Week 59 (2 – 8 Sep 2007)

Picture: Can't resisit another picture of the Nile - and a small waterfall that we went over four years ago. We were in a raft.

We attended Zana Presbyterian Church on Sunday and met a few people we knew. Other than that we had another quiet restful day and enjoyed watching a DVD without having to worry too much about the lack of electricity.

We walked up the hill to Matoke Inn on Monday morning, sorted out some administrative details and had a pleasant lunch with a lady from the UK and working Kenya. We met with Klemens, our Unit Leader, in the afternoon to update him on our progress and complete our mid-term review. He has been on home assignment in Germany for the last year or so and is settling back into a new role in Entebbe. We watched another DVD again – that’s three in a row now! What extravagance!

Tuesday morning was spent reading and planning some things for school. We had lunch with Lyn and a chance to catch up on what has been happening to us all since we last met. And yes, we did watch another DVD in the evening.

We decided not to go out on Wednesday to allow more time for working but the power went off at mid-day so we were unable to use the laptops until around 6pm which was a bit frustrating as we’ve just got used to having power!

On Thursday we took a taxi to town and met up with Hope, the daughter of our Chairman of Governors and with whom we stayed for about 10 days last September. Hope has been studying in Kampala for a diploma after finishing her Law degree so we haven’t seen her for a year. It was great to catch up with her – definitely a bright spark and has great potential for the future. After a fairly long walk we eventually found Sam’s, a missionary recommended eating house i.e. Western food like bangers and mash! Andrea was delighted that we ended up just across the road from the knitting / craft shop she has been wanting to visit since January. After 5 minutes I went next door to the electrical goods shop! We also visited a good bookshop before returning to Matoke Inn for the regional prayer meeting. We met up with the Unit Leaders from Chad and Southern Sudan whom we had met on previous occasions. There were some other folk we haven’t seen for a while too. We heard about the working in some areas – very challenging but also with some successes.

Today is a sad day for me. Friday 7th Sept sees the start of the Rugby World Cup 2007 and I can’t get anywhere near a TV – even in the matches were on at a reasonable time. Bear in mind that we don’t go out in the evenings and most of the matches are around 5pm or later (Uganda time). BUT – as I write (on Sat 15th) I’ve at last managed to get on to the internet and a top priority is to find out some scores. I won’t say anything about England and South Africa.

Back to the 7th. And we took another walk up to Matoke Inn for lunch and a rest before the Regional Conference 2008 Committee meeting which we’re on. Actually, Andrea is chairing today. It went OK but we experienced the difficulty of not only getting committee members into the same room at the same time, but getting them into the same country! Therefore, several were missing and only two of those present were at the last meeting. Still, we managed to get something useful done. We walked back to the flat and managed to do most of our packing before the power went again.

The power came back on so we were able to leave the flat at 6am on Saturday with relative ease. There were no problems on the flight back to Arua. We met another English lady, Ann, who arrived in Arua a week ago. She and her husband, Alan, are living at Kuluva Hospital and so are “near” neighbours. They gave us a lift into town to our car and on the way established that they are around our age and have two children, a boy and a girl, about the same ages as Richard and Laura and they are also first time missionaries. But they are with CMS rather than AIM.
Back at Ushindi, most people had gone to a wedding so it was quiet. Only the S4 students were around.