6th - 12th January 2010

Hi everyone :)

Sorry it's been 2 weeks since I wrote a blog. We had internet at home for a while, but now the laptop's broken so we're back to once a week internet time again. It was nice to have it while it lasted though! The main news for this entry I guess is this: I got into Cambridge! :D So big smiles and high fives all round! As you can imagine, I'm over the moon and very very very excited. Thank you to everyone who prayed when I came home for the interview; it really did help. I felt so peaceful about the process this time! I'd better start with the blogging now as I have 2 weeks to do and it's going to take me forever :S

Wednesday 6th - Found out about Cambridge, good times! A couple of us went to Mukono to buy fruit juice and biscuits for Kids Rally at the weekend while the rest of us stayed at home doing housework and bits and bobs. We had V.W.G. in the afternoon and it was mainly a social one. We intended to have training on that week but we couldn't organise it with the lady from Bambejja who does our training, so we had to postpone. The ladies were really good about it though - they're used to Ugandan time - and we had soda as a treat to apologise. We had a special dinner cos it was Becky's 3 year anniversary with her fiance, which was pretty difficult for her, so salt bread, sausages and chips went down well. Then hot chocolate, marshmallows and popcorn while we watched Doctor Who in the evening. It doesn't get much better than that, even in the UK! Maybe a takeaway pizza would've been good though... Anyway, the girls made me a beautiful banner to say well done for Cambridge, very sweet of them, which I'm going to take to my room and hang up over my desk :D Ah how cool to think that I'm actually going there!!!

Thursday 7th - Didn't do much, bit of a random day. We met Reverend Livingstone, the director at Lilo school at 9am to talk about the mural and get his approval. He agreed so we're using one of the outside walls near the pit loos...! We're planning to paint it white all over, then do the school crest in black in the middle with the motto underneath, then get the kids to do their handprints all over the rest of the wall in red, yellow and orange. It should look awesome :) If we can find a ladder then we're going to write some Bible verses over the top too. Please pray that we think of the right ones to put up there! We had a bit of an awkward situation with Lilo; the director and headteacher asked if we could give them some money to build a permanent structure at the back of the building they already have. They asked in a lovely way, it's just they have a need for it more than they have a need for the mural cos their temporary wooden classrooms are being eaten away by termites. The problem is, we wanted to do something interactive with the kids, that they could appreciate as their own lasting work. That's why the mural is such a great thing to do with them - no matter what their abilities physically or mentally, they can all put their handprints on the wall. We don't have enough money to pay for the building and we felt terrible about it. We can't use our budget money and we just don't have enough personal money, but that's really hard cos we love that school and more than that we love the kids, and if we could do it then we would. It's an urgent need for them, such a shame that we can't help. It's especially difficult when Oasis over-budgeted for us, so we DO have team money sitting in a bank account but we just can't give it away like that cos of the precedent it sets for future mzungu teams. Ah well. We can pray for them :) In the evening we spent HOURSSSS sorting out crafts for the kids rally - we're expecting 150 kids at most, so we prepared that many stars, holepunching them and tying them together with ribbon for the kids to decorate them. EPIC!!! It was a pretty late night as we tried to get all our packing done for Kids Rally over the weekend...

Friday 8th - Training in Kampala as usual - Zedde Mzungu from Calvary Chapel church ran the session on suffering. It was pretty good... I'm still not a massive fan of the training or the 6am early starts, but it's all for a good reason I guess. We left Kampala early in a vehicle that we hired to get to Tororo in Eastern Uganda for the Kids Rally. We went home to pick up all our bags then set off on the almost-4-hour-long journey. It went suprisingly quickly though; the land looks very different. There are barely any banana or matoke trees, but lots and lots of flat land with bushes and not so many trees, lots of pineapple plants and sugar crops and some maize crops too. There are way more cows because traditionally the tribe of Eastern Uganda is called Teso and they're cattle farmers. It was really interesting to see the differences in the area - the houses were pretty much all circular mud huts in the villages, with straw rooves. The towns were similar to Central, with iron rooves and bricks. Watched Scrubs in the evening after lots of soda and fish and chips for dinner, then had an early night cos of the insaneness of Kids Rally the next day. The guesthouse we were staying in was really nice, with toilets and running water (albeit cold running water!) and an actual bar. Not that we used it!

Saturday 9th - WHAT AN EPIC DAY. There are no words to describe quite how mental, awesome, stressful yet fun and generally amazing this day was!! But I'll try and describe it anyway :) We prayed for the day on Friday night and prayed that lots of kids would come, that it would go really well etc. We were expecting about 100-150 kids at the very most and prepared everything for that estimation. We got THREE HUNDRED children!!!!!!! Ah it was insane... We put them all into teams and gave them name labels and spent the morning playing games as planned. We did the balloon game, the get-the-domino-out-of-the-flour-with-your-mouth game, a clothes relay, ball and spoon races, musical statues and musical bumps, wheelbarrow races (which almost killed me when I had to demonstrate!) and a memory verse game with balloons. They loved it - their fave was definitely the flour game! What amazed me the most was the way we all worked together as a team, depsite the craziness and flexibility that we had to show cos of the change in numbers. Some of us did name labels and put the kids into teams, some demonstrated and explained the games, Bex spent ages making extra star crafts for the extra kids to do. I was so proud of us as a team! Even though it was stressy, we made it work and it became fun because of that. It shows how far we've come cos we definitely wouldn't have been able to do that right at the start of our time here. Anyway, lunch was meant to be after the memory verse and games at 1, but it ended up not being ready till about half 3 / 4 o'clock! Typical Ugandan timing again... We improvised and Nicky did the talk and we did the drama sketches to go along with it before lunch. Our theme was shining like stars for Jesus so we talked about what we can do to love other people like Jesus did, and acted out the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus washing the disciples' feet as examples. Then Nicky talked about how we're all unique and made differently, just like every star, and we each shine out who Jesus is in very different ways. It was an awesome talk and went really well with our memory verse - "You are the light of the world. Let your good deeds shine out for all to see." Good times! We didn't have enough of the craft stuff for all the kids, so we decided to do that at Sunday School the next day instead.

After we were done with the kids stuff, we had lunch in the Pastor's house (they cooked us meat, SUCH an honour from them) and then went for a walk around the village to see Dad's home. He grew up there so it was lovely to see all the places that he can remember from his childhood. The poverty in that village was astounding. The houses were so small for large numbers of people. There's a culture of polygamy there so there are far too many children for the adults to look after. There's also a high rate of HIV so the adults die of AIDS and the kids are left to fend for themselves without any access to food, education or safety. It's a very difficult cycle to break without ruining their culture in a lot of ways. You have to westernise them to some extent to give them different ways of overcoming the problems they're having. For example, they used to be cattle farmers and have tons of land for grazing their herds, but now there are lots more people living in the area using the land as farmland for crops, so there's less room for grazing. To help break the cycle of poverty, you have to introduce more western ways of generating income, like we've done with V.W.G with the soap and candle making. But to me it just seems presumptuous to wander in and tell these people with such a different culture and history to us to do things our way... Dad has some land there left to him by his grandfather where he wants to set up a community project with an orphanage, tailoring school and vocational and healthcare training for people living tbere. It's an awesome vision and they're not farming the land in faith for when it happens :) We saw the house where he was born all those years ago and it's still standing. His eldest living sibling was born in 1936 so it's been there for a huge amount of time - it was great to hear him speak his own language (Atteso) and be greeted by long lost cousins and members of his family. We didn't meet many of his brothers because they have big problems with home-brewed alcohol addiction and were down at the local drinking shop while we were there :( Such a different side of life. It was amazing if a little shocking to see it. The views were beautiful and we had about 50 kids following us through the bush while we walked! The situations those kids are in is awful - if they have parents/carers, they often earn only 1000sh a day. That's about 30p. Plus global warming is having a huge effect and ruining the seasons for them, so farming and crops are being thrown way off kilter and are failing much more often than they used to.

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Sorry, it just really shocked me in some areas. So many geographical and cultural contributing factors into their poverty, as well as social ones - it makes it so hard to solve the problem. I guess we can just do little things to make the kids smile :) In the evening we watched an Arsenal match at the guesthouse (I was SO happy!!!) and had chips for dinner, but it took over an hour and a half to arrive. I was not impressed. We complained, cos it seriously can't take that long to deep fry some sausages and chips. Half an hour at most but over 90 minutes?!?! :O We were quite hungry... Watched Doctor Who with Jona and Timo for a bit, then headed off to bed.

Sunday 10th - Church in the morning was fantastic! We did Sunday School for an hour at 9 and made all the star crafts with the kids - they loved it :) It was good to leave them with something to take home. We also left glitter glue and pencils with the teachers to keep cos they had so little. Some of the children led us in some praise and worship, very talented kids here! After that we went back into the main church meeting, which ended at 12 so that we could eat lunch and leave promptly. It was brilliant, lots of singing and dancing and the people were really happy to hear us sing and introduce ourselves. The pastor's wife stood up to welcome us and said that we'd really blessed the kids and they'd come home talking about the day they had on Saturday, which made us feel so happy! And then she said that all the adults were proud of their kids, which surprisingly overwhelmed me cos I've never heard a Ugandan say that before, especially to such a large number of children who are mostly orphans. The choirs were lovely, then Ellie preached on church unity and the images of the church as the body and bride of Christ, which went really well. All in all, a good morning :) We saw baboons on the way home in the vehicle so we stopped to take lots of photos :D It was soooo cool!!! We fed them bananas and we saw Mummies with little babies clinging to their tummies. Epic! After a loooong journey we got home to see Mama and arranged to meet Danny, a mzungu guy who came on an Oasis GAT team last year - he came for dinner then stayed the night and travelled back to Kampala with us on Monday. It was great to finally meet him cos we've been in contact for over a year since I was on the summer team last year and it was good to spend time with a mzungu guy for once! Ah I miss all the banter of my guy friends at home...

Monday 11th - Good but bad day... We went into Kampala at about 12, had a lazy morning so the family could spend time with Danny. He's doing a Theology degree at a Bible College in the UK so we had some good chats about what to expect from it and how to challenge your faith then piece it back together again so that it's stronger as a result of the intellectual study. He said some cool things, I didn't realise how much there was to think about in terms of matching up all the different parts of my faith. I've realised that there are things I accept just cos they're what I've always believed, but studying religion means I won't be able to do that anymore. I'm really excited about that actually :) I won't write about everything we talked about, it would take far too long! When we got to Kampala we had lunch at Cafe Javas again - yummyyyy!! I had chicken and cheese quaesadillas and guacamole and chips, happy times :D Becky was feeling really ill though, with a fever and aching all over while all the rest of us had headaches and bad throats and blocked noses. We decided to get a special hire home when I randomly threw up in the loo after my lovely lunch *cries* It was horrible! What a waste of good food. When we got home, everyone felt pretty crappy :( Bex hda a temperature of 39.2 - she basically had the high temp thing that Nicky, Ellie and I have had already. It sucks big time! She recovered pretty fast though, by Tuesday in fact, so that was good.

Tuesday 12th - We were meant to meet the builder at 9am to talk to him about plastering and painting the wall at Lilo in preparation for the mural, but he didn't turn up. BAD TIMES!! We got up early when we could've had a lie-in... The DVD player was broken so no English TV to pass the time :( :( :( And we all felt like crap! As you can imagine we were feeling pretty sorry for ourselves and wallowed a bit. I'm making it sound worse than it was; we had a pray and went to the tailoring school in the afternoon and did actually do something with our lives :) There were no ladies there though, very disappointing, so we just talked to Pastor Alex for half an hour then left to go back home and look after Becky. I wish that part of our programe was easier, I really do. The builder ended up coming at 5pm so we sorted out a price of 140,000sh for him to buy the materials to plaster the wall and to pay for his labour.


So that's it for now - as I write it's actually the 17th January, and I haven't had internet until now cos we've just come into Mukono, so there'll be another blog entry for you to read too in a bit :) My hands and back are aching now from all the typing (I had to do our team report for January and send it to Lisa, and I've already done my emails...) so I'm going to go and get lunch then come back in a bit.

Sending lots of love and hugs back home,
Flick
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