Week 8!!!

Week 8. Time files when you are having fun.

10-8-10
Get a nice morning wake up to the sound of a rat in our ceiling. So what do Tom and I do, sleep till morning. After breakfast we talk to Mike a bit because it is really quiet around here with all the workers being gone for the holiday. (Ugandan Independence October 9th) Mike tells us about his life his life and the piece that hits home for me is “I’m 56 and I’m still discovering that life is getting better the closer I get to God.” I want to be 56 and talk like I have got my whole life in front of me. Mike is a cool guy. Besides that just a read and hang out day.

10-9-10
Ugandan Independence! So we celebrate by having pancakes that the women in my life so graciously made for us. Thanks Ladies! Play with the kids all day, from shooting slingshots, to having them tell me I don’t know how to clean my shoes, to reading my bible with them. We have spaghetti for dinner then a movie with the kids on the projector. Tonight we sleep with the kids. There are four houses. I sleep in Grace, Tom sleeps in Mercy, and then the girls split between the two girl’s houses Hope and Love. That is super fun. These kids basically get to have a sleepover everyday of there life. Awesome.

10-10-10
Sleep turns out good in the kids’ house. I brought my mattress up and slept with that on the floor. Wake up and go to church. After church play soccer till lunch. Read and sleep until dinner. Try to use internet to Skype home but it is still down. Sorry guys.

10-11-10
Do Mike and Janelle’s interview in the morning for the documentary and that goes very well. I read some reading until lunch and then make a bookshelf for the library after lunch with Tom. Do an English lesson with the kids at 2:30 with P5, which is the second oldest group and it goes pretty well. Hang out till dinner because the workers will not get back until tomorrow. George gets back from Kampala after dinner and we figure out the Internet before heading to bed.

10-12-10
Wake and hear people! The workers are back! Hang with them at breakfast and kill time on Brynn’s computer fixing a few things till English at 9:50 with P6. I love P6! They are a lot of fun and I really like the age group. (12-15 years old) After English, show Brynnn the few changes I did on the computer and figure out the problem with Mike and Janelle’s Internet. Head back and help do teardown of one of the temporary huts to make a permanent one with the work crew. Eat and have a little activity of hunt the cobra after lunch. The workers find a Cobra in the grass about 100 feet from our eating area and proceed to hunt it down. Bosco eventually finds it and killings it with a six foot tall piece of wood. Pretty exciting! Do some reading before Solomon and I go for a walk into town to get some tangerines and get his pants fixed. In town we pay 600 schillings for 12 tangerines or a little under 25 cents per tangerine. Then we meet a boy named Opio and who takes us back to his hut for more. We meet his dad, Gabriel, who speaks great English and is very nice. We get a taste test of some of the tangerines at no cost and eventually brings us a bucket full of them and says 1,000 schillings. We get 50 tangerines for less than 50 cents that we picked right before our eyes. It does not get any more fresh or good than that. We head back for dinner and then bed.

10-13-10
Breakfast, reading and then help Kinyera Geoffrey with the fencing until lunch. The rest of this week will be interesting because Mike told the three heads, Bosco of the masons, Ochen Geoffrey, of the woodworkers and Kinyera Geoffrey, of agriculture team, that we are going to do some weeding out and to make a list of the workers that are not good and we will let them go. After lunch help some more with the fence until we run out of the nails close to quitting time and head back in. I find out then that I got really burned. It would be great if I was Acholi and did not have to deal with that.

10-14-10
Have a bad night of sleep but have French toast in the morning so it is all good. Do some laundry after breakfast and do it until I rip open a cut on my hand and have to give the rest to one of the cooks, Grace. She gladly accepts because it means extra money in her paycheck. After laundry go to the office and work on loading the pictures of the kids into the child sponsorship excel sheet until lunch. I finish up with that after lunch and am very happy that it only took about an hour to do. I thought it was going to be like a four hour process. Go back to the hut, read and nap. I wake up to Brynn saying that we are going to do Joyce’s interview in like an hour! I shake out the cobwebs and get ready. Joyce is a big one because she is the one of the kids we followed around for a day. The interview goes well from what we can tell because it was all in Acholi and it was clearly hard to tell her story just from her body language. But was really great see her perk up when we asked about her future and what she wants to do. Brynn and I are going to be doing Rose’s interview tomorrow morning so we get everything down to the office to get charging again. Do dinner and then team meeting about planning a trip to Gulu and possibly to Kenya as well. ☺

10-15-10
I know I usually do not do today but did Rose’s interview in the morning and it was very hard. We chose a spot that was not ideal for sound so lots of background noise that we had to redo stuff for but all things said and done it is good. After the interview all of the workers have gone home for the day because there has been some complications with the wire transfer for the money from the states so we just shut down for the day. Adam arrives here and is gonna spend one of his last few days in Uganda with us. We are super excited to have him here and are really gonna miss him when he has to go. Rose leaves after dinner to Gulu and takes a few of the workers with her. Could be a long weekend once again. Hang out with Adam and the girls the rest of the day I guessing but if anything important happens I’ll let ya know.

That’s it. It looking more and more like Tom will be leaving in November and not staying for the whole time so that is a bummer but being a friend’s wedding is pretty important too. Besides that it has been really good here and the time is really starting to go quickly. I can’t wait to see what comes of the next few months and also now that we have all of our main interviews done we are going to be going into editing phase and so pray for diligence in getting that done and for having the patience to get that done. Thanks for reading. I have to figure out a way to give a prize to people who read all of these… you guys are so great.