Tuesday, October 7, 2008

wee little update

Saturday is a day of hand washing clothes from the week, dancing to the beat of traditional African drum beats, watching a movie in the beautifully and newly finished library, and now, eating matoke and rice! While this may seem quite unexciting to some of you, matoke and rice once a week for two meals straight is a real treat after a long week of posho and beans every meal. (Please do not think we are mistreating our children here. Posho and beans is the country wide standard diet) When the money is there, the kids even get to eat meat! Saturday is the day of the week.
Sunday the kids dress in their best. Shoes and all! We then walk together to church down the road. Chris and Frank have began involvement in the prison ministry with the church. Chris is preaching and sharing many skits from our years in camp. Frank has a real heart for ministry!
Our bore hole is up and running perfectly thanks to you! We are having no problems and only having to pump 100 or so times to fill a jerry can instead of over 400 pumps! It is a real back saver. Don't worry, we are having the kids do push-ups to make up for the exercise lost! Just kidding!
Juliet, Meeme, and Mohamed are studying hard to prepare for their exams. Meeme is in P.7, Juliet in S.4, and Mohamed is in S.6, all levels in school in which exams are extremely important and weighting on ones future education. They will sit for their exams at the beginning of November. Mock exams take place soon! Please keep them in your prayers. As far as the schools are concerned, we are near completion of licensing Kampala City School and keeping it open! A friend's nonprofit is looking over the possibility of taking on a project to build onto Kampala City School and build a classroom for St. Thomas Primary School as well. Kampala City School is in need of dormitories for borders and two more classrooms as St. Thomas is lacking a P.5 classroom. Let us pray this takes place and building begins in January as planned.
Health update: No recent malaria cases! Although, worms are a big problem here. A few of the boys are dealing with the stomach pain worms bring. We are treating them case by case to the best we can with the resources we have. Scrapes and cuts happen daily and due to the tropical climate during this rainy season, healing takes a bit longer. With the rainy season also comes more coughs and cold symptoms, which are are treating as well. To reduce on the amount of sickness that goes through these precious kids, it is our hope to get a water purifier at the home. This will decrease on the waterborne illnesses that are so rampant. Water purifiers are $125 designed by a professor at Makerere University here in Kampala.
A new cook has arrived! She is notoriously fabulous and loves the kids as well as gets along great with our matron. Both women, Beatrice, the cook, and Vitas, our matron, are a huge blessing to our home and the children here.

1 comment:

Cheryl Russell said...

Thanks for the update! I love hearing about your service there. We are praying for you! May God bless each of you!