Recap - Day 5 - A Perfect Injustice Brick Throwing Continued

Waking up in Africa, still very surreal - it hasn't sunk in yet that this is where I am.  And I'm okay with that, for now.  We ate breakfast and then went down to the babies home to help with feeding and bathing the infants and getting all the kids dressed for the day!  Then back in the taxis and headed back out to Bombo (I think?!?)  to the new boys home for A Perfect Injustice!  David and Abby Kakeeto are leading the charge for this ministry and have such a wonderful vision for this 22 acre plot of land.  They would like to have 2 homes for 16 boys each, a bakery, possibly a school and church, a bakery, crops and livestock - and 5 fish ponds!  All so that these boys will have a chance in life. 

Of course the contractors worked quite a bit since the time we left yesterday and got lots done!  You can see where the window will be on this wall already.

But you can tell that his stack of bricks is dwindling so the mzungus had to get back to work throwing those bricks around to the other side of the house!

 No matter how far out in the sticks you are, there is still an audience when there are white people around!

 As the walls get taller, the need for more bricks INSIDE the house increases so we started throwing bricks "through" the windows and stacking them inside.  April (left) and Alei (right) decided to be stackers instead of throwers - and Jesse (Mr. Cool in the front) handed them up over his head - this is a very wearing process for these 3.

Even though it was a Tuesday, 3 of the boys from A Perfect Injustice (API) were allowed to skip school to come out to the land and work with us.  It helped us to get to know some of the kids that would live in this house when it is completed!  The three boys were: Davis, Monday, and Amos.

This is AMOS - a small, but VERY hard working boy.  He didn't want to waste time talking to us, he was too busy working!  I asked him to come throw bricks in the line with us, but he instead went to the brick pile and picked up 4 bricks and walked them to the end of the line!  He was also seen carrying one brick in each hand...what a beast!  He also took the hatchet to some wood and used a slasher to clear some land. He only stopped working to eat some chicken and chips for lunch.

Due to the climate in Uganda, there are all types of fresh fruits and vegetables growing EVERYWHERE!  The tree in the yard where we ate lunch these 2 days was an avocado tree.  Here is Michael's monkey with a fresh avocado that just fell from the tree.  So bright and vibrant!

At the end of the day, we were working on digging the trench for footings and making the porch/veranda area longer.  So we were able to do more hands on labor instead of just throwing bricks.  We got to help mix cement and lay bricks under the cement pad that will be on the porch.  Here is Pastor Dwight - the one in charge of our team.  He has been to Uganda 6 times and made the connections and relationships with each of these organizations.  So wonderful to see.

 Here is another one of the boys that came to work - this is Monday.  He enjoyed taking photos and goofing around between work tasks!  The other boy, Davis, was busy taking photos on Cristina's iPhone all day so I didn't get any shots of him!

 And one photo of me in this post.  I'm sure I was working...because I wasn't the one taking the photo!  A little pink in the face - probably more because of heat and not that I was getting a tan!

We finished work a little early this day so we could actually shower and relax a little before going back to the baby home for dinner time.  Then dinner at the guest house again.  I'm already in a routine and I'm okay with that.  Having someone else make most of my decisions through the day is helping me be able to experience more of Africa without thinking about the mundane decisions about life (when to get up, where to eat, what to do)!



Recap - Day 4 - Arriving in Uganda!

So, we've finally arrived in AFRICA!!  We flew into Entebbe, Uganda - for all of you history buffs, yes, THAT Entebbe.  But it was all good!  We had to wait awhile to get our visas before going through to get our luggage from the baggage claim - and we had A LOT to claim!  The bright side is that through all of our flight changes, leaving bags at the airports, etc...is that the airlines made sure that over 25 big bags made it to Uganda.  The down side is that ONE bag was missing - and it was poor Sarah's clothes!  So a claim had to be made and that took time!  Here is what I packed for just 14 days!  Between the 3 big bags, carry on, and my back pack, I had over 200 pounds of STUFF.

We were met at the airport by 2 taxis (one for people and one for luggage!) - these are no ordinary taxis, they are 14-passenger vans!  Good times.  We loaded into the vans and embarked on an hour long drive north into Kampala to our guest house (hotel).

Our taxi was very quiet as we all were looking out the windows and taking in all of the sights, sounds, and smells of Africa!  It is quite different from the mountainous regions of Colorado and the small towns of Kansas!  In Africa, they drive on the left side of the road and what we in the US would consider a 2-lane road (one lane of traffic in each direction), they consider a 6-lane road (3 lanes in each direction!)...here is a picture of the 14 passenger taxis and a few boda bodas (motorcycle taxis).  As you can see, the bodas aren't even on the paved road here.  They weave in and out of traffic at will and just take the quickest route possible to get where they are going!

We made it to the guest house and were there long enough to drop all of our stuff into their conference room, change into work clothes and go to the bathroom...and take a picture of Michael's monkey with David!

Then it was back in the taxi for another ride - this time about 45 minutes outside of town to the land of the new A Perfect Injustice boys home!  We met the other 11 members of our team that had arrived 2 days prior and had been working at the house all morning!  It was a bit awkward to try to meet and remember the names of people you've never met and then try to start working together.  This is what the house looked like when we arrived.  Yes, that is all brick and mortar (aka cement!)...and scaffolding made of sticks!  I'll do a separate blog post next week about brick making and construction in Africa...quite a bit different than how we do things in the US!

Our job as a team was to transport the loads of bricks that had been left on the outside edges of the work site and get them into the building for interior walls or along the outside edges of the building for the exterior walls.  These bricks were approximately 8 inches long, 3 to 4 inches wide, and weighed about 8-10 pounds a piece.  At the time we would have said that the bricks weighed between 15-20 pounds, but I'm all about keeping it real!  There's no telling how many bricks we threw this first day...especially since 1/2 of us showed up and only worked about 4 hours!  We did take a lunch break and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The peanut butter there was quite tasty! 

In order to move the bricks, members of our team created 2 lines facing one another in a zigzag pattern.  Someone would throw a brick to you and you had to immediately turn around and throw it to the next person and try to keep up in a rhythm so that your body didn't get too exhausted with starting and stopping!  But, a whole bunch of mzungus (white people) from the US that don't make their livings doing manual labor had to take water breaks, bruise breaks (time to compare bruises from times when bricks didn't get caught with hands, but with shins, ankles, chests, etc), and dust in our eyes breaks.  It took some time to get used to it! :)  Toward the end of the day, the contractors (natives in charge!) allowed us each to lay one brick on the wall.  So we could say we had something to do with the actual building of the house!

 We finished working by about 4 pm and then headed back to the guest house to "clean up" (such a relative term) and take a 5 minute walk down the hill to Sanyu Babies Home - an orphange of 48 children aged 3 weeks to 3 years old - to help with feeding and bath time.  Wow, what an experience.  No amount of babysitting or teaching can prepare a person for that many kids!  The mommas that work there (5 - 6 at a time) have it down to an art, but in my opinion, even with the additional hands of 22 people it was still chaotic! It was fun to be able to feed the little ones their bottles and to attempt to find appropriately sized clothes for all of the kids..kind of like a moving puzzle!

Dinner most nights was the buffet at the guest house around 7:30 pm.  Most nights there was rice and beans (or bean gravy), a vegetable (slaw or green beans/carrots), chips (french fries!), meat (goat, most often), and then fruits.  This is our first night's meal - the rice and beans were yummy!  At this point, I thought I could live off of rice and beans! 

We had a team meeting and debriefed about our day - it was a short meeting because most of us were just wiped out!  By now I think I have everyone's names down which is good!  We were assigned our rooms and roommates for the 2 weeks.  Praise the Lord that I got put in a room with 2 other ladies, April and Courtney...and our room had 5 beds!  So we had room to breathe (which is good considering Courtney's luggage EXPLODED and she took up 3 beds for awhile!) and didn't have to be in each other's way.  Due to malaria carrying mosquitoes, we were able to sleep like princesses under mosquito nets!  The one electrical outlet that we had in our room housed the small fan that kept us "cool" throughout the night...or at least kept the air moving!

Recap - Day 3 - London

Waking up in Windsor, just across the street from the castle was surreal.  It had been 11 years since I was in England last.  How much life I have lived in the past decade!

After not getting my requested wake up call (called a knock up in England - insert jokes here), I only had 30 minutes to get ready.  Thankfully I had enjoyed a nice, long, hot shower before bed so I could get packed and ready in a half hour!

We ate the cold buffet at the hotel thanks to the airline (only $18 for cereal, fruit, yogurt and toast) and then embarked on a very quick tour of London. 

We had to take a train into London and then navigate the Underground that is under construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics. As we were wandering around Trafalgar Square, we saw the Uganda House (Ugandan consulate) across the street!  Of all places to be in London, we ended up there!  How fitting.

We decided to get on a double decker tour bus and ride around London for 2 hours listening to "Uncle Barry" as our tour guide.  He was an older, retired gentleman that was very knowledgeable...he even spoke in 5 different languages rather fluently while we were on the bus.  We didn't get off the bus at any point to do more specific sightseeing since we were on a fairly tight schedule.  We saw all of the major sights and a few minor ones.  He caught some of us dosing (thanks to jet lag!) in the midst of his presentation and chose to make it known to everyone - but we'll forgive him!

As we were walking around after the tour trying to find some authentic fish and chips for lunch, we got to see Parliament and Big Ben up close and personal.  Here is Sarah with Michael's monkey in front of Big Ben.

After talking to a traffic cop to get directions to a fish and chips joint, we walked up the street and went down into a basement of a 'restaurant'...that's where they put larger groups of American riff raff.  We were served our fish and chips for nearly $14 per person.  Yikes!  Thankfully we had travel insurance to help pay for all of our purchases!  Most of the people at our table ordered water to drink.  Never would we have expected to have 5 different brands of water bottles delivered to our table...but even worse was that the bottles were not sealed so we know that they were refilled bottles...served with glasses with one cube of ice in them!  Hopefully not the norm in most United States restaurants!  I had ordered a "Fanta" and got some watered down version of a soda...at least it was not water!  Just a little sketch!

After lunch we got back on the Underground and then switched over to the train back out to Windsor to the hotel to pick up our luggage and find a way back to the airport!  As we pulled into Windsor it started to rain (in true English fashion!) so we did some quick souvenir shopping and went back to the hotel.

We got onto a bus shuttle/taxi that serviced the airport and headed back into London.  We kept stopping every couple of minutes to let people on and off and we seriously wondered if we would make it to the airport in enough time to get checked in and through security!  Then, we stopped at a bus stop and the driver took the money box and got off of the bus and no replacement driver was in sight!  I'll admit I got a little worried myself wondering if we were being set up, left for dead, or if we were supposed to get off and transfer to another bus.  After about 10 minutes, a new driver arrived and we were on our way.  Of course the airport was the last stop for the bus service!

As we tried to check in on a new airline without any luggage to check in (since it had been left at the airport overnight), we ran into a few snags.  We all got checked in finally and through security with about an hour before our flight was to take off which gave us a few minutes to shop duty free at Harrod's.  Of course it was too expensive for my taste, but it is always fun to look around. 

We got everyone to the gate with plenty of time to spare and waited to get on the plane.  Here are Josh (left) and Steve (right) Quisenberry - father and son- waiting at the gate for our overnight flight to Uganda!

On the flight I was sitting in the middle of the 3 seats in the middle of the 767.  On one side, a older gentleman from England that had been doing charity work in Uganda since the 60's and on the other a Lebanese woman that had been living in Kampala, Uganda for the past 15 years.  They both wanted to entertain me for a majority of the flight that I was truly hoping to be able to sleep through!  But I heard many wonderful stories about the people of Uganda and some of the cultural dos and don'ts from people that were not natives which I suppose was helpful...if only I could have slept more than about an hour on the flight!

Recap - Day 2 - More Travel!

I awoke on Saturday morning in Chicago instead of Brussels as was our plan.  Oh well.  What's another trip through airport security? 

The airline gave us food vouchers and we had a good time trying to spend all of their money, down to the penny!  We chose to celebrate National Donut Day again and so we got a couple dozen donuts to share!

Thankfully, we were all able to sit near one another on this flight - granted we were in the last 3 rows of the plane, but together nonetheless!  And, no airplane ever backed into a mountain, so I figure we were in the safest part of the plane.  Some of the team used our time in the terminal the night before to get to know each other a little better and we had time during dinner to talk.  But 8 hours of flying solidified that a little more!
Here I am with Lexie (from Texas) and April (from Colorado).

We landed in London and picked up all of our luggage - HOPING to find a way to leave most of our luggage at the airport so we didn't have to sightsee with so much luggage on Sunday in London.  Unfortunately, the airline hadn't let London know that there were issues and we needed lodging.  So we waited for 30 minutes to get our hotel reservations and got on the shuttle to the hotel.

We arrived at the hotel only to find out that they were not the hotel called by the airline and that they didn't have any available rooms for us.  It was a nice, swanky, modern hotel...well, at least a nice lobby that we got to sit in for over an hour while they tried to find us a different hotel and taxis to take 11 of us and our luggage to the other hotel!  At least a couple of the team got to use their internet to send emails!

So, our 2 Afghani taxi drivers took us another 15 minutes outside of London to Windsor.  We stayed at a hotel directly across the street from Windsor Castle...and the queen was staying there, but we never saw her...because it was 1:30 am before we were checked into our rooms!

We asked for directions to get into London the next morning to get in a full day of sightseeing.  Andi, one of the hotel workers, was happy to oblige.  In his very tall, large, Scottish manner at least!

He read my t-shirt that says "International Voice of the Orphan" and instantly said, "I'm the international voice of the whiskey bottle which explains why it is empty!"...oh my, what a ride.

I got to have my very own room that night - I love how the 'double' room was just that ... 2 twin beds pushed next to each other under a headboard!  It was good to have a nice, hot shower and a soft bed.  Unfortunately, even with the time change and travel, I only got a couple hours of sleep once it was all said and done!

Recap - Day 1 - Travel...kinda!

Well, now that I'm back home, I can relive my trip and hopefully convey 1/100th of my experience for you.  I will apologize for the excessive details that will probably be included.  I won't get to talk to most of you in person so I want to express as much as I can as you are reading this...
After dropping my precious puppy, Deacon, off at his home for the next 2 weeks, I went to my parents' house to see my parents and grandparents before heading to the airport.  I had my 3 large suitcases in tow (47, 46.8, and 49 pounds each) when I went to check in and when it took 20 minutes to get my boarding passes, I will admit I was getting a bit nervous that my trip was going to be over before it began!

Luckily, the issue was that Wichita wasn't able to print my boarding passes for the 3rd flight of the day leaving Brussels - something easily dealt with in either Chicago or Brussels. So, got everything checked in and went to visit with the friends (Holly and Brooke) and family (mom, dad, grandma, grandpa) that were there to see me off on this adventure!

Throughout these blog posts, you may see photos with a beanie baby monkey (seen here with Holly and I).

This monkey was one of 93 beanies given by Holly's mother, Lynda, for the kids in Uganda.  As they were praying over the beanies and the children they would be given to, this monkey became designated for a boy named Michael.  I decided that whomever this child was, that he should be able to see the journey that the beanie (and I) had been on in order to see him in Uganda.  So I began to document in photos, the adventure we were going on!

After several minutes of laughing and praying, it was hugs all around, heading through security, and up to the airplane!  My flight to Chicago was very quick and uneventful...the way flights SHOULD be!

I changed concourses in Chicago, grabbing a pizza on my way to the gate to meet the other 10 members of the team (1/2 of our team flew through New York and 1/2 flew through Chicago).  I will admit I was a bit anxious about meeting these 10 people that I had only met via a 10 minute Skype chat or a paragraph of introduction via emial.  I only had about an hour of layover, so not much time to get to know anyone well, just the cursory introductions and small talk!

I met Lexie for the first time...we had talked via Facebook and text, but never met in person. It was good to at least see a 'familiar' face.

So, once all of the team had arrived, we began to hear the boarding announcements for our flight to Brussels.  Several of the first class passengers boarded when there was an announcement that the air conditioning on the plane was broken and needed to be fixed and there would be a slight delay (we only had a 2 hour layover in Brussels so we didn't have a lot of time for delays!).  After about 15 minutes, the next announcement was that it was too hot outside for the workers to fix the air conditioning!

They had the first class passengers deplane and we all knew we were in for trouble!  After about an hour, we boarded the plane and settled in.  Most of our team was scattered throughout the plane with several of us surrounded by Belgium high school students that had been in the US for a senior trip.  Oh my...45 high school kids on an 8 hour flight - I was not looking forward to that!

After waiting on the plane for 30 minutes or so, the flight attendants were having certain parties deplane in order to make sure they could get on different flights out of Chicago.  Unfortunately, we were not the lucky ones!  We were on the plane for about 2 hours before the flight was cancelled.  After 2 more hours of trying to get flights rescheduled for 11 people, we were headed to a hotel for dinner (at 10:30 pm!) and a good night's sleep (courtesy of American Airlines) before leaving Chicago on Saturday morning to head to London instead of Brussels.  I will admit, I was very thankful for a SLEEP NUMBER bed for my last night's sleep before heading overseas! :)

I got to share a room with Lexie and Sarah...my teenage trip daughters (sisters!)...love them!

Day 13...

Today is the last day I will be in Uganda, Africa.  Very bittersweet for sure.  It has been a very lengthy 2 week stay, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like we have spent that much time here.

The 1/2 of the team that ended up going through London has been here a day less than everyone else, but our diversion made it seem much longer!  On the other hand, when we started the trip, we were hoping for a possible extra day layover in Brussles, Belgium...as we sat talking today, the consensus is that NO ONE wants any more flight delays!

I do not know what God expected me to learn on this trip, but I am sure that He will continue to speak to me through this experience through the years.

Yesterday, several of us women returned to the Hope House to spend another couple of hours with the women there.  What precious spirits they have in spite of the circumstances of their past.  They are such a blessing.  They made each of us a gift of jewelry and I got pieces made of browns and pink...some of my favorite colors!

Our flight home starts late tonight...and it will be 27 1/2 hours before I arrive home to family, friends, and my puppy!  Can't wait!  Looking forward to eating fresh veggies, meat, and cow's milk...and a shower and Quilted Northern toilet paper!!

My next post will most likely be from the US!

Jinja, NOT Ninja, and the Nile

Jinja and the Nile

Monday is coming to a close. Today was spent in a 14 passenger taxi. We drove to a town called Jinja and went to an orphanage called Redeemer House. Right now they have over 20 kids living there and they range in age from 2 to 16. It is an amazing ministry and these kids all have chores that they do (cooking, cleaning, picking mangoes) and they are being taught about the love of God. We were welcomed with singing and dancing!

They made us lunch and we just played with them for several hours...and I officially have my first sunburn. :( but it is bearable so I will survive! 

After we left Redeemer House, we drove a little while more and went to see the rapids on the Nile River. I didn't ever think I would see the Nile, but today it happened. I even put my hand in it. So cool!  But not nearly as cool as 2 of my teammates getting engaged at the falls (to one another). So excited for Jesse and Courtney. 

I am currently writing from the cramped back seat of he taxi so that I will be able to post as soon as we get back to the guest house (hotel). I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. We are playing this week by ear until we leave on Thursday night! Amazing that I have only known these people a week...we are talking about how blogging has changed our lives. Too true - mine by reading so many others' stories and many of us connecting here in Uganda for the first time. Who would have thought!