Something small like plastic

What do you have to share?

Many, many nights here during rainy season are cold and rainy. The storms come on quickly, are very powerful, and then they taper off.

Because it rains at least once a day during this time of the year, it is hard for people who "dry" things for a living, to get anything done. The example I'm thinking of is "thatch." Most people here live in a thatched hut like this.

They need to re-grass their roof sometimes as often as once a year.

Alice, my houseworker, often walks to work in the rain, with Sarah on her back. She would tell me of the cold, wet night. She told me her roof was leaking in many places, but that there was no grass anywhere to fix it.

Can you imagine you and your family, including a new born, trying to sleep through rain storms night after night, while your bed, sheets, floors, etc. have water dripping on them?

I kept trying to think of solutions for her because that's what we do– we Americans problem solve and try to fix things. But she kept saying since no grass was available; it couldn't be fixed until dry season. She was very matter-of-fact about it, until…

Doug started constructing the crates into storage, and he ran across a large sheet of plastic that had been used to ship our mattress in. He took old pieces of cardboard and that plastic down to the trash pile.

Patrick (our watchman) and Alice (our house worker) went down to gather these treasures. Patrick wanted to use the cardboard for a fire-starter, and Alice took the plastic to "fix" her room for the time being.

Her face was priceless the next morning. She had had a dry night after her husband fit the plastic on the roof. I don't know how they did it (I should probably go see), but it gives me peace knowing during the rain tonight, she will be protected.

How many other families out there are getting wet night after night? How many babies are sitting under a drip, catching cold and getting sick? This is a reality I'm sure of, I just don't know who they are.

We didn't even know that the plastic would be such a blessing. What gifts and talents are you throwing away because you don't think they would be of use to anyone? God wouldn't have given them to you if He didn't intend for you to use them for His glory somehow.

What can you do with your own "plastic sheeting?"

Blessed to have and not to have

We really are blessed by you in so many ways. Thank you to all of you who send words of encouragement, care packages, emails, birthday, and Christmas gifts.

It has blessed my heart that my children can receive happies from you, but at the same time know that there are certain things they can't just run to the store and buy.

Recently, we started watching the X-men cartoons with the kids. Caleb is really into super heroes anyway, and to balance out the number of Barbie and princess movies we see, we decided to help the boy out.

Of course, like any good American kid, Caleb wanted a Wolverine costume as soon as he saw the show, and he wanted all the action figures he could get his hands on.

Well, there is no Wal-mart within spittin', shootin', or drivin' distance, so his sister Karis got creative.

She asked me to make her some paper dolls, and she started coloring them into different X-men. After a while, she was special ordering them from me so they would have a specific shape.

These were some of her first: Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Night Crawler, Cyclops, and Professor X (who still needs to be colored).

Then she got braver, and asked for more detail from me:

Juggernaut (which she has self-declared "Bad" on his chest), Beast, Colossus, Shadow Cat, Jean Gray, and Ice Man.

So far, Juggernaut is the only "bad" one, but I'm sure there are more to come.

I just wonder if she would have thought to do this for Caleb if there had been a Wal-mart nearby?

I live in a high school football game

I loved going to my high school’s football games. In fact, I love any high school football game. I love the feel of the air on a crisp, cool night (although most nights in Yoakum were more “sticky” than “crisp”); I love the excitement; I love the encouragement that the whole town gives to those young students; and I love hearing the band, especially the drums.

I kind of mourn the fact that my kids aren’t growing up going to high school football games, but then I realized, we sort of live in a “perpetual game” here in Arua.

*On any given day, I can hear drums beating. I don’t know where they originate, but I like it.

*Popcorn is for sale in little plastic bags all around Arua. It is a popular snack for all school children.

*Ladies all over town have their "assigned seat" for where they sell their "goods."

*For political rallies, weddings, or advertising, LOADS of people will get in the back of a truck and ride around town whooping and hollering with music blaring from a bullhorn.

*Football (soccer) games are a common occurrence around town, and I can hear the crowds yelling for their local team as they play.

*Some of the streets look as polluted as the underside of a football stadium.

*And children run around without adult supervision all day long.

So maybe I’ll look at the bright side: An American football game won’t be so foreign to them when they finally see one. They will recognize several parts of it just from living in Arua.

The heat is on

NOTE: This was originally on the bottom of the previous post. I've added a few things, but not that much, so if you got the last one, feel free to pass this up.


The heat here is quite amazing during dry season (end of Nov - April/May).

That illustrious time is sneaking up on us this month and will be in full-force by the beginning of December.

I said several times before moving here, “I can handle the heat in Uganda. I’ve lived in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and it’s hotter in those places than here in Arua...trust me!”

Well...all that is true, BUT, I forgot to think of one small difference.

In the States I had air conditioned to run to at any point in time.

Homes, Wal-mart, church, post office, restaurants, etc.

No, no, no, no, no to all of the above.

I now grocery shop with big sweat rings on my shirt, I mail letters with water dripping off my face; I eat using my napkin for my sweat instead of for my mouth; church is nearly unbearable with all those people so close together.

Anyway, you get the point.

There is no relief except our vehicle which has a bless-ed air conditioner. We usually only drive it one day a week to take the kids to the pool, and when we get in the car, and the kids ask if they can roll the windows down, Doug and I quickly and simultaneously say, "No," during dry season because we just want to have a little taste of that coolness in the vents.

Thank Jesus the hot/dry season is only half a year or else God and I might be having a talk about whether or not He REALLY called me here.

I'm also thanking Jesus that my solar might actually be hooked up soon, because that will mean we can run fans at night when the power for the city goes off. We haven't really needed a fan at night since April, excepting a couple of times. But come December, I want that thing to be able to blow all it can after 11pm.

As a side note...I've been reading my friends’ blogs in India, and the heat there sounds even worse during their dry season – add humidity to it. Yuck! I’ll take a dry heat over a humid heat any day!

Wondering about life here?

I spent the whole year before coming here doing that, too.

Every time I turned on running water, I would think, “Will I have running water? Even if I do, it won’t be clean.”

Every time I unloaded the dishwasher, I thought, “How will I manage washing dishes by hand for the next three years?”

When I took my clothes out of the dryer, I would think, “Oh, how I’ll miss this soft feeling compared to clothes drying in the sun.”

Anyway, the list went on and on, but now that I’m here, those things aren’t a big deal – thankfully.

I wash dishes every day, and I rarely mourn the fact that I don’t have a dishwasher.

I do have a tap in my kitchen – one - for cold water, so getting grease off things is hard. I have to heat water on the stove (no microwave) to help sometime, but it's not a big deal.

I thought I would see all these things as inconveniences, and I don’t. Weird.

My friend suggested I pray for extra “umph,” while living here.

Not a bad idea.


Other things broke my heart before coming to Arua a lot more than not having hot water.

I still wish Kylie could dance.

I wish they could do all the school stuff.

I wish they could go to AWANAs, VBS, and camps etc.

I want to be closer to family.

I don't want my kids to get malaria.

You get the point...

But since God called us here, I have to know that this is the plan for their lives, too, and He’s shaping them into something special that He had planned long ago.

My kids are pretty tough, and I'm so proud of the way they've adjusted these past months.

I know on Sundays when they sit through a 2-hour service with no English spoken, it must get really frustrating and wear them out.

During the service, after we sit down, children flock to sit beside us (scrunching us, seriously), in front of us, and behind us.

Kids play with their hair behind them or lean over to see what they are drawing. The kids in front, don’t pay attention to anything except my kids because they are turned around backwards the whole time. And the kids next to us are always asking to see my Bible, mechanical pencil, or some other “novelty.”

I’m trying to interpret Lugbara the whole time, so after using my brain so much and having all this activity around me, I am worn out after church, too.

These are all adjustments, but you just get used to them.

I see how other people live around me, and I'm thankful for that one tap in my kitchen. Others around me carry a jerri can to the bore hole and then haul the water to their house - every day.

I have a fan in my house that can cool me off on a hot day. Most people here don't even have electricity, much less a fan.

Sun-dried clothes aren't as crisp as I thought they would be, and I have a wonderful clothes line to hang them on. My neighbors put their clothes on their roof, in trees, and on barb-wired fences.

Perspective is a funny thing.

Small things I notice every day, but I forget to mention

***Not only do we drive on the left side of the road here, the controls on the steering wheel are backward, too. I’ve only driven six times, but every one of those times when I wanted to turn my blinker on, I ended up turning on my windshield wipers.

Blinkers are another story altogether. When you are behind someone, they will put their left blinker on if it is safe to pass, and their right blinker if they advise against it (if you want to trust them).



***On the very hottest day, and any given time, there will be several young people in town with hoodies on. I cringe thinking about the heat they must be feeling, but I realize that since they only have a thin covering of hair on their heads (most of them), the hoodies protect them from the sun.

I never see them wearing sun glasses because the sun is absorbed into their skin instead of reflecting off of it. And babies are always tied to their mother’s backs with thick, wool blankets. They deal with heat in a very different way than me. I just sweat and sweat some more.



***If you break down on the road somewhere, the protocol is to break limbs off of a tree and put limbs several yards in front and behind your vehicle. You don’t have to try to pull off the road (most never even consider it). They just park right in your lane, and you come around a corner, and BOOM, there they are. I would love to know statistics on how many accidents occur because of stalled and broken vehicles on the road.



***When you are riding on a motorcycle and the road changes to a slope down, the driver will turn off his engine and coast…every time. When we start climbing again, he will crank back up and keep going. They assume it saves gas (because they don’t know it uses more gas to start up your engine than just coast in a lower gear).

As a fun side note (and I read this same thing takes place where my friends are in Nepal), drivers don’t run their lights at night on their vehicles because they believe leaving your lights on will run down the battery. Thankfully, sometimes when you are passing them, they will flash their lights to let you know they are there.

What do they think lights are for on a car? And can’t you imagine how silly they think we are for continually keeping them on?



***I helped Alice, my house worker, one day go collect some money from Western Union. She needed me to verify some amounts for the teller. She had her baby Sarah on her back, so she asked me to stand in line for her. I am not kidding, I was only four feet from the counter, and I counted 16 people in front of me. “Personal space” is not a concept here.
People here do not like a crying baby. When Sarah started crying on Alice’s back, they wanted her out of the bank so badly they let her ask for her money by sticking her arm in from the side in front of all those 16 people. I quickly got out of line.

People here expect the mother to “feed” it right away to get it to stop crying. Alice told me that her sister-in-law was beaten the other day in town because her baby wouldn’t stop crying. I don’t know if it’s true, but I do remember how anxious all those people were for Alice to go first and get out as fast as possible.



***I will forever be surprised at the kinds of things that are transported by motorcycle here. I have seen beds, tables, shelves, pigs, chickens, goats, mattresses, you name it. It is quite amazing what all they can carry on the back of those things.



***I smelled fresh cut grass the other day. It was such a blessing. I stood in the road for a while and just watched this man weed-eat a whole section of grass so I could smell it. My yard gets “cut” every week by a man with a hand slasher (and so does everyone elses), so it was a real treat to smell grass being cut by a motorized contraption. It really makes a difference for the smell. Go figure.

Driving legal in Uganda

Driving in Uganda.

You will never catch me driving in Kampala, but I have managed to drive in Arua six different times since January.

It’s not the driving on the left side of the road that is the problem, it’s the other people and motorists. I can’t and won’t even begin to explain this.

In Kampala, specifically, is some of the worst driving I’ve ever seen. Experiencing my sister driving in Tel Aviv, Israel, was pretty bad, if I remember correctly, but Kampala ranks right up there with the worst. I think there are even videos on You Tube of Kampala traffic you can see for yourself

Anyway, I had to get my driver’s license the other day, so I inquired about it from a couple that has lived here a little longer than us. They said it was just a small process.

We would have to pick up forms, go get a medical exam and get “cleared” by a physician, then go back for pictures. Not bad, and even better since rules are fluid here, and our friends went to pick up the forms for us, and convinced the employee that we were healthy and he could wave the medical examination. Cool, right?

The forms we had to fill out had numerous questions about whether or not we had amputated limbs or had seizures or mental issues, so we did our own medical examination, of sorts.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling this story is because of the photo process. Doug went first, and the man took a couple of pictures of Doug, got his fingerprints, his signature, and he was finished.

I sat down for my picture, and he took one, then he took another, then he took another. Then he closed the curtains and took one, and then he took another. Then he had Doug hold up a sheet beside me and took one and then another.

Side note: I’m a counter. I love numbers. I count tiles in the bathroom; I count dots on the ceiling when I’m in the dentist’s chair; I count reflectors on the road; I count stairs. You get the point...I’m weird. So, you know, I counted the number of pictures that man took of me. THIRTEEN.

I don’t know how Doug got by so easily, but apparently his camera is set on a “darker” setting, and my skin color was making my face show up like a light show. He couldn’t get the room dark enough, and I don’t know if he didn’t know how to change the settings, but he finally succeeded in getting a decent picture.

Glamour shots Uganda style.

A visit to ORA

We went to ORA (Orphans Refugees Aid) today for a birthday party for Leejay, who turned 5

and his sister, Lucy, who turned 2.

Their family is from New Zealand, and they work for the ORA organization here in Arua. It provides foster care for orphans instead of having an orphanage.

They live in a house on the base with no electricity, no running water, no oven, one small sink, and a long drop toilet, etc. (and they are truly happy, blessed people) They are amazing.

They are here for just a little while longer. They came for about 6 months to check on everything that they had built and organized three years ago.

Look at this beautiful mural Kim painted inside the piat three years ago.

Kim is also a nurse, and wouldn't you know it? Caleb needed some attention today. He seems to be drawn to nurses...

I wish you could see some of the wounds Kim has treated here and kids she has helped. One boy last week came with severe burns on his arm that his mother had wrapped in rabbit fur. It took her hours to clean the fur out of the wound. Here's what she wrote about it:

"So many kids around here die from burns like these that are either not treated or inappropriately treated with traditional local village beliefs, like covering them with dead animal skin or urinating on them (yes you read that right. There is a belief by some people in this culture that if you urinate on a burn regularly it will heal it!!!) There are also many kids that have badly disfigured limbs or huge lumpy scars from burns that were not treated properly. So to know I am making a difference in at least Jonahs wee life makes every moment of our time here worthwhile."

If you want to see a "during" and "after" photo, look here, and scroll down past the giraffe and lion pictures, and you'll see the picture. She is an amazing lady.

All the children got together inside the piat to play a game.

During the scavenger hunt, I only thought it was a little crazy, until...

I realized that Sam (Lucy and Leejay's dad) put one of the clues on himself!

I've definitely never seen that before.

The kids loved tackling him.

Sam is very handy. He built this swing set last month. Over 100 children come each weekend and hang out on their compound, so it gives the kids something to do.

He also designed a jeri can shower so his wife can have a shower instead of having to cup water over her head from a basin. This is a guy who truly knows how to love his wife.

I hope they will return again soon to check on ORA. They are a sweet family, and we love having them around.

...Plus, New Zealanders have such a cool accent! :)

Americans and their storage

Our crates arrived back in June, but we weren't sure if we had any projects around the house that needed the wood from them, so they remained on the carport intact.

Doug decided we could make them into storage. They were already half built, right?

He built two piano dollies (that project alone took a whole day because he had to find wood and wheels in town), and then he bought cinder blocks. I only assisted him a little, and my strong man moved the crates and put them up on blocks. That all took place in August.

Last week, he bought materials for framing, a door, a covering, etc.

He attached three of our crates together, and cut doors in the two walls. You can see the doors right here, if you know what you are looking at. Kylie's head is "in" one.

Once our inverter gets here from the States, we will be able to put the final wall on.

That seems funny, but the wood for the walls is on top of the roof covering the solar panels. We were told it's not good for the panels to be getting full sun when they aren't able to charge the batteries.

The crazy thing is that we don't have that much stuff, but yet, storage is needed. Why do Americans always seem to have more than enough - us included?

We are going to put suitcases, bicycles, and empty boxes from unpacking out here so that our "garage" that was originally going to be a school room can be an office, of sorts. The kids prefer to do school in the living room.

So here we are, in Africa, representing America well with our "storage shed."

Dispicable Me

Warning: This is one of those posts that only grandparents will care about.

Kelli and Alissa left a box of chalk here for my kids when they left, and my kids decided to use them to the fullest.

Here are some of the fruits of their labor after four hours!

Caleb with Missing Link, Ginormica, and B.O.B. from "Monsters vs. Aliens."

Karis's re-creation of "Dispicable Me."

And Kylie's...

Karis' armless Snow White.

Kylie's armless Snow White

Caleb's "Sleeping Beauty."

There was so much more, but you get the point.

Then...

It rained.

They didn't even care. They went out the next day for four or more hours, and went at it again.

Caleb's "Monsters vs. Aliens"

Kylie's "Monsters vs. Aliens

Kylie's "Dispicable Me"

Karis' "Monsters vs. Aliens"

Patrick, our watchmen, even got involved.

When our other watchman, Jeremiah, arrived, he drew some pictures, too.

These guys are great - especially with our kids.

When Jeremiah came in the gate yesterday on his bike, Kylie asked him to ride with her for a minute, and he took a couple of spins around the driveway with her.

Well, this was after the efforts of three days.

Yesterday, I went to the "office supply" store and bought another whole box for $1.00. You can't beat that for entertainment.

Batman

Doug got a call from our one remaining journeygirl a few mornings ago to say she hadn't slept well.

The reason being was that a bat had somehow found its way into her room and became quite lively during the night.

She finally located it hiding on a bottom shelf in her room.

It's that yellowish-looking thing attached to the wooden wall in the picture below.

This is after the Tupperware container that was next to it had been removed.

He was a tiny little sucker.

My heroic "batman" came to the rescue with his own set of Tupperware.

I think every good super hero should be armed with Tupperware (but don't let Doug know I said that)

Cute, huh?

Kampala

Our trip to Kampala was not for re-stocking, so instead of running around looking for what we needed, we got to have little fun exploring.

In one store, I found this...so I bought it.



It was really good, especially when served over ICE. Our friends the Skuza's in Kampala have a freezer cold enough to make ice because they don't lose electricity at night. It was so nice.













The next day, we found a store with this...












I will confess right now, that we spent way too much money on Dr. Pepper, but you must know that this was the first one we had seen since before we boarded the plane in Houston, January 4th.

That's really a bad excuse, but that's all I've got.

Each can was $1.65.

We bought 3 for everyone, and would probably do it again given the chance.

We carried them back to Arua, and we are using them sparingly.

The sad part is that I thought Dr. Stripes was just as good as Dr. Pepper.

Doug says that is blasphemous to say, but I just think it's sad because maybe I've lost my taste for it.

The good news is I found this, too.

It was heavenly, and so much cheaper than Starbucks.

Let me tell you another reason we had time to leisurely look around for these luxury items...

Doug and I were on a date. For real.

Lynn and Jan Skuza kept Karis and Caleb, fed them and played Uno. Sandra took Kylie with her and some other ladies to the Ndere Center where Kylie watched again the dance show we had taken her to in June.

This one.















And this...I have no words for...

Our reason for going to Kampala was to take Kelli and Alissa to the airport. Stan and Pam blessed us before they left for America by giving us money to take the girls out for steaks. They chose to eat at Spur, and the steaks were really good.

There is even a trampoline inside for the kids to play with.

Another treat was getting to go to the movies for the first time since Zambia in May. An appropriate movie happened to be showing, so we went. You will see evidence of the kids having watched "Dispicable Me" in a later post.