A Year in Review

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Wednesday was the first anniversary of us moving to Uganda. It’s been an eventful year and I thought a recap of it might be nice.

March… The month started with our commissioning service. Later in the month we loaded our container and saw that ship off. Then we flew out of Chicago with 26 pieces of luggage on March 22. God blessed and all the luggage made it to Entebbe with us. Matthew Stensaas and Tom Tracht met us at the airport and helped load the luggage. Our plane got in late at about 11:30 PM and then, by the time we’d gone through the line to get our visas and found all our luggage, loaded it up, and driven to the motel it was almost 2AM the next day. We slept a few hours and then got up and going again. We looked at some appliances and then drove to Mbarara with Matt and Keila. The following day we looked at houses and a couple days later decided to take the house we’re currently living in. It needed a LOT of work. Only half of it was finished and that half had a lot of damage so needed repair. James worked out the contract with the landlady and work was begun to finish it. God also brought along a vehicle for us to buy. It needed a new engine but it was the right price and, it turns out, the right kind of vehicle for the ministry we’re working in.

April…. We spent most of the month staying with Bro. and Mrs. Brian Stensaas. James worked hard every day to get the house finished as quickly as possible – mainly he just supervised to make sure things were getting done right. He also ended up making a trip to Kampala to get some of our appliances. We got mattresses to sleep on and then we just waited for it to be done. We moved into our house as soon as it was finished enough for us to live there. We’d decided to have them tile the house and the tile on the finished side was barely dry before we moved in. They had a lot to finish on the other side and that was done about a month later. So we had workers in our house every day starting at about 7:30AM until dark (about 7PM). We also didn’t have a wall or fence around our house because of a disagreement between our landlady and the man next door.

May… May was a busy month, particularly Mother’s Day weekend. We got up that Sunday morning and someone had stolen several of the fence posts we’d put in to have them in readiness for the fence to be put up. James spent the entire day dealing with police reports and all the mess that came with it. The next day, one of our workers was planting some plants around the outside of the hedge surrounding our property and broke a water main. A 20ft geyser of water was opened and poured down our hill, through our house, and around the septic tank in the front. After that was stopped, two walls of our septic tank collapsed. It was weak already and would have eventually broken but the main break revealed the weakness and forced us to repair it sooner rather than later. The day after that happened, we got our dog Teal’c. We’d wanted to get a dog for a while so James was really pleased with being able to get that particular dog. We’re all glad he did. 😀

June… Thankfully June wasn’t as eventful as May. 😉 We butchered a cow in our garage. That was interesting! The other side of the house was finally finished completely and cleaned and we moved the kids into their rooms on that side. We also started language study and then restarted three weeks later when the Trachts wanted to join us in it. Father’s Day Sunday we found out we were expecting Huckabee child #6 and so ensued several weeks of miserable morning sickness for me.

July…. I was quite sick for the whole month and James and Osbert ended up doing most of the cooking. Near the end of the month our container arrived. First it arrived in the country and James had to take a trip to Kampala to clear it through customs. Then they brought it to our house and we unloaded it. We got most of the unpacking done in the next couple weeks. It was so nice to have our own beds and the familiar things from home! It was like Christmas!

August… We got most of the packing done and I began making curtains for the house. I was able to repurpose many of our curtains from the States and use them on the windows here with just a little work. We also started school in the middle of August with the kids and continued our language study. Thankfully, about the time we started school the morning sickness went away and I started feeling a LOT better. That helped!

September… Relatively uneventful aside from the fact that we started going with the Bassetts to the refugee camp on a weekly basis. James had gone with them one Sunday in late July or early August and really loved it. So we all went at the end of August. It was our niche. We all tremendously enjoyed it! God seemed to be directing us into that ministry and so there we are. And we still love it!

October…. We took our first trip back to Kampala. On the way there the transmission went out on our vehicle and had to be repaired. That made the time there interesting in finding transportation! But God worked everything out for us. I had my first Doctor visit while we were there. We were planning, at the time, to have the baby in Nakasaro Hospital in Kampala with Dr. Mbonye. She is really nice but kept recommending we check a hospital in Mbarara. We had an ultrasound and found we were having a girl! We got our third dog – a female Rottweiler – and she’s been fun to have around and great for our other puppy. Calmed him right down! We also had a baptismal service at the refugee camp. I ended up missing it with sick kids but James and the boys really enjoyed it!

November… Our first Thanksgiving here and we hosted it at our house. It was a LOT of fun! We bought two turkeys and had them butchered right in our yard! Definitely a learning experience there!

December… Our first Christmas here. We took another trip to Kampala the first part of the month and were able to get some paperwork taken care of and also find some special things for Christmas. Our church family sent a couple boxes of surprises to us from the states for Christmas and that was so special. It was a very special time for us and, while we missed family back home, we had a really good time remembering Christ’s birth here in Uganda. There was another baptismal service at the refugee camp and this time I got to go! It was great – a very moving service. We got there early and I got to visit with many of the ladies in the church there. It was such a blessing.

January…. We finally decided to tour the hospital here in Mbarara and decided to try having the baby here instead of going to Kampala. It was a big decision for us but we both had peace about it. Debbie and Matthew Guimon and her niece, Sarabeth, visited from America. It was SO good to have someone come from the states! James had an accident on the way back from taking them to meet Phyllis Hall in Kampala. God worked things out with that, helping him have the right people with him at the right time.

February…. Baby was due but didn’t arrive. That’s okay, though. The election took place on the 18th and was relatively uneventful.

March…. Brennah LaDynne was born on the 6th, almost 2 weeks late. Her birth went very well and I’m so glad we decided to have her here in Mbarara. She came before we’d been here a year.

So there you have it. Our first year overview. Sorry this is so long. Thanks for persevering to the end of this post. 😀 It’s been exciting to see God work in the good times and the hard and discouraging times as well. We’re really enjoying being here in Uganda and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else! It really feels like home.

A Bit More of the Mundane – Food Preparation

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This part of living in Africa has probably been the most challenging. Before moving to Africa I’d been pretty good about making pretty much everything from scratch. We didn’t buy a lot of mixes. I even made our butter and yogurt from scratch in the states. But I took for granted the readiness of other parts of food prep or the availability of certain foods.

So, upon arriving I had to learn what was available, how much it cost and if that was a good price or not. Our helper, Osbert, has been a huge help with this! I’d take a trip to the central market a couple times a week for our produce. Think of all the open air markets you’ve ever seen in the movies or pictures of 3rd world countries and it looks a lot like that. Each little “eduka” (shop) has a variety of things to sell – pineapples, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, carrots, peas, and we’ve even been able to find green beans! After buying what we needed, I’d bring it home and clean it – soak it in clean (filtered) water with some cleanser in it to kill parasites or other bacteria that our bodies aren’t used to. We buy eggs by the tray – 30 eggs per tray. Every Saturday, a man comes by with lettuces, spinach, and sometimes hot peppers and broccoli. We also have two avocado trees in our yard so for about 3-4 months out of the year we have all the avocados we can possibly eat and enough to give away. That’s a LOT of guacamole.

As you can see, produce is readily available. So we eat a lot of fresh fruits and veggies every day. Other things are more difficult to find. For instance, our family really enjoys cheese. When we first arrived, you could have any cheese you wanted as long as it was gouda. 😀 Not long after we got here, the man that sells us the gouda also began making mozzarella. So now we can have “real pizza cheese” on our pizza. 😉

Meat is another thing that isn’t as readily available. Here in Mbarara we can normally get minced beef (ground beef) and pork sausages – sort of a cross between a hot dog and a sausage link. But that is all. We could get chicken but we’d have to buy a whole chicken and have it butchered here at our house and then cook it. They are also quite tough so I learned to use the pressure cooker to help with that! Being Americans, we’re used to planning our meals around the meat. So it was quite the change to plan the meal and then add what meat we had later. After we’d been here about three months, we butchered a cow in our garage. It was quite interesting! Not exactly something you’d do in America. 😀 But it was so nice to have meat more often! Also, we could have different parts of meat – like a roast or steaks and stuff like that.

It’s been fun to start to find things. For instance, last fall we learned of a place in the capital that would deliver meat down to us in Mbarara, just for the cost of the transport on a bus! Through this company we can get chicken pieces – like legs and thighs, lunch meat, and stew beef. The cost is also far less than we pay in the stores in Kampala for these same things. Its been a blessing to have access to this!

Another thing that we recently found was a local dairy that delivers cheese all the way to Kampala. We noticed their label on some of the cheese that we bought in Kampala and decided to check into it. Thankfully, the dairy isn’t far from where we live and we can buy all the same cheese here for less – a wholesale price, vs. retail. For the first few months, if we wanted sour cream or cream cheese I had to make it. But we can get those things from the dairy and it saves me time!

Late last fall, Osbert showed us this HUGE market outside of town called Western Market. We’ve started going there for our produce once a week rather than making two or three other trips to Central Market in town. The produce is a LOT cheaper for us. You have to buy a much larger quantity but it is generally worth it. Also, we’ll get entire stalks of bananas for what it cost us at the central market for a bunch of bananas. It should come as no surprise that we can go through a whole stalk of bananas in a week as a family. 😀

We were able to find our African version of Sam’s Club – called Vickies, after the Indian gentleman that owns it. We can buy bulk items from him for less than what we can get them in the grocery stores. He sells canned goods, juice, bails of flour, pasta, other baking good in bulk (like sugar, salt, baking powder, etc.) and many other things, including non-food items like toothpaste and diapers. We go there about once a month or so, maybe even less but when we go we stock up.

For everything else, we go to a local grocery called Pearl. We can get a lot of the other things we need from them and often, if there is something we’d like to get all we have to do is ask the man who owns Pearl and he’ll order it for us.

So, as you can see, we’re adapting. It takes some planning ahead but I’ve learned how to make the things that my family enjoys and a whole lot more. We eat a lot of beans and I’ve learned to make some pretty good refried beans from scratch. 😉 When I got married a good friend gave me a recipe for spaghetti sauce and I make that several times a month. It makes excellent pizza sauce, too. I’ve also learned to make LOTS and then freeze some of it to make it easier next time. It’s been fun to learn how to speed the food preparation process. No grated cheese here! So my cheese grater is my dear husband. 🙂 Most of the time he is more than happy to help me with that part since it makes it take me less time to get the food ready.

Another blessing has been the seasonings that people have sent us ever since we mentioned the need in November! It’s been wonderful! We can’t even get many of the spices needed to make those particular mixes – I’ve checked! So THANK YOU to all who have sent them! We’re enjoying them tremendously!

I could go on longer but this is long enough. I hope it gives you a little picture into our daily life! We really do enjoy the African food that they have here but there isn’t a lot of variety in it. We eat it a couple times a week normally. But it is nice to have food that tastes like “home” and it has been a journey to get to the place where it really does taste like home.

Birthing Babies

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I told Anna if we got to Friday and nothing had changed (to wit, baby born, un-to wit), then we’d go see the doctor. Well, we went and saw the doctor. Everything is fine with the both of them, but the baby, like all the others, will have to be evicted. Anna has required oxytocin every time. Like Ethan, this one is late being born, and the plancenta is showing calcification. So, needless to say, we will be going in tomorrow morning for an induction. If she stays consistent with prior births, the truant infant should be making her apperance in the evening sometime.

A Little Bit of the Mundane – Daily Life

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I haven’t blogged in a while. I guess we just got really busy and then the thought of catching up is a little overwhelming. So I’m just going to jump in where we are.

Last June we started language study. Its been challenging to say the least! Most weeks we have at least 4 days where we spend an hour or two working on the language. That is about as much as our brains can absorb in a given day and then we just have to practice, practice, practice. It’s challenging because of the noun case system that they have that affects the verbs and other modifiers. You almost just have to memorize the various forms and then their variations. Complicating this is the 6 verb tenses. The verb changes form based on if it is present tense, today past, yesterday past, near future, distant future or distant past. Slowly, slowly we’re going through those to learn them better so we can actually understand them and use them. Thankfully, we’re getting to the place where we can understand things that those around us are saying.

Last June we also found out that baby #6 is on the way. The summer months were kind of rough. The morning sickness was really terrible and some days I couldn’t even get out of bed. Thankfully, by the time I was 12 weeks along, the morning sickness went away and I was able to do fine after that.

We started school in mid August. Its interesting juggling school, housekeeping tasks and language study. Sometimes its really overwhelming. But I really want to learn the language so we’ve been plugging away at it. The kids are doing great with school. Its nice to have designated school room. It’s the other half of our family room area. It means that the school books and supplies are contained in one place and aren’t leaking out into all the other places of the house. Gaelin started first grade this year. I was a little concerned that it might be beyond him but so far he hasn’t encountered any concepts he couldn’t figure out. I know 5 years old is a little young for first grade but we’ll take it a year at a time. He is really smart and gets bored easily so the challenge of it is good for him. The things that actually bother him the most are the mundane things – like handwriting and spelling. He’d far rather do his math or reading than those other things. It’s challenging for me, too, having 5 kids in 4 grades. Teaching long division one minute and carrying or renaming the next. Helping one student grasp the concept of a noun and then another student write an essay on a foreign country. But I really enjoy it!

We’re starting to feel like we are moved in. Our container arrived last July and we were able to get unpacked for the most part pretty quickly. James has been helping me get pictures hung. Once my sewing machine arrived I started making curtains for all the windows. Juggling that along with school made it take a long time but it got done. There were a few things that we couldn’t really unpack. One thing was our books. The bookshelves we had in America weren’t very good. They wouldn’t have survived long here. So last month James had some bookshelves made for us! After 11 months of being here (and longer for the books since they were some of the first things we packed in the states – some of them 3 years ago!) we finally got those unpacked! It’s like Christmas being able to find old friends and new discoveries in our library! The kids are loving it! It took a while but we finally have some avid readers in our family. Often I’ll go looking and find them curled up in their room with a book. Whenever boredom strikes I suggest another book. We also were able to get some shelves made for things like our towels and cleaning supplies and the kid’s toys and games. Its wonderful to feel a little more organized and not have to say “I have that but I don’t know where it is…..” I’m loving that!

We’re getting ready to plant our garden for this rainy season – if the rains will just get consistent for us. So far it has been a pretty dry rainy season. Last rainy season we didn’t get to plant a lot as we got started late and the ground wasn’t very good. But we’ve been working to get it ready and are just waiting for the rains to start. We’re going to plant tomatoes, green peppers, zucchini, broccoli, and peas. We’d like to eventually plant sweet corn as well and a couple other things too, maybe. We’ll see how all those other things do. We can get tomatoes and green peppers here but have to look harder for broccoli and zucchini is almost impossible to find. The local peas are more like split peas – sort of like a bean that you have to cook for a while. So if we grow our own we can harvest them earlier while they are still soft. They don’t quite taste like American sweet peas but will work fine in a pinch.

So that is a little about our every day life. A lot more happens daily than just that. Some days it feels like Grand Central Station around here and other days it is nice and quiet. But mostly it is just normal life that we’re adapting to little by little. 🙂

More adventure than a body can stand

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Today was really overwhelming in many ways.

Early this afternoon – before I’d had a chance to finish lunch and feed everyone – a worker that was helping plant some cactus like bushes outside our fence around the property broke a water main. I’d just finished putting some clothes on the line and starting another load of laundry when I heard a strange noise. It sounded like really hard rain – only it wasn’t raining outside. Then we looked up the hill behind our house and saw the plume of water. Water was shooting into the air for 25 or so feet by the road. I ran to our water shut off and tried to turn it off. That did nothing. So I ran up the road to see if they knew how to turn it off. No one seemed to know. Finally one lady said that they had to turn it off at the water office in town.

By the time I got back to the house there were several inches of water in our house, running down the hill, through the garage and then into our kitchen, hall way, bedroom (though not as bad there) and living room. It was also running up the hall and into the other side of the house that has just been finished. Thank God, nothing was sitting down that would get seriously hurt except for a few things in our bedroom and James was able to get them picked up really fast. Only a couple of our mattresses got wet and a few odds and ends that could either be thrown away or washed.

But the water was still coming. I started working at sweeping it out of the front door. But it was still coming. I’d barely make a dent in it but it would fill again. I went to the kitchen and just couldn’t get it out of there so had to stop. I worked and worked and worked and lost all track of time. I wished I could throw up because of the stress of it and because it just made me sick to my stomach. Finally, 45 min. later they got the water shut off. But the damage was done and I didn’t know what to do to get it all out. I called my parents (thank God for skype!) and got an okay connection, enough for them to be able to hear me. Then I called the only missionary I could find the number for on James’ phone. He said they would be here as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile I’d been bawling my eyes out, then gritting my teeth and working frantically, then crying again and on and on. The guard kept coming to the door and apologizing (it was a worker that he’d gotten that broke the main). I told him that it would all be fine and that I would be okay, believe it or not. Osbert came and told me he was sorry. I told him I would be fine. It was just so overwhelming! All that water and mud!

Finally, the several of the missionaries and several of the Africans arrived and started helping. In about an hour all the water was out and we could start cleaning and mopping. A couple of the missionary girls that are here stayed and helped me mop and clean and in a couple hours after that we were as done as we could get it.

I’m so thankful for all those that came and helped! It was such a blessing! I’m thankful that we didn’t have our container here yet because then we would have had so many more things in the garage and house and they would have been ruined. I’m thankful that the damage to the property wasn’t worse. It washed away a lot of the hill behind our house but not all of it and we can build it back up and level it.

The worst thing right now is that the huge volume of water coming past our house and into the road washed away some dirt around the septic tank and caused parts of two sides of it to collapse. It wasn’t very well built in the first place and I think that this revealed a weakness in it’s structure that would have come out eventually but this just sped it up. Now we have to get our septic tank repaired as it is sitting open and other sides of it could collapse at any time, if there is a lot of rain or something.

I’ve also been able to laugh about it – Here I was, the crazy white lady running up and down the road asking how to turn the water off, asking people to turn off the water to their house to see if it helped, splashing water out of our front door (it had to go over the sill we have for our screen door!). As we were mopping we got started singing “Showers of Blessing” and one of the verses seemed so appropriate:

There shall be showers of blessing
Precious reviving again
Over the hills and the valleys
Sound of abundance of rain.

LOL!

Yep, that was pretty much it – Sound of abundance of rain over the hill and the valleys. Not sure about the showers of blessing yet – but I know that God doesn’t allow things in our life just to make things hard for us. I know He has a blessing in there for us somewhere and we will yet see it. I know this. Because God is *always* good – even when water is pouring down your hill and through your house.

Now I have a stack of laundry a mile high (mostly dirty rags and clothes the kids were wearing that got covered in water and mud) but my house is pretty much clean. I’ll probably have to mop a couple more times to get it completely cleaned up but that isn’t going to be as hard as it would have been. I just need a couple dry days so I can get all the stuff dried on the line. It was nice this morning and the rained most of the afternoon – ironically, it was pouring rain *while* the water was pouring down the hill. God does have a sense of humor.