Saturday, June 13th

Saturday, June 13, 2009
Today’s update will be short. I am tired and the electricity just came back on after a windy/rain storm. My understanding is that we are very fortunate it came back so soon. We were told it could be an hour or it could be 10 days before the power comes on. We were fortunate that it returned after about 2 hours. Sleeping has been difficult enough, but without fans it would be worse.
Today we made coffee. We started at 6am and we finally had our first sip/chew at approximately 11:45am (it was supposed to be two hours long). We have a new appreciation for the “work of living” here in Uganda. We planted, transplanted (including the use of “natural fertilizer” aka manure), picked, dried, pulped, cleaned, fried aka roasted, and ground our coffee. We Mzungas decided we would bring the western concept of coffee filters to Uganda. We chewed, sipped, and spit our coffee. After we were done with our coffee we spent some time hiking around the Sipi Falls. The falls were gorgeous, fun, and quite an experience.
We then headed over to Mbale via the very confident driving skills of Tim. We experienced Indian food at an open air (open rain) café. As we sat there we listened to Tim talk of their dreams of a baby shelter in Mbale.
Then, back to the compound to shower our dirty bodies, participate in worship with those of us staying at the compound and a few friends both Ugandan and American.
A couple of other updates – I have experienced what I believe is the most mosquito bites of the whole team. Three to be exact, all of them in the Entebbe airport parking lot. We brought along scads of mosquito spray- certainly not needed thus far. No true illnesss. A couple of “oh, I better take some pepto bismol” but not much more.
In my opinion the group is getting along incredibly well. We are having so much fun getting to know each other and always talk about the next time we come. Bob says he’s not coming until they move Uganda about 24 hours closer to home.
Hope you all are doing well.
Jane