MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 03-07-2011

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Brennah LaDynne HuckabeeAs you can see, the 2011 model Huckabee has arrived. Our sixth child, Brennah LaDynne Huckabee was born at 2AM on March 6, 2011, right here in Mbarara, Uganda. Her and Anna are doing great. The birth went smoothly and without complications of any kind. Thank you all for praying about it. Anna has always had trouble getting labor going without chemical assistance. We had decided that if nothing happened by Friday we would go see the doctor. As it turned out of course, nothing happened, so we went in Saturday morning and began the process of inducing labor. We used the private hospital here in town (Mayanja Memorial), and I'm quite glad we did. I can't imagine going through the exhausting process of driving to Kampala, enduring the exhausting process of having a baby, and then having to drive all the way back. This was so much better. We live five minutes from the hospital. If I needed something, I could run back home to get it or to check on the kids (one of the other missionaries has a teenage daughter who volunteered to watch the crew while we were gone. She is such a blessing). When we needed a meal, I could send one of my employees to get some food from one of the local restaurants. Then, the very next day, since there were no complications, we could come home. Plus, it was super cheap by American standards. The whole experience couldn't have been more positive.Mayanja Memorial Hospital

Having an infant in the house again is fun. The kids are beside themselves with excitement. They don't remember Gaelin when he was a baby, so they are enjoying getting to know their new little sister. Elizabeth is digging getting to have a little sister. She prayed for her, and God answered. Pray for our new little girl.

Pray for rain. We have been getting more rain lately, but not in the quantities that will be needed for growing crops around here. It will get unbearably hard for folks in Uganda if the drought continues. Pray for the preaching, the growth of the churches, and the English class we are teaching out at the refugee class. Pray for our continued study of Runyankore.

God bless you all!

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.

Water and Labor

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Mbarara Pump HouseGot a bit of a scare yesterday. I read in the local paper that the water in the Rwizi river was getting low. This is the river that supplies Mbarara with it's H20 llifeline. We are in a drought at the moment. The rain we should be getting this time of year, we're not. I decided to go and check it out myself. So, I drove out to the local pumping station to take a look. Wouldn't you know, I passed Julious, a fellow I know from the early months here (he did a lot of the electrical work on the house). He happens to be an employee of the National Water and Sewer Department. Thanks to him, I got a full tour of the facility. The water in the river is a bit low, but it's not at the catastrophically low levels the paper made it sound. The only way we will run out of water here is if Bushene runs out, and they have been getting plenty of rain. However, that said, the lack of rain is going to hurt a lot of people who depend on their gardens for food. Pray for rain. 

Anna has been in labor all day. She ate some pineapple, which is supposed to help advance labor in some cases. It seems to be helping her. We went for a couple long walks today to keep things moving along. Pray that things continue, and conclude with a baby tomorrow. 

In other news, our mutual parents finally got the Christmas packages we sent in October. Sigh. It's not actually Uganda's fault this time. There has been an embargo on foregin mail in the US for months now, thanks to some mail bomb threats. Ah well, Christmas in March, right?

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 03-02-2011

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Greetings! This is actually the second time I've tried to write this. A couple weeks back I tried to write an email, and at the end, before I could save it, some bizarre javascript error happened and erased the whole thing. Needless to say, I was angry enough to beat a manatee to death with a snow shovel. I figured I'd better wait awhile and cool off so I could write an email and actually be Christlike at the same time. Then, in the interim, I got busy updating the website and just now got it all to the point where I can start blogging again. So, here we are.

No baby yet, although I hope to be able to communicate that news soon. Anna is QUITE ready to give birth. She made her goal of having Brennah's birthday land in March and not in February, which is top heavy with birthdays already, but now she'd like to be done please. Pray the labor will endure and result in a healthy birth, infant, and mother very soon.

We are doing well with our language study. Runyankore is a complex Bantu dialect with phonemic lengthening (almost tonal), 3 past tenses, 2 future tenses, and multiple cases that change the prefixes on everything. It's progressing, but slowly. Unless you're willing to fake tongues with the Pentecostals and spend several hours barking like dogs at 11 PM on a Saturday night, there's just no quick or easy way to reprogram your brain to speak another language. I try to be patient with the process, but it just feels so slow sometimes. The really awkward thing is how the Swahili we're learning out at the refugee camp keeps intruding into the mix. I'll find myself totally unable to remember the Runyankore for something, but the Swahili will be all I can think of. Aggravating.

I tell you, I'm very glad I went to BBTI to get the training in Phonetics and Linguistics I did. It has made the whole process a LOT easier than I suspect it otherwise would be. It helps in the English class I'm teaching at Ngarama an awful lot as well. Because I know what parts of the mouth are needed to make specific sounds, I can show the mostly Congolese people I'm instructing exactly how to make, for example, the 'r' sound. This involves circumflexing in American English, and tangles their tongue as badly as multiple flapped 'r's in a row does for us. We know what to listen for when learning speech, and how to replicate those sounds very well, so we can attempt to speak the language properly without a foreign accent. Our goal in all this of course is effective communication for ourselves, to preach the Gospel effectively without translators, and to bequeath literacy to them, to grant them true priesthood of the believer by learning to read the Bible for themselves. Those 10 months of hard work in rural Texas are continuing to pay eternal dividends. I honestly think the speed with which we have adapted to living here was largely facilitated by the cultural and language training we received at BBTI. It was well worth the financial and time investment. I am personally very grateful to the Cobbs and Alfords and others who labor in isolation in Bowie, TX to equip missionaries like me to be a success on the field.

I'm enjoying preaching, and being involved in the ministry long term in one place. Deputation bounces you around too much, so you never get to really scratch the surface on the Biblical text as thoroughly as you would like. It's good to be involved in people's lives long term as well, helping them reach the goals God has for them, equipping the saints as servants of Christ. We are prospering here in the sun and pleasant climate of Mbarara. We eat well, we live well, and we're all as healthy and happy as can be. It is deeply satisfying to be busy about the thing God intended you to do. Getting regular sleep doesn't hurt either. 🙂 I am very grateful for all your prayers, and for your financial support, which is continuing to make all this possible. I anticipate great things in the future, because I serve a great God.

God bless you all!

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. 🙂