Helloooo everybody!!! I hope you are all very well! Things are very good here in Uganda!
There have been even more changes in the girls’ home in the last month – we welcomed two MORE girls into our home to live with us. Their names are Tendo (9 years) and Katherine (11 years), and they are sisters. They’re staying with us for a short time until they can go and live with their relatives. Teddy (who’s 11) is loving having them live with us, and the 3 of them are as thick as thieves when they get together and leave a trail of chaos behind them wherever they go!!! So that’s 4 new residents in the girls’ home in the space of 6 weeks!!! There’s a picture below of Teddy, Katherine and Tendo (and Juuko one of the White Eagle boys) in their school uniforms about to leave for school, and another of Hope and Isaiah, and another of Isaiah, Hope, Aunt Esther (who looks after Isaiah and Kitibwa during the day) and Kitibwa (who was in a bad mood at the time, so has a scowl on his face!).
An unwanted visitor to the girls’ home this month, however, was the snake pictured below, who came to visit Aunt Tinah late one evening a few weeks ago – she has a room off the back yard, and the snake was outside her door when she came out! I wasn’t there (thank God!), but apparently she screamed very loudly, and the young man who lives above us heard her and came and walloped it on the head and killed it – then the girls put it in a bucket until I got back so that they could show it to me!!! - So I thought I’d take a picture and show you, too!
Isaiah has been poorly over the last day or two – he had malaria quite seriously and had to stay overnight at a local clinic and was on a drip for quite a long time.... But, thank God, he’s fine now, and loving being back at the girls’ home – he gave us all a HUGE smile as soon as he got back, and has been very happy ever since!!! Kitibwa missed him so much, and kept on asking where he was and wanting to play with him. One of their favourite games is to hold the handle of a skipping rope each to their mouths and use it as a microphone to sing into, and Kitibwa was trying to get me to hold one and sing with him in Isaiah’s absence - but apparently I was a very poor substitute, as he gave up in disgust after only half a minute of my singing!!!
On the theme of Kitibwa and Isaiah, I had no idea that two babies could produce quite so much poo in one day!!! I sometimes look after them (on Aunt Esther’s day off), and I’ve been shocked at the number of nappies we can go through in a day!!! I’ve also been shocked at their attention span when they like a game – one of their other favourite games to play is “Ring a ring of rosies”, but sometimes I find it hard going when we’ve already sung it about 50 times, and they want to do “Again!”!!! My muscles get tired from all that falling down and jumping up again!!!
I went on the second part of the Celebrating Children course a few weeks ago, and it was absolutely wonderful (apart from the fact that they’ve given us some horrible assignments to write before we return in a month’s time! I reeeeally hate writing essays!!!). The course is just so inspiring, and we all came back full of even more passion to work with children and show them God’s love in everything we do!
Over the last month, we’ve had a few visitors to River of Life, including a group of dentists from the UK who came to give free dental treatment to the people of Nyendo. Lots of our kids had their teeth checked and some had treatment. Some of our kids also helped out at the clinics as dental nurses (holding torches, passing instruments, etc.), and others learnt to do oral health education sessions for the local adults and children. They’re even going to do a teaching session at church this Sunday – we’re very proud of them! (One of the things I learnt during that week is that here in Uganda they don’t tell little children that a Tooth Fairy comes to take their teeth when they’ve fallen out and leave a coin, but instead they have a Tooth Rat!!!! Ha ha!!! I guess it’s much more believable for them, since rats are in nearly everyone’s houses!!!)
Anyway, I think that’s all my news from this month. You’ll be glad to hear that the beans with the bean weevils in are finished (yeah!!!), and, although we had maggots in our maize flour which we make our porridge and posho from (posho is one of the main foods here, made of flour and water mixed together and cooked in banana leaves for about 4 hours), I managed to avoid them as I ate somewhere else the day they discovered them (- lucky escape for me!). We gave the rest of the maggots and flour to the farm to make posho for the pigs, who don’t seem to mind the maggots in the slightest bit!
I hope that you are all doing very well.
Lots of love,
Sarah
No comments:
Post a Comment