Tea Plantations...

This past Saturday the Wilks and I went about an hour northwest of here to visit some tea plantations. We are in the rainy season now and this is a big harvest time for tea. It's amazing the amount of work it takes to pick all these tea leaves by hand and place them in these baskets. There were hundreds of rolling acres like this...it was beautiful! For all you tea lovers....lots of tea is grown here in Uganda. If you come visit I'll make you a nice cup of hot chai (milk tea)!

Here's the Wilks family, my teammates. Barry, Scarlett, Emily (13), Jared (12), Sara (soon 10), and Anna (2 1/2). I love these guys! 

"Kids Club"

Every Sunday afternoon the Wilks have started a 'kids club' where the Wilks kids share Bible stories and then play games/sports. About 30 kids and teens that live nearby come. This has been a really neat ministry for the kids and I have enjoyed getting to know some of the teens as well (a teen here can be a person up into their 20's as long as they aren't married). Please remember this group that kids might come to know Jesus as their Savior and then share the good news with their parents at home!

After the Bible story everyone has time to play around. This is our homemade basketball goal in the banana plantation at the Wilk's house :) Trying to teach Ugandans how to play basketball is kind of interesting (football or soccer is the big sport here), but as a good Kentuckian I have to help share with them this wonderful sport!  

This is me and my friend Lillian, soon to be a fourth year medical student at the University here. I was able to have her and her roomate, Brenda over for Lillian's birthday. Brenda and Lillian are also active members of our town church. I enjoy hanging out with them a lot. Thanks Lillian for supporting the USA! haha 

This is one of our clients, Kakazi. We went to visit her in her home and found one of the poorest living conditions I have seen yet. She rents a small mudd room where her and her 6 children stay (her husband died a few years ago). There was only one small, very thin mattress under the mosquito net we had given her. I asked where all the children (some of whom were as old as 16) slept. She pointed to mats on the ground and clothes that they must have used for blankets. Thankfully we were able to give her this blanket, and also with some of the money donated by FBC Henderson's VBS offering I was able to buy two more small mattresses for the children to sleep on. She was so appreciative...you would have thought we had given her a million dollars! I look at her situation and think, "how does she do it?" But Kakazi knows our Savior and has much joy even in circumstances that look 'bad' to us. Praise God...I can learn a lot from people like Kakazi! 

"You're too fat!"

Shopping here is not a leisurely Saturday afternoon outing where you can walk around in a nice air-conditioned mall browsing at clothes nicely hung on their designated racks (this applies to most stores in America except maybe Old Navy :) and then stop at the food court for a quick lunch from Chick-Fil-A. 

The only shopping we have here in Mbarara consists of going to the used clothing market where you have to walk past raw goat's meat and step through muddy sewage only to dig through piles of used clothes that are often dirty and stained. Sometimes though if you look hard you can find pretty nice clothes from places like GAP and Abercrombie. Well one Saturday I went to the clothes market here with my teammates. I was looking for some skirts (of course...what else would I wear here!) and found one that I thought would be good for going out to visit patients. As I was holding it up to see if I thought it might fit (because there are no dressing rooms here) the woman who ran this particular 'stall' said, "You are too fat for that one"! As if I don't have enough of a complex already about my weight being a woman! 

Here in Uganda it is supposed to be a compliment to tell someone they are 'fat' or 'big' because it means you eat well and have money. Well, I don't care how long I live here being told that I am 'fat' will never be a compliment to me! First of all I thought, this woman is dumb....why would she tell me I am 'too fat' she should want to make a sell regardless, right?! Secondly by her telling me that I was 'fat' she totally ruined her chance of making a sell from me at all! And thirdly, this lady was huge compared to me...how could she even call me 'fat'!!! She tried to show me another skirt and I told her as politely as I could (even though I was furious inside) that, no I did not care to buy from her. I tried to explain to her that telling an American that they are fat is very rude in our culture, but I don't think she understood. Can you imagine...being at the mall in a store in America and a salesperson walking up to you as you look at something to buy and them saying, "You are too fat to wear that"? Some things I will never understand about the culture here!

Our first bunch of bananas from our very own 'plantation'!

Here is Anna, who stays on my compound with me, cutting down our first bunch of bananas from our little 'banana plantation'. There are three types of bananas grown in Uganda...matooke, which are the large green bananas that are cooked and eaten as a staple food here; bagoya, which is the large yellow banana most similar to our bananas in the States; and kabalagala, which are the small sweet yellow bananas that are so good here! Usually you cut them down when they are a little riper (but still when they are somewhat green). Unfortunately this tree became top heavy (we have too many banana trees planted in a small place with poor soil) and after attempts by my yard worker to brace the tree...the limbs began to break so we had to cut this bunch of bananas. I learned that banana trees only produce one bunch of bananas ever! So know this tree will be useless. People gain a lot of their income off of bananas here. But a bunch of bananas like this might only sell for about $3 and it takes trees sometimes years to produce. Then Ugandans have to strap about 7 bunches onto their bicycles and push the bananas far distances into town to sell them. So much work for such little money!

Here I am with my first bunch of bananas from my very own 'plantation'! These are the bagoyas that will eventually turn into big yellow bananas most similar to what we have in the States. This is a heavy bunch of bananas! 

My new car!! I can't tell you how thankful I am to the Lord for this car. I had been having so much trouble with my truck and the clutch was really hurting my left knee. This one is still a stick shift, but it has a lot more power and is so much easier to drive! This picture is taken from my front porch. So you can see a bit of my compound..it's mostly concrete (I only have a little bit of grass in the front and the back). But I do have a few banana trees and pineapple plants growing in the back (I'll be surprised if they ever produce while I am here though!) 

Tour of my house.....

Finally after living here in Mbarara 6 months I feel like my house is somewhat 'home'. I wish you could see pictures of it when I first moved in, but thankfully I have been able to slowly 'make it my own'. I was able to get curtains made so I picked out this material as well as the dining room curtains (to follow..i really like those). I spend a good bit of my time in this room especially over in that corner on my laptop (so now you can picture me emailing you).

The dining room is probably my favorite room of the house. I really like the rock wall and it's just 'homey' feeling to me. I don't eat at the table a lot though by myself, but I try to have people over a few times a month to share this big house with!  

It's hard to get a picture of my kitchen, but this is at the doorway entering in. I spend a lot of my time here cooking since I have to do some much from stratch. I am learning a lot! Just call me Betty Crocker :) 

This is the hallway I like to call 'the dungeon'. My house is enormous for just me...there are 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. So I have plenty of room for visitors :) I won't bore you with pictures of every room, but my room is the last one on the left. The garage that has my washing machine is right across from my bedroom. Someone told me I should calculate how far it is from my bedroom to the kitchen....I probably walk a mile everyday in my own house! 

This is my bedroom. I finally decorated it a bit. I went and got this really pretty bedspread at the used clothing market here for really cheap. Don't you love the designs on my floor? None of the houses here have carpet because it would constantly be dirty from all the dirt, but I don't know why they can't just put normal solid color tiles on the floors instead! I guess it makes them unique.

This is the view from the other side of my room (and this isn't even all of it)...my room is huge! The small room in the right of the picture connects my room to my bathroom. I use it as a room to hang my clothes to dry (cause if I hang them outside I have to either iron them or wait 3 days to avoid mango worms that can get into the clothes and then into my skin!) 

And finally my blue bathroom (I am sitting on the bathtub as I take this picture). Unfortunately I don't have very good water pressure, but I do have hot water (when I remember to turn on the hot water heater)! Hope you enjoyed the tour :)

How many car problems can I have?!

So today we were having a meeting/workshop with the Words of Hope counselors at our church here in town. The morning had gone really well and when it came to lunch time I went to my truck, parked at the church to go get some food for us. I put my key in the driver's side door to unlock, but the key wasn't fitting exactly right and wouldn't open the door. I thought, 'that's strange'. Then I went around to the passenger's side door and found that it was also messed up.....someone had tried to break into my car!! Can you imagine...broad daylight, middle of the day....at the church! I mean this is small-town Mbarara....not down-town Nairobi! They had tried using a key in the passenger's side and half of it was now broken off into my lock. It look liked they had even tried to remove the side mirrors, but thankfully they were not able to enter and nothing was missing! Praise the Lord. 

Thankfully I was with the Words of Hope team and Pastor Naboth, our new counselor, was able to go get a mechanic friend of his to come and open the small window on the door and unlock the car. I really don't know what I would do without my Words of Hope teammates....they really look out for me. So what would have been a 15 minute run to get some food for lunch turned into a 2 hour process of getting the doors open and then going to buy new locks and having them installed. I couldn't help but laugh....it seems like everything that could have possibly gone wrong with cars has happened to me in the last 8 months! I must have set a record or something among journeymen.....(let's see I've had an accident and flipped my truck over, flat tire with no jack and a bad spare, a counselor left one of my seat belts hanging outside the door and I ran over it, been pulled over for speeding although no ticket was given), gotten my tire clamped twice for wrong parking, backed into my gate at my house, gotten stuck/had to use 4-wheel drive, have had a mud flap fall off twice (it's still currently off), and now have had my truck almost broken-in to)! 

But unfortunately the story doesn't end there...tonight I went to give my guard some tea and I noticed that the small window the mechanic had maneuvered to open and unlock the car was now shattered and looked like if I touched it the whole window would break into a million tiny pieces. Apparently it had been 'cracked' during the day and then tonight the decrease in temperature made it shatter. So looks like tomorrow will be another fun day as I go to get this replaced! It's crazy that this happened only a few days before I am going back to Kampala this weekend to get a different vehicle. I have had a lot of difficulty driving this vehicle because of the size and now the past few weeks I have been having a lot of pain in my left knee from the clutch as well as some other problems, including the air conditioning. I had been praying about this car....ever since my accident I have had a lot of fear of driving and have never really felt confident driving this truck. God really is good...there is another vehicle available for me to drive that is much smaller and has an 'easier' clutch! Well, at least I had one more exciting thing happen in this vehicle before trading it for another one....and who knows what tomorrow may bring!

There's always room for one more....

This picture is through my windshield so it is a bit blurry, but it's so African! This is a cheap way to get from place to place here...I don't know how they do it though cause the back tires are so flat!

This is at a 'dump' just a short walk from my house. Pretty huh? Sanitation is a hug problem here and Ugandans litter all the time. On top of this dumpster you can see a Maribou stork...these are the most disgusting birds I have ever seen. They are like vultures. The first time I saw one fly over my head I thought it was a pterodactyl! Of course the goats like to join in on the 'feast' as well.