Last week, the Commander of Land Forces in Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) Lt. Gen. Peter Elweru said that people who constantly complain of poverty in their communities should be arrested, for they have fertile soils which they can use for agriculture and change their situation.
In Scotland, a mother has had enough of her two children’s complaints about their perceived poverty, but she is not putting them up for arrest. Instead, she decided to bring them to Uganda to show them what real poverty looks like, and in turn be grateful for all they have.
Ziz York, a Scottish working with Charity Organisation Teams4U said her two daughters Nia and Robyn kept on complaining about how poor they were for not possessing and Xbox game console and not going to Disney World.
“Before we went to Uganda, my daughters had been complaining ‘Oh, we’re so poor’ because they’d seen friends get holidays to Disney World or getting an Xbox for their birthdays and stuff like that. I turned round and said ‘You have a roof over your head, we have loose change in our pockets, we can buy pretty much what we want in a supermarket, you have freedom of movement, we are in the top five per cent richest in the world’,” Ziz narrated, according to British news site The Sun.
What she did was to put them on a plane and flew them all the way to the Pearl of Africa to see children who had no clothes or shoes on, plus the malnourished, and it was ‘mind-blowing’ for them.
“We do live in a suburban bubble, so Uganda was mind-blowing for them. I think the biggest eye-opener for them was just the lack of clothing. They were seeing children that were a quarter dressed because their clothes were that ragged. They saw the lack of basic supplies we take for granted,” Ziz said.
As State Minister for Foreign Affairs Henry Okello once said that bad roads in Uganda can be used for tourism, poverty is already being used as a lesson to learn gratitude. Uganda is a gift that keeps giving.