Trip to Uganda: Transformative visit?

You know that feeling when something suddenly changes inside of you, some people call it transformation, I'm not exactly sure what to call it, but today it happened for me.

I was invited to visit the Life Day and Boarding School and Code High School in Seeta, Uganda. The school was started by Christian Life Church. Pastor Senyonga Jackson. He spoke at a Church in Raleigh about 10 years ago, and he met Dr. Michael Haglund, a neurosurgeon and professor at Duke. Together, they came up with a plan to offer surgery, training and medical equipment to hospitals here in Uganda. The Duke Global Neurosurgery and Neuroscience program has been operating here in Kampala now for a decade. They send a team of medical professionals twice a year.

Today, we visited the school with medical student, Phil Walker, who is part of the Duke team this week. To say we were overwhelmed by what we saw would be an understatement. We drove down a long, rutted dirt road with visible poverty lining our journey. But when we arrived at the school, a sprawling campus of concrete classroom buildings nestled in a green pasture, dorms, we found not poverty, but joy.

The school is home to 863 children – about half are orphans, the others come from single-parent homes, or homes with the families who cannot afford to raise them. The children all wear uniforms, are impeccably disciplined, and walk around with huge smiles on their faces. They stand and greet you formally when you enter their classroom, and if you take the time to speak with them, they will eagerly give you a hug at the end of your conversation.

The best part of our day was the chapel service where hundreds of students from the primary school danced and sang religious songs along with their classmates who were leading the festivities. Standing in that concrete room, with hundreds of kids singing at the top of their lungs, waving their arms, and dancing with huge smiles on their faces, I just couldn't imagine anything more joyful.

Team leader, Betty Nansiri, graciously allowed us to tour the campus, and enter classrooms with candy to give out. Instead of the chaos you might expect, each child sat respectfully and waited for their piece of candy, and all offered a polite "thank you" in return.

Today, the students in the high school were taking their final exams. Many of them will go on to college or vocational schools. I interviewed a young man named Moses who hopes to be a doctor one day and says without the school he would never have gotten to this point in his educational journey.

In Uganda, there is no public school. All schools cost money. This means many children can't go to school. '

This school is free to the children: 100 percent of their tuition, room and board is paid for by private donations.

Many of those donations come from American sponsors.

There's no doubt, their conditions are humble – they have no running water. Each child is given a bucket to go to the water tank to fill up and use for bathing and brushing teeth.

Food is prepared in a makeshift kitchen in a concrete hut in a big vat with a wooden ladle, then carried in a bucket in a wheelbarrow to the dining area.

The children sleep 14 in bunkbeds in a small house with one adult to monitor them. The 83 houses on campus line a typical African dusty dirt and gravel path. Wet clothing hangs on laundry lines in front of each home. But even when you see all of this, you hear the laughter of the children walking or sitting in groups on the front stoops a each house. See how respectfully they react when adults speak to them or ask them to do something.

Suddenly, you don't see poverty, only love.

Today convinced me this may not be my last trip to Africa. Africa changes you...