A day in the life of.....

March 1st

Someone requested a "day in the life of" entry from us. So here it is. (in john's style of presentation- linear, bullet points. :-)

6 am- Bathroom break
7 am- get up
7:30- Breakfast at the institute (40 feet from our hut.)
8:30- Head off to work on the guesthouse for John
8:45- Ellie goes off to the baby house
1:00- Lunch (usually rice, beans in a sauce of some kind, matoke)
1:30- A handful of trail mix, and back to work for John
5:00- quitting time for John, back to the house to bathe
6:00- Dinner (varies. the meal rotation is about 5 or 6 days before repeats)

After that, it depends on the day. Last thursday, we went over to Uncle Mike's and watched The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Some days we just hang around, read, write, or talk with friends. Something that is commonly done in the evenings that we don't do very much (which we're planning on changing) is visiting the family groups.

By the way, here is the website of the ministry we are working at. I thought some of you might like to check it out.

http://www.newhopeuganda.org/


Ellie wanted to take a baby from the baby house, so since this morning till tomorrow night we have little 2-month-old Isaiah, who is quite sick. He has a very hard time breathing, and it makes you feel awful because you can't do anything to help him. Ellie is trying to get him to go to sleep right now in the other room. He doesn't like lying down at all, probably because it's harder for him to breathe. So he wants to be held all the time, and that doesn't happen very much if at all at the baby house. That's one of the reasons Ellie wanted to take him. We'll let you know how the night goes. I'm thinking it might be a bit rough. It might be good to explain the baby house also. I'll let Ellie do that since shes working there.

peace



Feb 26th

Ellie and I just watched a movie with Rose and some friends called "Freedom Writers" , which is a mostly-true story about a teacher in inner-city California. It was a good movie, in a pull-yourself-by-your-bootstraps kind of way. Anyway, as we walked from Rose and Julia's hut to ours we both (independently of each other) had the odd sensation of stepping back into reality. Movies can be immersive, and we had briefly forgotten that we were in the middle of the bush in the middle of Africa. As we stepped outside the hut, we stepped back into reality. Of course I've had that sensation before, but it's more striking when the disparity between the story of the movie and the story of life around here is greater; greater than walking out of the movie theatre back to your car. Here there are people a quarter mile away who will never travel more than 10 kilometers from home their whole life, just milking cows and growing casava.