22nd - 28th December 2009

Hi again everyone :)

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you enjoyed your time with family and friends. It was good over here, if a little strange! Christmas Day itself was better than I expected it to be; we decided to watch Love Actually before midnight, then toasted our Ugandan
Christmas with hot chocolate and mince pies :D It was awesome, made the day feel special. We stayed up till half 3 (stupid idea, we had to be up early to wash our hair before church on Christmas Day!) then went to church the next morning. Managed to get out of doing Sunday school and just spent the whole time in the service; I have to admit, it was much less enjoyable than normal Christmas church at home. I missed seeing friends and families all together on Christmas Day. It's so much smaller in the village, even though it feels like a little family to us now it's still not the same. I missed singing carols and candlelit Christmas services at school and the little traditions we all have at Christmas, like writing our letters to Father Christmas and putting some water and a carrot out in the garden for Rudolph :( I only thought about those bits in the quiet parts of the day though; once everything got going and it was all busy with the family, it was difficult to stay homesick or upset.

After church we had a huuuugeee African lunch, Mama must have been cooking for days! There was chapatti, matoke, rice, Irish potatoes, pumpkin, cassava, beef, chicken, cabbage AND greens :O We were all stuffed by the end of the meal, although somehow I managed to get away with only having one medium sized portion, which was lucky otherwise I reckon I would've exploded. We watched Shrek in the afternoon, and did crackers with the whole family, then gave them their presents and just chilled out for the rest of the day. The idea of Christmas here isn't so much about presents like it is at home-home; it's about spending the day with your family, doing nothing and eating ridiculous amounts of food. That's the main similarity with home :) I missed having cold weather desperately, it didn't feel like Christmas at all in the lead up to it, but on the day itself it was grey and rainy! Sod's law - my one opportunity to have a hot Christmas, and it does the opposite!!! It was a lovely day though. I realised yet again how blessed I am to live with the family and to have the girls here.

The other days before Christmas itself were fairly uneventful... Jocelyn, our new coordinator came to visit on Tuesday 22nd, which was kinda tense. We've had a couple of organisation / communication issues with her lately, which were difficult to discuss and led to a lot of tension on Monday when we were in Kampala. We seemed to resolve it on Tuesday, so there's no point recounting all of it now cos that would be pointless, but please pray that our relationship with her is strong and improves and that we become closer friends with her. She's only just starting this job and has never done anything like it before, so please also pray that she has wisdom about how to do it and that God helps her through all the different and stressful stuff that she's doing. We had all our decorations up by this point, so the house looked like a crazy explosion / mush of shiny paper chains and hangy things and tinsel :D

Ooo they've just started watching Shrek in the other room, LOVE that film! Which reminds me to tell you that we now have internet at home :D :D :D :D Emailing is gonna be much easier.. So anyway, on Christmas Eve we had a kids Christmas party which was awesome fun! We decorated the room that we normally have church in and played loads of games and acted out our Nativity that they made lots of crafts for. The sheep masks and shepherds' beards looked particularly cool i.e. hilarious :) Little things like the sweets and balloons that we gave out at the end made them seem really happy. I love being able to do things like that for the people here, especially the kids while we're not working at the schools during the holidays. It's made me think a lot about getting involved with more voluntary stuff when I'm home, but outside of church too.

Boxing Day we ran a youth seminar for a load of young people in the area. We did tons of planning for it but it ended up going a bit pear shaped! We thought we were using Gilgal, with access to lots of space and rooms, so we planned for craft stuff and a big game of football and all sorts to be going on at once, but in the morning it turned out we could only use 2 rooms at World Vision, where we have church. Plus it was raining so we couldn't play any games outside :( We reorganised everything, not without a little stress, but it was fine and we fitted in all the seminars that we'd planned, and some that we'd asked other pastors to come and do for us. It was a very full day cos we had a lot to cover, so we wanted to start at 10 on the dot, but in typical Ugandan style, nobody turned up till gone 11! We're kinda used to reorganising the order of talks and general day arrangements now though, so by this point it was just funny.. We ended up having no crafts or games, and just doing praise and worship to divide up the talks. We didn't get as many people as we wanted, but it's a start.. We were thinking about running another day, or maybe just an afternoon for the young people to do some creative self-expression time and some creative prayer as well. We really didn't want to miss that stuff out on Saturday but we had to :( It was exhausting doing that after so little sleep and the craziness of Christmas! Thank goodness, yesterday church was called off and we could just rest and read through the whole day. Admittedly, I was reading the Secret Dreamworld of a Shopoholic series, which I've guttingly now finished :( I'm starting on the Twilight series to fill my mind with meaningless non-theological fiction over the holidays, my reading for interview actually nearly burned my brain out!!!

Some bad news from the Christmas season - on Boxing Day a man who comes to our church died after being ill for a month or so. He was a well-known guy; when we went to pay our respects, the whole village was outside the house sitting on the floor and mourning. The grieving traditions and... rituals I guess never fail to surprise me. The women sit around the body wailing and screaming for much longer than the men, some of whom don't see the body and others of whom pass through quickly. Mama Rachael slept over at the house through the night to comfort the family with the rest of church, who went to give them their support. Such a lovely custom. The girls and I were talking about how the grief is very melodramatic at this early stage after the death; there's a real thing here with vocalising your grief and it being a communal expression of grief, so different to the UK, where people are more accustomed to leave you alone till some time after the death. Mama went to the burial yesterday but we didn't. I think it was enough to see the body and pay our respects; the burials are very difficult to handle. It sounds depressing to talk about it and it is in some respects - he has left 13 children behind, and they're only the ones who live in the village. He had 2 wives before he got saved; one of them had 16 children, but 10 of them died. Can you imagine the pain? I can't even begin to. But at the same time as being difficult and painful for his family, death here is so real and the people are resilient as a result. People don't shy away from details, they don't make excuses or put their lives on hold. In some ways I wish they could, so they could have more space to grieve, but maybe that's just an English reaction. It's teaching me that death is real for all of us, it could come at any time and that's ok cos it's natural. It's always been that way.

So that's basically the last few days, onto nicer subjects now. Today we went into Kampala to check the post and had a nice lunch (chicken sandwich with ENGLISH TASTING MAYO in it!!!!!! Woop!) and did some supermarket shopping before heading straight home. We bought sausages, bacon, eggs, salt bread and baked beans for dinner tonight - I'm so excited! We have tons of our budget left over; the money we gave to Oasis was far too much for the budget they gave us, so every now and then we buy a nice meal with it. We're having a cooked breakfast in Uganda!!!!! How cool?! On Thursday we're going on a retreat to a place in Jinja called Mto Moyoni. Apparently it's a really beautiful place where we can relax and focus on God and just chill out with hot running water for a while :D We're having New Year there, on the banks of the source of the Nile - once in a lifetime thing I think! I want to see the sunset on the 31st and have a toast out there at midnight with some music while we look at the stars *grins* By the time we get back on the 3rd January, I should have heard back from Cambridge. I reckon by my next blog entry, I'll be able to tell you whether I got in or not. That's given me masses of butterflies in my tummy!!!

Anyway, enough now. I'm hogging the laptop and I should go! Again, thank you for reading this far, I really appreciate that you're all keeping up with me and sharing my experiences while I'm here :) Sending you tons and tons of love and hugs,
Flick
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