EVERETT — Clara Anderson has only been back on U.S. soil for a few weeks.
Already, the 4-year-old is asking when she can go back home to the orphanage in Uganda.
Clara and her family left Arlington two years ago to live and work in an eastern African village.
Tonight, the Anderson family plans to talk about their experiences at a presentation in Everett. They plan to return to the village next month near Kampala, Uganda’s capital. Tyler and Kim Anderson, Clara’s parents, hope their story told tonight and elsewhere around the Northwest inspires others to follow them.
Tyler Anderson said there’s a need for people with a range of skills — from doctors and nurses to construction workers and teachers — for short- and long-term mission trips.
“We need people, people to do the work and people to train others,” Anderson said. “The whole point is to train the kids — kids who have no parents — to raise them up to take care of their own.”
More than 31 million people, mostly subsistence farmers, live in Uganda, a landlocked country slightly smaller than Oregon. The equator threads through its southern edge. By contrast, Oregon’s population is 3.7 million.
According to the “CIA World Fact Book,” more than half of Ugandans are younger than 15. And Uganda has few safety nets — no welfare, unemployment or other programs — to help if a family member dies or can no longer work, Anderson said.
Many children have lost their parents to AIDS, malaria, war and other calamities. That has left more than 2 million children — 15 percent of the population — orphaned.
In 2006, Tyler Anderson was a physician’s assistant at Cascade Family Medical Group in Arlington when he learned more about Uganda’s plight.
The Andersons, who attended the Word of Life Church in Marysville, heard a presentation at a Bible retreat by the Rafiki Foundation about children living on the streets of Uganda.
At the time, the eldest of the Andersons’ four children was 8. Imagining children that young living on the streets changed everything for the Andersons, Kim Anderson said. That summer, the couple sold their home and moved to Africa.
At the orphanage, Tyler Anderson, 39, serves as the medical director and Kim Anderson, 38, is a first-grade teacher. Together they care for roughly 135 people, including the orphans and support staff.
After hearing their story, Annie Somers, who also attends Word of Life Church, got involved with the Rafiki Foundation and now is a member of the Northwest area team. She is coordinating the Andersons’ U.S. visit. She praised Tyler Anderson for helping with the orphans.
“In March, about 70 of the orphans got chicken pox,” Somers said. Tyler Anderson was able to deal with the outbreak without any complications, she said.
The Rafiki Orphan Village Uganda sits on about 50 acres. It is one of 10 villages set up in 10 of Africa’s poorest countries by the Rafiki Foundation, an interdenominational, nonprofit organization.
The village has electricity and running water. There are cottages, a dining hall, a medical clinic and a playground with a jungle gym, teeter-totter and swings. There’s a play field for soccer and a cement pad for basketball. There’s also a garden tended by Ugandan women who live at the orphanage serving as surrogate mothers.
Everyone sleeps inside at night under nets treated with repellent to fight mosquitoes, which spread malaria. Outside the orphanage, most people can’t afford the nets, so malaria is a common killer.
The Anderson children have spent the past two years eating, playing and learning alongside Ugandan children and learning the language.
In the Ugandan culture, people don’t usually eat breakfast, Tyler Anderson said. At the orphanage, though, breakfast consists of eggs, pancakes, fruit and milk.
It’s another way Anderson’s team is helping to fight one of the scourges of Uganda, a type of malnutrition caused by a lack of protein in their diet.
Uganda is a study in contradictions. It’s a fertile land with rich soil, plenty of sunshine and enough rain to give it a year-round growing season. Yet most of the people are malnourished because their diet consists almost entirely of carbohydrates, with little or no protein.
“It’s not unusual for people to eat meat only at Easter or Christmas,” Tyler Anderson said.
Uganda is also one of the only African nations that has reduced its new AIDS cases by almost half. Yet at the same time, its numbers of orphans have increased.
To some, Uganda’s challenges and contradictions would be overwhelming, but not for Anderson, who said his faith in God is what’s sending him back to Africa.
“The problems are the same, they’re just packaged differently,” he said.
Before their trip to Africa, the Anderson family had never traveled farther from their Washington home than Iowa. Now, they hope others will join them on an adventure in a land more than 8,000 miles away.
Reporter Leita Hermanson Crossfield: 425-339-3449 or lcrossfield@heraldnet.com.
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