April 21, 2011

• Life without assistance

  So for the next two days we are on our own.  Azeda’s mom was hospitalized with Malaria and she has gone to help.  She said she would be back Saturday morning, but we will see.  Please pray for a quick recovery of her mother.  I am not sure how old her mom is, but her father died from Malaria 18 years ago.

  So what can a family of “mozungu’s” (translated… white people) do without a house maid?  Well laundry is out of the question!  She has an amazing ability to get almost every stain out of our clothes.  And as you can imagine, four kids with red dirt/mud everyday can produce some serious laundry.  Oh yeah, that and the Ugandan version of Montezuma’s revenge is reeking havoc on poor Isabel.  I tell you what, you cannot pay someone enough money to deal with the amount of cloth diapers that we have had.  They are all washed by hand!  Holy crap… literally!

  Actually, Isabel is just starting to get over it.  It was a combination of her body adjusting and cutting teeth.  She had a couple of bad days there.  But it is getting better, quickly.

  Sorry for jumping on subjects… but everyone knows I am a little ADHD.  (a little?)

  Yesterday was a pretty fun day.  After home schooling, Liz and I took a motorcycle taxi (bota-bota) to the “mall.”  At the mall, there are European style groceries available.  Hence the ability to make cookie dough now.  The first bike was a little older.  If we hit a bump you could feel the motorcycle grind a little.  I am pretty sure that motorcycle was not rated for three (and a half) people, one of which is a fat guy.  (my tail bone still hurts from the ride!)  After that four hour excursion, we played outside the gate with the neighbor kids.  It was a ton of fun!  It first started with frisbee.  Of course, the neighbors did not have frisbees, they used the tops of butter containers!  I am pretty sure that between the 30-40 kids outside our gate that there may only be three balls (a mini soccer ball, a plastic wiffle ball, and a real soccer ball).  I have only seen the real soccer ball here once.  It is probably because they cost around $15 here.  So these kids make do with everything. 

  I often see the kids playing with bicycle tires and sticks.  They will see how far they can roll the tire with the stick before it falls.  There are a couple of kids who have sticks that resemble guns.  So they have their little mini gun fights.  After a little while, I got out Isaac’s mini-football.  The neighbors love seeing that.  Most of the time, we just have a big circle of kids and we play catch.  But yesterday was different.  After a short while, one kid, Louis, volunteered to be “in the middle.”  From that, we probably had three hours of the craziest game of monkey in the middle I have ever seen!  It was a ton of fun, until mom said I had to come in for dinner   (j/k Lizzy).

  By the way, we realized yesterday that everyone will have to pray for the poor work groups that come here.  The language barrier here has halted my ability to make jokes.  So besides Lizzy, I have no one to joke with.  Poor Azeda must thing I am a lunatic!  So the work groups will have to be my opportunity to vent my jokes.  They are all getting pent up.  I may have to find a padded room.

  Now for the good news… It is official, we have all of the ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.  Oh yeah, except and OVEN!  Do not worry though, Lizzy will get her fix just by eating the cookie dough.  Oh the sacrifices…!

  Well, I guess that is all for now.  Please keep praying for us.

  • 4:20 am
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