Sunday, July 19, 2009

Woops

It's been a bit long....

Could I say "nothing to report" and get away with it without telling a lie? Well, no. It's obviously been pretty busy so all that either of us can do is say, "woops, sorry" for the lack of updates. Let's try and run things down:

Family Team - 27 people
We bought a new truck
Fish Farm Install Crew - 2 people
Hired a Full-Time guy for SODIS
Mpigi Team - 17 people (ish)
Fixed 4 boreholes
Jeff's Cousins and a PA Student - 3 people

Now, I'd lie (again) if I said I had any remote semblance of responsibility with any of the visitors (I did get to have fun buying the truck at least), so I'm not going to try and look like a hero for organising those throngs of people. A huge thanks to everyone else but me for getting everything organised and ready for all of these people, namely the Dycks for Kibaale, Brent, Cheryl, Morgan and Anna for Mpigi, our big boss Jon Imbeau for the fish farm crew (and everything else he does), and Jeff's Aunt and Uncle for the cousins (haha). Thanks to Cassie for making her way over here from PA to visit us again. We're blessed to be visited.

So, despite a lack of preparing for arrival (speaking for myself, Sean, only), we did get the full benefit of having these visitors around. It has been just awesome talking with people from back home and seeing what my skin could possibly look like without dirt caked and embedded all the way into the subcutaneous layer. Honestly though it has been so good seeing people pumped up about Africa and making sacrifices to come over here and help out however they can. And they sure did - someone has a new house built, lots of sponsored kids got to meet their sponsors in person (think about that... how cool is that?!?), needy people in the community have some gifts and were able to receive prayer and love from others who genuinely cared enough to fly over and show it. Lots more too - all very very cool. All the teams did great work and were a pleasure to have. I hope if you guys are reading this you were able to take away some life changing experiences! Uganda can do that :)

In other news, it is now very lonely here. Everyone has left. Rachel has left to Kampala to give Paul and Megan, our new coworkers working with the Timothy Centre in Masaka about an hour away, a tour of the big city and helping them pick up some groceries and stuff like that... the first time in Kampala is pretty overwhelming. Picture real life Frogger combined with Carmageddon, throw in some AK47's with your pizza, and the ability to buy children's life preservers from Habib on the street while waiting for Licky Calmichael to pick his motorcycle up off the pavement and that's Kampala. Jeff & Shannon are dropping and picking people from the airport. I spent the latter half of the day sweeping puke from the sidewalk due to sick children. Jamie and I reorganized the house saturday leading me to endlessly quote Will Ferrel from Old School in my head and secretly smack myself when Jamie wasn't looking (actually, it wasn't that bad - the place looks better now, and I probably led the charge on the project). We haven't had rain in ages and are out of water, pumping it from the borehole to flush toilets, wash dishes, and sweep puke from the sidewalk. Yeah, so, another weekend in Ug actually.

I hope that we can do a bit more posting than we have been. And hopefully we haven't lost everyone who used to read. We're still here!

PS - Oh yeah. I broke out my tooth. Minor detail.

Some pics of the babble above for all you cliff-noters:

From Woops

The Family Team givin'er at church

From Woops

KCC's new truck, "the dominant ruler"

From Woops

Tim and Geraldine from H20 4 All with Elkanah, our farm manager, hooking up tanks for the new fish farm, and experimenting with the human hamster wheel

From Woops

Yobu, our SODIS dude

From Woops

Some of the Mpigi team, and Jamie's cute head

From Woops

Confused Chameleons!

From Woops

My "toof" as it looks while at church

From Woops

Jamie, and a kid after sugar-cane

From Woops

Really?