1st -7th December 2009

Happy Advent everyone! :)

Can't believe it's nearly Christmas. Where did 2009 go?! I can't believe it's nearly a decade since the new millennium; I remember standing on the bridge near my house looking out over London and watching the fireworks. We had a big party at our house! Very weird that it's 10 years since then. This New Year will be very different and a lot more Ugandan I suspect! The main news this week is that I fly back to the UK on Thursday for a week. I have 3 interviews at Cambridge on the 15th which I have to be back for, then I'm coming straight back to Uganda for Christmas till the 21st Feb, when I fly home properly. I'm not seeing anyone next week, just so you all know! It's not that I don't like you, in fact I'd love to see everyone, but I'm trying to limit the culture shock / emotional stressy side of coming home. Seeing everyone would just make leaving again a whole lot harder.
Anyway, onto this week's goings-on!

Tuesday 1st - The day my sickness started :( For most of this week I was stuck with a fever, pounding headache, total loss of appetite and my body ached all over. Bad times! After going to Mukono on Monday, I continued having my hair braided and had to have it done again on Tuesday. I sat for EIGHT HOURS, feeling absolutely terrible and watching ER that Becky bought for an extortionate price at the one DVD shop in the area; it was the only English disc they had! However, I will happily admit that my hair looked awesome! While Bex and I were at home, Nicky went to World AIDS Day in Kasawo (apparently it was awful!) and Lucy and Ellie went to Kampala to pick up stuff from Oasis for the holiday programme we're running this week at Bambejja. We all felt tired and rubbish by the evening. I couldn't sleep cos of my 39deg fever so that put me in a pretty bad mood for the whole week! To make matters worse, over the next few days my hair started to fall out. I didn't realise what a bad job the woman had done on my hair!

Wednesday 2nd - Half my hair braids had fallen out, no joke, so I spent the day quite unhappily in bed, feeling rubbish and trying to read my books for interview. My headache made that kinda impossible though, so I just lay there feeling silly! I got up for vulnerable women for a while; we had arranged for a woman to come from Mukono to train the women to grow mushrooms, but she just didn't turn up. It was absolutely gutting... We organised everything so that it would go ahead, the women worked really hard to collect donations and we met with Pastor Ben and sorted out all the financial runnings of the organisation and the project, but she just didn't come. Such a pain! Then I stayed up for a bit of Bible study too (we're continuing with the teaching series on Hebrews) but then had to go back to bed again. The girls did a good job of cheering me up and looking after me though :D

Thursday 3rd - My brother's 16th birthday :) It's very strange to think that he's already 16. He's chosen his A Level options already too, I swear I'm still that age though...?! So on Thursday we had a fake day off cos working at Bambejja this week means that we don't get an actual day off. Instead of going anywhere we sat at home all day and watched ER being really lazy :D I started feeling a bit better and Bex undid all the rest of my hair braids that hadn't fallen out. What a waste of 20 hours of just sitting there!! The problem was I didn't have time to have it re-done and sorted out before going home for interview and obviously I have to look presentable for that, so the only option was to have them taken out :( They looked cool but they just don't suit mzungu hair; more trouble than they're worth I think. Ah well, at least I can say that I tried it out! Not much else to report... We had a few prayer times in the evening outside in the compound cos it gets harder to concentrate when the small spaces in the house get hot in dry season. We have to COVER ourselves with Deet but it's lovely being outside. The stars are amazing in the village cos there are absolutely no streetlights, and the moon was getting full this week so it looked stunning lying down out there. We've spent some time praying for people who aren't Christians at home, which is nice, and also for stuff that's going on here. It's difficult though; we're not disciplined enough with our team prayer times and we don't leave ourselves enough quiet time to really meditate on God together as a group. Beating ourselves up about it just won't help, so there's no point in that, but I wish it was easier. I want to be better at that in myself as well as the whole team being better... I read the Bible more here and it definitely gives me more strength but it's not enough, I want to do more. It's easy to say that though, the discipline is hard!

Friday 4th - Training at Bambejja. We had a talk from Auntie Jovia, the lady who runs the whole Bambejja project, about the background of the project and all the work it does, then we visited a home in the local slum community. A girl called Florence lives with her 4 siblings and her mother in one tiny room near the project and she goes there every Saturday with the other 120 or so girls. They pay for her schooling and give her life skills training, healthcare, counselling and they give social care to the family. They do all sorts of awesome stuff,it's very cool to be a part of. Hopefully we'll visit some other houses in the community soon too. We left the project at 1 and didn't stay for the prayer meeting as usual cos we had to go to Garden City which is a posh shopping mall (mzungu central) to buy craft materials for the Christmas holiday stuff at Bambejja this week. I had large margherita pizza for lunch so I was happy :D I was starving after the lack of food during the week! By this point I was better in case you didn't realise :)

Saturday 5th - Two of the Oasis International Placements from the UK, Zoe and Helen, came to visit us in the village so we could show them where we live and work. They live in Kampala so they hadn't seen what life was like in a village before. It was SUCH a lovely morning! They brought Refresher chew bars with them, which was a ridiculous answer to prayer cos I'd been saying for about a week and a half that I had a craving for them :D In all seriousness, it was God having a laugh :) I love God!! He even provides Refresher bars! :D
Anyway, we showed them Lilo and Gilgal and Mama cooked us a giant lunch, with matoke and chapatti and rice and beans and meat and greens and everything else under the Ugandan sun, and then they left just before kids club. The kids made angels as the craft for the first part of the Christmas story and we told them about the Nativity and Christmas party on Christmas Eve. We're going to use all the crafts they make in the performance, hopefully it'll look awesome. I'm really excited about it :) We told them about the angel visiting Mary and next week we're doing Jesus' birth and the shepherds, then the week after we're doing the wise men bit. In the morning we met Albert, a guy who we first saw a few weeks ago, who does African dance and music workshops and performances all over the world. He's awesome! He's coming to kids club next week to teach the kids African dance that they can use in the choir performance when they're signing Christmas carols in the Nativity. I really hope it works out ok! He's also going to teach us how to dance like proper Muganda women :D

After kids club we went to Gilgal for boys and girls group, knowing that it probably wouldn't go ahead and our suspicions were correct :( We were all gutted, so we decided not to give it up just yet. We couldn't announce it to the village because the louspeakers have been cut off from the mains cos the people who owned the shop weren't paying their bills! We're going to tell the young people in the village by word of mouth and really commit it to prayer this week and hopefully on Saturday we'll have lots of people turning up for the groups. Please pray that we have wisdom, that people feel it on their hearts to come and that the football pitch at Gilgal will be free for the boys to use, cos that's what draws them to come along.

Sunday 6th - Church for a good few hours as usual in the morning; half past 10 till 2! Sunday School went really well. We did the same part of the Christmas story as we did at kids club, but we made 3-D angels to stand on the stage and hang around the room at the Christmas party :) (I say stage, I don't really mean a stage at all!) Then in the afternoon we had the youth seminar that we planned with Tata. It was meant to be about an hour long and it started at 3. We didn't leave till HALF PAST 6!!!!! This is sitting on backless wooden benches, so we had totally numb bums by the end! Funny times :) It was awesome though. We met a guy called David who used to work at Gilgal, who we've arranged to meet and form a choir with in the next week or so. He might be able to talk to us about Pastor Murenzi if we play our cards right... He led some fantastic worship stuff, which was a real blessing. I do miss my home church because the worship here is very different and I love that part of church at home. Bex did the talk and it went great, she kept it short and sweet which was a real blessing given the timing circumstances! :) After that we headed home and had an early night after sorting stuff out for Bambejja today.

Monday 7th - So today we've been at Bambejja. We left the house at 8, got to the project at 10 and started a few hours of games at 11 and then led the first part of the Christmas story in a devotion this afternoon. The girls are all lovely and it went really well. They even discussed in the devotion time! :) Now sitting in Steers, our usual hangout on Kampala Road, before we go home. We wanted to get a bit of internet done cos otherwise we'll have quite a few days without it. It's always nice to get emails from home etc :)

I'd better stop writing now cos I still have a few things to do - Thank you for reading this far again! I'll write when I get back to England just so you all know that I'm alive and surviving the weirdness of culture shock etc. Sending lots of love and hugs,

Flick
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