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On a mission to Uganda, then coronavirus threatened her return
PSEA Retired member Maggie Beall Orosz had been in a remote, poverty-stricken area of Uganda for more than two weeks when airports everywhere began halting international travel. Coronavirus closures were sweeping the globe. If Beall Orosz and the dozen or so other Pennsylvanians in her missionary group didn’t leave immediately, they risked getting stuck in Uganda indefinitely.
Not that Beall Orosz was eager to leave the children and families she’d been helping day in and day out in the villages of the Hoima District. But PSEA colleagues stood up and helped ensure that she could get home safely.
The main purpose of the trip was to advocate for clean water well production. But as part of the medical team, Beall Orosz did everything from teaching basic hygiene to stocking local clinics with critical supplies to treating the locals for parasitic infections. The desperation she witnessed was incredibly impactful, and she feels they did some real good there, including getting three more wells built that will deliver clean water to 3,000 people.
She fought back tears as she recounted their experience visiting refugees who had been violently ejected from their land by a wealthy sugarcane plantation owner.
“There were, I would say, maybe 500 people pressing in on us who have one outfit – normally they're unclothed – who came to greet us with song and dance and hope in their eyes. And we brought them 50-pound bags of grain. They had no food. They're starving and they have no healthcare, no well. They're sleeping on the ground.”
When news of coronavirus broke, and things began heating up at home and abroad, Beall Orosz and her group knew it was time to say goodbye to their Ugandan friends.
Immediately they began to hit snags.
“We were supposed to go from Entebbe, Uganda, to Brussels, Belgium, and then to the USA, to Washington, D.C., and then drive home,” she said. “But the Belgium airport was closed, we couldn't get back through there. And then they changed our flight several more times.”
Meanwhile, Beall Orosz, a former senior director for NEA, reached out to her colleagues there to, “ask for their prayers for a safe return to the United States.”
Unbeknownst to her, her former NEA colleagues reached out to Congressman Mike Kelly, who is from Beall Orosz’s hometown and was her lobby assignment when she was serving as NEA director. In short order, Beall Orosz was getting requests for updates on her groups’ flight status from the congressman’s office with an offer to help if they got into any trouble.
Eventually they made it back home after rerouting through Addis Abba, Ethiopia, even as they met others whose flights had been canceled entirely.
“This was after President Trump's announcement that ‘you either come home now or plan to stay,’” she said. “And it was such a blessing to have that backup, because we were starting to feel a little bit abandoned by the United States.”
