Jinja

Hello all!
I know it has been quite the time since I have caught you up on all the workings of Africa! So I will do my best to give you a run down of events.

Last weekend we had the opportunity to go to Jinja, the source of the Nile river. We met with two different missions organizations that are in place there. It was really fun to be able to listen to them talk. A guy named Spencer from the Church of Christ took us on a devotional tour of the town of Jinja which was really powerful. We started at the source of the river and tried to imagine how many people had been getting their life support from that river for thousands of miles and many years. We moved to a street that had once been called the Beverly Hills of Africa. Unfortunately it was inhabited by many Indians that were running the economy through business. During the reign of Idi Amin he made all Asians leave the country, not able to take anything with them. The houses were left and ransacked. The street is run down with ruins of beautiful architecture. Uganda’s economy has still not returned to what it once was. We also went to a hospital. It was hard to see the condition of health care. People sometimes must wait for months to even be seen by a doctor. It was hard to chew on and I felt very uncomfortable in the setting. As a group we were able to eat US food again at a restaurant and I loved every bite of it. We stayed at a beautiful resort right on Lake Victoria and I took a really long nap at Saturday afternoon, which felt glorious. On Sunday we went to a little Baptist church and this is where I got my blog title. The children sang three songs for us while dancing and one of them stated, “God’s love is like a mango, sweet and sweet.” I laughed because I know if such a song was sang in the American church or in one of my classes people would be too busy analyzing what theological meaning those words have and all enjoyment would be lost. Ok maybe I’m a little bitter! Just try having class with 20 college age students from all over the country and all from Bible schools. We spend the majority of our classes discussing questions like what is a missionary? What is missions? Goodness. It is enough to make a girl want to cry.

As far as how my family is doing, I’m trying to take pictures of them to add on to my blog, but that is tough going as they will never pose for me! We have a couple new additions to the family. Sometimes my 20 month old niece will live with us. Her name is faith and she is scared of me. She screams when I enter the room. A funny thing about child raising here is that children scream and get what they want. Faith has sugar in her milk every night. Along with Faith came Joann. She helps with all the housework and isn’t connected to my family directly, but I think she is about 11.

Lastly… I must tell you that it rains all the time here. One day last week I needed to use my umbrella to block to sun during chapel because it was so hot. Of course I forgot to bring it. About an hour later Kiersten and I had run to the bathroom and while we were inside it started DOWNPOURING. We tried to wait it out but had class in 15 minutes and by the time we made it class I could ring out my skirt. Of course I didn’t have my umbrella.

For anybody interested in my waterbottle situation… Kiersten had bought be a plastic disposable bottle from the store. I came home one day to find my host sister drinking from it. She decided she needed it because she was thirsty. There goes that one. The next day (Friday leaving for Jinja) I had another plastic waterbottle and had set it right next to my bag before going to tea. When I came back to board the bus our room was locked and my stuff was outside. No water bottle. Oh the life.