Medical Mission to Gulu, N. Uganda

5 days, 6 church plants, 5,471 Gospel presentations, 2044 professions of faith, and over 1,000 patients treated - welcome to an E3 Partners Mission!

Team ROL head off to Gulu -
Julius, Hannah, Christina, Andy, John

In June, we partnered with E3 Partners, an American Missions Organisation, to reach out to northern Ugandans, who are still recovering after 25 years of conflict came to an end a few years ago. We have been supporting a Pastor in Gulu for many many years, and so when the opportunity came to head north as part of a bigger team, we jumped at the chance!

John, one of our Elders, and Julius, our White Eagle Project Manager joined our visitors - Andy, Hannah and Christina - on the most amazing trip. John was part of the team that went and evangelised in Jospeh Kony’s (the notorious leader of one of the worst rebel groups in Africa) village, and as well as leading his Uncle to Jesus, helped 401 others make decisions to follow Him!

Hannah treating an elderly patient

Meanwhile, Andy and Hannah, as physiotherapists, were literally helping the lame walk/wheel again, with walking aids and wheelchairs, whilst Christina and Julius, as part of other Village Teams, were spreading the gospel of Jesus and teaching people that there is HOPE! The team returned home inspired and bouncing with ideas of how to marry practical medical support with church-planting and evangelism We’re really looking forward to partnering more with E3 in the future.

We were also really fortunate to benefit from a big donation of medical supplies, which Hannah and Andy diligently catalogued. We were then able to hand these on to the Medical Superintendent and her staff at Kitovu Mission Hospital in Masaka - they were overwhelmed by some of the items in the suitcases, as they were about to run out of them!

Handing over 4 suitcases of medical supplies at Kitovu

The Lane's Log Episode 3 - Masaka's Hospitals

A very quick update from Andy and Hannah before they head north...

This week, we managed to visit the local hospitals that we had been trying to arrange our voluntary work with. Hospitals are very different here! The nurses don't wash, feed or clean patients, instead family members stay with them to look after them. If there are no beds available, patients lie on the floor or corridors to receive treatment.

Like the UK, there are periods of the year in which the hospitals are particularly busy. In Uganda these pressure times of the year are due to Malaria and mostly linked to the wet season and the high number of mosquitoes.

The wards were absolutely jam packed. Sorry we don't have any photos – we didnt feel it would be appropriate. Those that can't afford private hospitals, or the local catholic hospital, go to government hospitals. However this still costs patients to see a doctor and receive treatment, which for many can still remain too expensive.
 
While we were being shown round the local Catholic hospital we were asked to assess and treat one little boy who had his webbed fingers surgically separated. Post operatively his wound was open and very sore! Thankfully we had packed some balloons we used to encouraged him to do his exercises. Hygiene and equipment is going to be something we learn more about as we work more.
 
We also visited the local government hospital. Their physiotherapy department has a room about the size of our waiting room at work, where patients come for treatment. We were surprised at the equipment they had (very old but has potential for treatment). Once we have sorted out the paper work, we are hoping to help them out with some of their clinics.

Andy and Hannah are with River of Life for the next 3 months. They are Physiotherapists from Newcastle, UK and are helping River of Life develop our links with the local hospitals and ROLC's Hospital Ministy. If you would like to support their work with River of Life, head over to their Justgiving page

Sarah's Story - new girls, a snake, baby-sitting and a visit from the dentists...

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

The Lane's Log Episode 2 - Nutrition, Outreach and Ball Line Football Academy

We know it hasn't been long since our first email, but a lot has happened in our first week here. We are gradually finding out more and more about what life is like here in Uganda.

At the beginning of the week we were living with a trainee dietician, who has been doing research into malnutrition in the surrounding areas of Masaka. This has involved visits to local clinics and several trips into the wider communities away from the major towns. On some occassions, these trips ended in taking babies/children back to hospital due to the severity of their conditions. 70% of the population is under 24 years old and the country has high child mortality rate. Hospitals and local community clinics have large population areas and most children born in these areas won't have a birth certificate.

Community Clinic

We were able to join the final research trip to find out more about what she has been doing and also look into the possibilty of River of Life Church creating some community health outreach projects/clinics. We visited a clinic and were able to chat to a number of their staff. This particular clinic has a catchment area population of around 59,100 people, 27,500 of these are believed to be under the age of 15.

During the visit the team were told of some children away from the clinic that may benifit from a visit, as they were known to be malnourished. As we visited the families it began to hit home that we were in Uganda. I (Hannah) went into two homes, both approximately 3x3 metres in size, where the families lived, ate, slept etc. They were very dirty but this didn’t stop young children running around playing. One of the young girls we met had oedema around her face, which is one of the first stages of malnutrician.

On our trip we passed other villages along very unkept, poorly maintained roads. Whilst we were driving we passed a lady sat by the side of the road with a pile of blankets. There was a body under these blanket and we were told by the Ugandans on our trip that she would be waiting for the family to collect the body. Pretty unbelievable really!

Over the past couple of days we have been spending time getting to know the River of Life Church Projects. They have a number of ministries into the local area, including work with a number of schools and the nearby prison and hospitals. On Friday we had the opportunity to visit a school. We walked into a classroom not much bigger than our staffroom at work, where about 100 little faces greeted us with beaming smiles, huge excitement and deafening noise. We were asked if we were okay to share a little about ourselves and talk a bit about Health and God. This was/is totally out of our comfort zone, as we haven't done anything like this before but it is an area we would very much like to support! It is also an area the projects are looking to progress and develop to include additional health education. We will see how it goes!

We later walked back to the charity offices through a more deprived area of Masaka, Nyendo, an area we will be spending quite a bit of our time. The River of Life sponsors and supports a number of the local children to go to school, teach them life skills and gives them places of rest and love. This in many cases also includes giving them somewhere to live, such as the respected boys and girls homes and others at local boarding schools. All of the children sponsored are called White Eagles. One of the managers is a trained social worker, Julius (previously mentioned in our last email) and he supports children when possible to go back to live with their parents. He kindly took us to two schools to meet a number of the White Eagles. Again we were greeted with laughing, clapping and screams of excitement. What an experience! They were all so welcoming – They were so thankful that we have visited their country, so much so that it was a little uncomfortable. Andy and I stood at the front and told each class (around 7 in total) why we have visited, what our jobs are back in the UK etc. Unfortuneately we didn't take any photos as we didn't want to appear rude, but I'm sure you would have loved to have seen their faces!

Today (Saturday) we had our first physiotherapy clinic with the White Eagle boys. It was great to start doing some Physiotherapy, teaching and advising them appropriately. We look forward to progressing the clinics in the coming weeks.

We have also spent some time with Ball Line Acadamy, River of Life's football academy based in Nyendo. We were scoping out the possibility of doing some Physiotherapy and Healthy Living/Life Skills work with the group of boys who train and play within Ball Line. Training goes on for two hours in the midday heat. Some of these boys play in bare feet on the dry red African patchy grass. So when Andy got asked to play in his slightly too small plimpsoles he couldn't really say no! Two side-line trips to put suntan lotion on and two blisers later, the ref blew the final whistle – much to Andy’s relief! We will see how much we can do with these guys in the coming weeks when we get to meet their main coach.

Relaxing before food at the boys home

We are learning a huge amount about life in Uganda. We can't quite believe it has been only a week since we arrived! It has been a hard week but also a very rewarding start to our time here. Everyone we have had the privilidge to meet have been extremely friendly and we have been very excited to see some of the amazing work the The River of Life Projects are doing in the community.

We will tell you more when we write an update next week. We are missing people at home and hope you are all well! Lots of love and thank you so much for all of your emails/messages!

Lots of love!
Hannah and Andy x x

Andy and Hannah are with River of Life for the next 3 months. They are Physiotherapists from Newcastle, UK and are helping River of Life develop our links with the local hospitals and ROLC's Hospital Ministy. If you would like to support their work with River of Life, head over to their Justgiving page

The Lane's Log - Andy and Hannah Arrive!

Andy and Hannah are with River of Life for the next 3 months. They are Physiotherapists from Newcastle, UK and are helping River of Life develop our links with the local hospitals and ROLC's Hospital Ministy

We arrived in Entebbe, Uganda, after our 8 hours flight at around 7:30am. It had been a long day, travelling to Heathrow terminal 5 and not getting much sleep during the flight to Uganda. We were met at the Airport by John, a driver for the river of life, who kindly helped us with our bags to the van we were to travel to to Masaka in. After a quick stop at a local supermarket, where John kindly supplied us with lots of water and bananas to keep us going, we set off to Masaka.

John stops to buy fish for his dinner!

After the night flight it felt like another long journey, on a large variety of roads, but it gave us a good opportunity to see our surroundings. It did not take long before it was clear that we are no longer in the UK and that for most of Uganda their way of life is very different to back home.

Crossing the equator!

After around 2 hours, we had a quick stop as we passed the equator and posed for a few photos, before climbing back into the van. Uganda looks like a beautiful country with far more greenery than we had anticipated and after around 3:30 - 4:00 hours, a journey that would take around 90 minutes on UK roads, we arrived in Massaka.

Our first port of call was to meet up with Rob and Kat, who are kindly putting us up for the next 3 months. They were at The River of Life Church, and we arrived just as the service was ending by greeting new visitors. Before we put our bags down, Rob had greeted us with a big hug before ushering us to the front to introduce ourselves. We received a massively very warm welcome, with big smiles, hugs and handshakes, both in the service and afterwards.

After Church, we drove the final 10 minutes of our journey up to the house that Rob and Kat are currently renting. The Church have found them a beautiful base, with an amazing garden, to help to greet visitors to the River of Life and look after Elena, Rob and Kat's beautiful baby girl. We feel very privileged to have the opportunity to stay here and it has certainly helped us to settle and feel safe.

Rob and Kat are also currently hosting a student, Mariah, who has been working on co-ordination with the local hospital and River of Life looking into malnutrition in the surrounding areas. Mariah has also been very welcoming, helping us to feel relaxed and it's a shame our stints only overlap for the next few days.

After a quick nap to re-energise and to attempt to stop Andy being so grumpy, we were treated to a trip to Masaka's nicest hotel, to swim and eat. We decided to skip the swimming, as we were still both tired and looked forward to our first meal in Uganda. An hour after our arranged eating time, and several power cuts later, we tucked into our meal. As we ate, we enjoyed chatting to Gerald and Julius, who joined us at the hotel. Both guys are Ugandan and play important roles at River of Life. We finished the meal with Ugandan tea, served using hot milk and ginger!

Our new bedroom!

After food, we headed back to our new base and quickly set up our mosquito net and headed to bed. It wasn't long before we were both out for the count and didn't wake until 10am this morning...

Today we have continued to settle, unpacking our bags and enjoyed local chapattis, guacamole and groundnut sauce for lunch. Later we are discussing our plans for the next few months and hoping to make up a timetable for the coming weeks. Exciting times!

Finally, we would like to thank everyone once more for all of their love and support. We have both found leaving our normal lives in the UK very difficult, and we wouldn't have made it this far without everyone back home. A special thanks to our families were have continued to support, comfort and encourage us in our times of need. Thank-you!

An extra special thank-you must also go to everyone that has given money to support our time here with the River of Life. As we type, we have raised an amazing 73% of our target total - a massive £2,028.50!!! Thank-you!

If you would like to support River of Life and Andy and Hannah's time with us, head over to their Justgiving page

Sarah's story - welcoming new members of the family, riots, insects and Operation ARK

Hellooooooo everyone!!! I hope that you are doing well! Life here is good, and the last month has been great!

One of the highlights of the last month was welcoming 2 new residents into the girls’ home: Hope, who is 16 years old, and her son Isaiah, who is 1 year old. We were all soooooooo excited to see them, and are loving getting to know them! Kitibwa, in particular, is overjoyed to have a little friend to play with, and spends all his time hugging and kissing Isaiah... although he tends to smother Isaiah a bit at times with all his affection!!!

But they play together a lot (see photo – Kitibwa is in blue, and Isaiah is in grey and yellow), and whenever Isaiah cries, Kitibwa comes over and says “Sorry” and strokes him. On the first day that they arrived, Kitibwa took Isaiah by the hand and led him from his room and into the sitting room to where everyone else was - he was really looking after him and it was soooooooo cute!!! Hope is lovely! She is very tall (Isaiah takes after her – he’s almost a year younger than Kitibwa, but nearly as tall), very gentle and kind, and wonderful with Isaiah. She’s getting on particularly well with Kitibwa’s Mum, Kellen.

Another noteworthy event of the last month has been the riot that we had.... in fact, there were 3, but the first was particularly severe. People in Uganda, and particularly in Kampala, have been doing “Walk to work protests” that have often escalated into riots, and people in Nyendo (where I live) started to riot too one day 3 weeks ago. They were dragging people out of cars and off motorbikes, and trying to burn and destroy their vehicles, and setting up road blockages with burning tyres. The police came with guns and tear gas, and then the army came with their guns too, so there was a lot of gunfire for a few hours. I was safely locked inside the girls’ home, but most of our kids had just gone down to the boys’ home. Although they were safely locked in, they got tear-gassed, because, when the police came, many of the rioters ran and hid behind our church (just by the boy’s home), so when the police tear-gassed them, our kids got tear-gassed in the process, because the wind blew the gas straight into the boy’s home! They were all crying and coughing, and their skin stung for some time, but no one was badly hurt.

The whole thing lasted about 4 and a half hours, and initially, I was watching proceedings from the balcony of the lady who lives above the girls’ home, but when they started firing shots, I beat a hasty retreat, just in case a bullet went astray!!! There were quite a few injured that day, but most tragically of all, a little 2 year old girl who lives not far from church got killed during the riot, when a member of the reserve army entered her house and blindly opened fire because he thought one of the rioters was hiding in there. That resulted in tensions being rather high in Nyendo, and there have been 2 further riots since the bad one (but they only lasted for 3 hours and 2 hours, and there were much fewer shots and a lot less tear-gas). Since then, there have been police patrolling Nyendo every single day, dressed in riot gear and gas masks – they look like navy-coloured Storm Troopers from Star Wars, and are quite scary-looking when they’re all dressed up!!! They seem to have taken up 2 bases in Nyendo – the first is in the church grounds (by the boys’ home), and the other place they sometimes go is just outside the girls’ home – I don’t know whether they think we’re a particularly dodgy lot, and likely to start a riot!!! Anyway, we’ve decided that we’ll be particularly safe in the event of another riot, since they’re camping out just by us!!! The surprising thing (for me) is that the riots didn’t leave me feeling scared, and it wasn’t scary during it either, and I had thought that something like that would be!

The last month has also been a month of insects.... first of all it was “White Ant Season”, when all the ants come flying out of their nests, and are promptly caught by all the local kids, to be eaten either straight away (i.e. alive), or saved for later to be fried. (White ants are a local delicacy.) I wasn’t brave enough to try them alive (I kept imagining them running round my mouth!), but I did try them fried, and they were very nice, to my surprise! Then, it’s also “Grasshopper Season” again, although there don’t seem to be as many as last season, so we’ve not been eating them much. And then, lastly, we’re eating lots of insects in our beans.... but that one is not intentional or planned! The problem is that we’re growing our own beans at the White Eagle Project farm in order to save money, but they didn’t spray them with chemicals (like they do with the ones we usually buy), so the beans are infested with weevils!!! They’re horrible – they float in the sauce, so I try to remove them when I see them, but they’re also hidden inside some beans, so as you’re eating you suddenly feel your teeth crunching on something like grit, and you realise that you’ve just chewed a bean weevil!!! It reeeeeeally puts me off my food, which is a shame as beans are my favourite food over here, and we have them 5 days a week!!! Unfortunately the sack is huge, so we’ve another month or so of eating weevils and beans still to go! (And you can’t waste food over here by throwing it away, just because it’s infested with weevils!)

Last week, we had Operation ARK (Acts of Random Kindness). It was great fun!!! We (the youth and youth leaders from the churches in Masaka) spent the week clearing rubbish from the streets and market places of Nyendo and Masaka town, clearing drains, and generally blessing the community.

Everyone worked soooooooo hard, and got ridiculously dirty and grimy in the process, but there was such a good atmosphere the whole week, and there was a lot of joking and good fun!!! We also had lots of singing and dancing and good food (-apart from the bean weevils!) each day! Here are some photos below showing sludge from a blocked drain, someone clearing said blocked drain, and someone clearing rubbish from the street...

And there’s also a photos I took of the hundreds of chickens that arrived packed in the back of a truck, ready to be sold at the market that day, because it looked funny!

Anyway, that’s my news. Life continues to be interesting, and full of new experiences!!! I’m also busy running the holiday programme with our kids, doing my homework and assignments for the “Celebrating Children” course I did last month (they have to be done before I go back for part 2 of the course in 2 weeks’ time), and doing various other things at church and with the project.

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter and are enjoying Spring!!!

Lots of love,

Sarah

Sarah's story - Going on retreat, Snakes, and Celebrating Children

Helloooooooooo!!! I hope everyone is doing really well!!! Thank you to everyone who’s e-mailed me! I’ve had quite a busy month, so I’m slightly behind with my e-mails, but I’ll catch up soon!

Despite being busy, the last month has been wonderful! The highlight of it was when I went on a retreat during my week off. I went with my friend Thirsa, going on public transport all the way, which is always an interesting (if rather uncomfortable) experience, as you get packed in like sardines, and often share the space with chickens, sacks of potatoes, and lots of wierd and wonderful stuff. The retreat was in Jinja, on the banks of Lake Victoria at the source of the Nile. It was soooooooooo incredibly beautiful!!!!!

The retreat was entitled “The Father Heart Encounter” and was AMAZING!!! It was all about knowing God as a Father, and was really really wonderful! Also, the food they gave us was amazing, and I even had a strawberry!!!! – it was the most beautiful strawberry I’ve ever tasted! (- although one of the Ugandans was very suspicious of what he called “a funny English flower”, and was convinced it would make him ill!) There were also lots of interesting people there, including 4 people from Karamoja, a very primitive part of Uganda, who amazed us with stories of life in their village, where they still wear very few clothes (just a few strategically placed animal skins if what they said is true), drink blood mixed with milk, and buy their wives with cows (- it costs 150 cows to get a good wife, apparently!). They invited us to go there and preach (and even offered to give us some animal skins to wear so that we could dress - or rather undress - like them!!!)..... Maybe one day I’ll get the chance to go.... Anyway, as I said, the retreat place was incredibly beautiful, and it was so lovely to sit and enjoy the views, etc. Thirsa and I were slightly worried when they told us that a quite big water snake had recently been seen just by the edge of the lake – we decided to go down there together, just in case we saw one... though in retrospect, we decided that we didn’t know what on earth we would have done if we had seen one, or why going together would help – although I guess it would mean we had only 50% chance of getting bitten if the snake decided it wanted a bite!!! (But they assured us that water snakes are very timid snakes, and very unlikely to attack!).

Speaking of snakes, one of our VERY brave White Eagle boys killed a big (to my eyes, anyway – it was about 1 metre long and just over an inch in diameter!) snake down at the boys’ home last week!!! It was at the edge of their football pitch, and he hit it on the head with a big stick. It became a bit of a local tourist attraction for the local kids for a few hours - they picked up the dead snake with sticks, and tried to scare each other by chasing after their friends with it. Every child is terrified of snakes here, whether they be alive or dead, so there was a lot of screaming for a few hours, until someone disposed of it!

Last week, I had the privilege of going on a course in Kampala, along with Uncle Julius and Aunt Emily (the project manager and project director). It was called “Celebrating Children”, and was the first of 4 separate weeks during the year. It was all about working with children, how God views children, how to listen to children, stand up for their rights, include them in decisions, run children’s projects well, be good children’s workers, etc. It was really good, and everyone left with a renewed passion for working with kids, with new skills, and with fresh ideas about developing their projects. We have to do six assignments before the next training week, so I’m trying to organise myself to get all of them done in time. Some of them are quite hard, and not very fun.... Others are quite fun – one involves observing a child at play and writing up a load of stuff on it, and I’ve chosen to observe Kitibwa – so far I’ve observed him hiding his toys all round my room, hiding my keys (- lucky I was observing him!!!), and trying to “phone” me with the television remote control! I don’t really like tests and assignments (- I had decided to try and avoid ever doing any exams/coursework again after finishing uni.! -), but it’s worth it, because I’m learning so much through the course, and we hope it will help us develop the project, as well as helping us improve individually.

This week, we’ve got 4 visitors from the UK staying at the girls’ home. It’s reeeeeally wonderful to have them, and we’re all enjoying their company!!! I’m continuing to slog away at learning Lugandan, and am not making very fast progress, which is sometimes frustrating because some other people come and seem pick it up very quickly! I’m focussing on particular areas, one of which is phrases to use for the hospital ministry.... so on Monday, I acted as an interpreter for one of our visitors as we went round the hospital – I was sooooooo pleased, as I understood nearly everything that was said to me and had some medium length conversations, and only needed help when some patients asked if they could give their lives to Jesus – I got stuck after 2 sentences! (I’m learning a few new phrases every week, so I’ll try to add that to my repertoire soon!).

We’ve had a HUGE amount of rain here in Uganda over the past month – despite 2 months of dire warnings via TV, radio and texts from the government telling us there’d be a drought and a famine in Uganda!!! Everyone’s very pleased about the rain, although it has meant that there is an abundance of mosquitos, and I’m getting eaten alive everyday by them despite wearing a ridiculous amount of mosquito repellent and eating Marmite like there’s no tomorrow, as someone said that can help! (– I’ve even tried wearing 3 different makes of repellent at once, but had to stop because the girls complained that I smelt so bad! – but it didn’t work anyway – they still bit me!).

I’d better leave off here, as the girls are about to come home, and I need to meet with Teddy to hear her read – she reads to me every day to try and improve her English, although she tends to read with a Mancunian accent, as she’s learnt how to read and pronounce lots of words from me!!! She doesn’t speak like that yet, but it would be funny if she did! Maybe Kitibwa will!

I hope everyone is doing very well, and that you have a WONDERFUL Easter!!! Eat lots of chocolate eggs for me!!!

Lots of love,

- Sarah