April 1, 2011

  • We landed safely!

    So we landed late last night, 10:15 Kampala time (7 hours ahead of Grand Rapids)!  What an adventure it was.  I cannot believe that the kids made it the whole way.  There was relative peace among them.  THANK GOD!!  We actually got praise for how good our children were.  Imagine our suprise...

    We finally got to sleep around 2 am!  Yes, that is all of us!  We had to wake Isabel at 11:30 am.  The other kids got up just before us around 10:30.

    We are currently staying in a motel.  It is definately not the Ritz, but it has beds/pillows/mosquito nets!  There is even a little heat in the shower, praise God!  We did some running today.  We got hooked up with some Ugandan Shillings and we are multi-millionaires! It sounds nice to say that, but things are not any cheaper here.  An Iphone 4 costs $800, a soda $0.75, you get the jist.

    The kids are adjusting well, or at least as you could expect.  Grace is really adapting well.  She is incredible.  Isaac and Lydia are struggling.  It is either sleep deprivation or the shock of it all.  But there is little making them happy.  But they are warming up to the idea.  Once we get a house, and settle in a little, I forsee it getting much better.

    We also met our house help yesterday.  She is awesome!  The kids absolutely love her.  It is really nuts how quickly they warmed up to her.  Even Isabel likes her a lot!

    The house hunt is on... we looked at two today, but our budget does not allow for the mansions that we all dream about.  We could get a pretty sweet house, from what I hear, for about a million shillings a month.  However, that is about $115 per month more than what we budgeted.  So either pray for the exchange rate to increase drastically, or for a similar house to come available in our price range.  We cannot afford to stay in a hotel too long.  Ten days expense is equal to our budgetted house payment!

    Keep in mind, we are seven hours ahead of you, but Skyping is free from one computer to another.  If you so desire, I can email you our cell phone numbers.  We cannot afford to make calls from them, internationally, but we can receive them.  I hear that it is only $0.17 per minute if you Skype a phone.  Not too shabby if you ask me.

    Anyway, for now, that is an update.  Please continue praying for us.  We will need quite a bit of moral support with the cultural adjustment.  Things are DIFFERENT.