Balance in this Life

How do you find a balance in this life we are living?  Being in a third world country, trying to lose the last shreds of our first world mindset?

Moving into a different house recently, I find myself doing what would probably come natural to any Amercican in a new home for their family.....making it look nice.  I found myself contemplating what I could do to transtition the raw, concrete floors into something "nicer" and easier to keep clean.  Then it as if I wake up again, take a look around me, and realize where we are and that I can live with concrete floors.  Who needs tile when the majority of people we come in contact with have dirt as floors?

BUT how do I tap in to this balance of Third World vs. First World life?  How much do I deny myself or deny for my kids because life has choosen to deny it for so many others?  WHERE DO I DRAW THE LINE?????  Some lines are easy, as in "Yes, we can live without a t.v.", but others are much more blurred.  Do I take us down to two meals a day because others are lucky to get one?  Questions like these are what I am finding my brain being bombarded with on a daily basis lately.  Sometimes emotionally it feels like too much and I just want to scream.....scream for the unfair hands that so many of my daily companions have been dealt.  Am I saying that these companions need a western styly house with tile floor?  No!  Some of the happiest people I have met here have had the least in terms of material possessions. 

But I am saying that NO mother should have to watch their child starve to death when there is such excess of food in other parts of the world.  I am saying that NO mother should have to sit on a dirty, rat infested, hospital floor for four days, waiting for someone to care more about her son's life than about a few shillings they could make from a bribe. 

PLEASE, someone, help me find a balance to this life God has called us to live.

Field Trip Fridays

The kids and I home school and usually we are able to fit five days of work in to four school days.  That leaves us Friday free for Field Trip Fridays!  It has been very important to Jason and I to involve the kids in as many steps of our ministry here as we can.  It wasn't just our lives that changed drastically when we moved here, but theirs also.  We want them to understand what we are doing here and most importantly WHY we are here.  FTF came to be as my way of making sure that the kids stay involved.  During the week, Jason usually rotates through the kids, taking one or two with him into the villages when he can.  Fridays are our day as a family to all minister together.  We have been trying to visit different types of ministries around the area, giving the kids a glimpse of different ways that people are working together, under God's name, for His purpose.

This Friday we visited a ministry called Ekisa.  http://www.ekisa.org/  While there are many orphanages in Uganda, very few will allow children with disabilities.  Ekisa is a home for these disabled children, that so many in the rest of society here, are ready to just cast away.  We had an incredible time visiting and loving on the kids in this ministry.  Nothing makes me smile more than to see my kids get down on the floor and truly care for these other children.  Here are some pictures from that day........ (and yes, Pierce had pigtails because Hadlee did that day and he insisted on some too!)

Fresh Meat Anyone?

Getting meat here has been tricky from the beginning.  In Luweero, where we trained, the issues were that our power was unreliable so we couldn’t store up meat, and yet to buy any we had to travel about 2hrs, so it wasn’t something we could just get as needed.

In Jinja there are some meats available in the local grocery store, or supermarket, as it is called here.  At a supermarket you can usually find whole chickens and minced meat (ground beef).  It doesn’t always look trustworthy though, with questionable temperatures in the coolers, and meats stored right next to ice cream.  Here are some images of what the supermarkets look like…….

Meat is mostly sold in market (I'll get pictures of market soon.  It is quite the experience).  

The sight of the raw slabs of meat hanging, often all day in the sun, with no type of refrigeration, flies all around, does not necessarily scream “Mmmm, let’s have steak for dinner!”.  So for the first nine months in country we have avoided most meat, aside from the occasional chicken or mince meat, which was still wary at times.  These last two weeks things changed though.  We were eating lunch at a local diner run by a lady from Australia.  We noticed she had filet on the menu.  Jason had been craving a good steak, pretty much since the plane landed, so we gave it a try.  IT WAS DELICIOUS.  I asked Jude where she bought her meat from because all I had seen was the market booths.  She told me about a butcher in town that she had been using for quite some time and that if I told him that Jude sent me then he would make sure that the meat was fresh and cut the way we (as in Westerners) like it.  Ugandans have many different uses for different parts of the animal that we would not even think of, so if you don’t specify, you will end up with all types of cuts of the meat

We decided to be brave and give it a try.  The whole pieces of steak were actually quite a bit cheaper than buying the mince meat in the supermarket, so I even thought that I might start trying to mince my own meat, if I can get the right attachment for my Kitchen Aid.  Best of all, the meat was so good.  It has to be bought a couple of days before you intend to use it and really worked on to tenderize, but the result is worth it.  I still have to hold my breath when I buy it and get past my American thoughts of how meat should be handled though.  My stomach turns slightly every time I go to buy some, but I am sure I will soon get used to it.  Here is our butcher……

Our Church Here

I wanted to try to give you all a glimpse of our lives here.  One of the hardest things to leave behind in TX was our church family.  We absolutely LOVE Brazos Fellowship and miss our friends, fellowship and the sermons so much.  God has given us another gift here in the form of Accacia Community Church.  It is a nice mixture of Ugandans and other missionaries.  The services are in the backyard of the pastor, underneath the trees, surrounded by God's beauty.  I even received quite the sunburn this past Sunday because the shade shifted after the service started.  Here are some images from a normal Sunday morning for us......

 Hadlee hasn't quite developed enough courage to attend the Sunday school class yet, so she usually sits with us and colors.  Our pastor throws a lot of "Amens" into his sermon and Hadlee never fails to answer him with her own "amen", much to the delight of the crowd!

 The family before the kids break into their own class.  We all worship together.

The worship and praise team.

Impromptu History Lesson

One of the many things that I have come to enjoy here in Uganda is homeschool with the kids.  It definitely is a challenge at times, having 4 kids with different needs all at one time, but it has given me a chance to see what they are each gifted with, as far as scholastics are concerned.

   

 With Pierce I usually try to do the basics of preschool, practicing his alphabet, counting (both in English and Luganda), colors, etc.  With Karson, I have a full second grade curriculum from Sonlight, which Hadlee and Everett both sit in on for history, bible and science.  Then the three older kids break for individual work on math, reading, handwriting, spelling and language arts, for their individual grade.  So far this has worked for us and as Pierce gets older I will probably separate them two and two.

In history we have been studying the Vikings Era.  Sonlight does a great job in tying all subjects together for one theme.  This past week however, I had to jump ahead in time and have an impromptu history lesson with Karson.

He had taken some computer paper and a stapler and disappeared to work on a creation of his own.  He was so excited to share this creation with me, but when he walked into my room for the big reveal, my facial expression greatly disturbed him.  I couldn’t hide my thoughts and it really confused him.  He had done a great job on creating a mask and hood.  This is what he walked in looking like………..

Needless to say, to help explain my look, we got on the computer and had a little history lesson.  I found an image of the KKK where he would see that his mask looked exactly what they used to wear and why it might come as a slight shock to see my little boy wearing it.  He decided his just needed a new color!

Update on Karson

Other than a couple of episodes with hives, Karson hasn’t had anymore issues since the last post.  Everett, however, has.  

The other morning Everett woke up with the same swollen face that Karson had been sporting.  It must, undoubtedly, be something biting them in their sleep.  What changed is that Karson sleeps on the top of a triple bunk bed and Everett had been on bottom, with no one in the middle.  Everett decided to move to the middle bunk, which I am assuming just put him in closer quarters to Karson’s biting bug/spider/whatever it is.  Later that day Everett also broke into hives, so I am assuming that the face swelling is the first sign and the hives are just a reaction to the poison (or whatever they are reacting to) still being in their body.

Yesterday morning Everett appeared to be a little puffy again, but nothing huge like before, but then again, just before bed, more hives.  So now we have the fun task of taking apart the beds, again, and trying to find this pesky critter.  Pests have been one of the biggest hassles for us so far.  First with bedbugs then fleas and now this creepy, biting, mysterious bug/spider.  Oh, and we can’t forget the very, very annoying ants that are everywhere.  Here is an image of them in the kitchen, late at night, after they thought we had all gone to bed!