was taken before that could happen. I wont get to restore the relationship with this boy that I love so much. There were 2 other boys that were also taken. They were put into a car and driven away. We have yet to discover who the other 2 boys are although we are sure that we know them and that they are in our programs. There are hundreds of street children that sleep in that slum and because we have so man kids in our programs and because street kids are constantly put into prison, moving around, getting sick and holing up somewhere for sometime and simply going missing there is no way for us to guess which kids they were simply by looking at which kids are not around anymore.

We have reported the incident to the police and chairman but know they are not going to do anything, police here don't care very much for a group of street children that end up missing.

All of the uncles we work with love the kids sooo much, and are always very optimistic about everything, they always believe anything is possible. When I asked them if they thought we would ever see Nicholas or Mukenya again, they just got really sad and said, "no... we wont..."

What is so hard for me is all of the uncertainty. I will never know what happened to them, whether they were sold, or sacrificed, or escaped. It is also so hard for me not knowing what other two boys were taken as well because we definitely knew them.

Every week we have kids that disapear from our programs, they are usually put in prison, they come everyday and then one day we never see them again.

Around the same time last week someone that lives in the community we work in said that there were 6 kids that had been grabbed by city council and were going to be put in prison that were crying out for me and asking me to come get them out. Jessie, Pastor Nelson, and Abbey (an amazing social we work with from Grace Church) went to the prison on Monday. The thing was that we had not been told the names of the kids that were asking for us and over the last two weeks we had SO many kids that had also disappeared. We went to the prison and found one boy and got a list of a few boys that had been taken to different places but we weren't able to figure out which boys they had in the prison and the man wouldn't tell us (because ALL the kids go by nicknames or different names, we know very few of the boys real FULL names which was what we needed, we have a list of them but the man wouldn't go through them and let us know). We knew that one of the boys as well was very young and had been asking for me, I could think of several boys that he could be. The kids go to sentencing at several different courts so we wouldn't have been able to know where they would be to speak for them because we wouldn't have known where they would be.

It hurt me so badly to know that there were kids that had been depending on me to get them out of prison and I completely failed them. I couldn't help but feel so discouraged when we were sitting on the car on the way back thinking of all the kids that I have fallen in love with since being here that have disappeared and I have no idea where they are. It made everything so real and final. All those kids that disappear I had just been hoping they would come back and telling myself that they were around and that they would return eventually when the reality is... they wont (and they don't). They are gone. I cant help but picture their faces in my mind... boys that just disappeared. I will never know what happened to Charles, and Robert, and Derek, and Mukenya, and Nicholas, and Sobote...

I appreciate so much the prayers of everyone for my kids that were kidnapped. I know that God can work miracles, and in fact He may have already done so with William, we are not sure yet. I am praying for it constantly that God will move in an incredible way. I am not giving up hope. it has just woken me up to the fact that the many, many kids that I had fallen in love with, noticed they were missing and was simply waiting for them to come back are most likely not coming. It is a grieving process for me for more than simply the kids that were stolen. It has been really hard for me. I know that God is a big God and that He is with them and experiences everything that they do. I do not feel hopeless just immensely sad and overwhelmed with the evil and suffering that I am surrounded by in my ministry to street kids.

Thank you so much for supporting me and for all of your encouragement, it has meant the world to me. I am so blessed by how many have come around me and my ministry and Jessie and our kids to pray

I love you all

Abby