Naomi plays the violin

Here is a picture of Naomi with her new found love - the violin! It's really Bethany's, but Naomi loves to get it out at every opportunity to 'show' me how it should be played! OK, so the bow hold is a bit dodgy, but hey, she's only 3!

Crisis Continues

For those of you following the Kenya troubles, you may have heard that the tension continues. It's tragic to watch this country go this way. This also means that our car will be staying longer in Nairobi and will not be driven back tomorrow as we had hoped. There has been shooting on the road between Nairobi and Kampala and so it is simply not safe. We thank the Lord that we still have our old car to use in the mean time. We'll keep you posted on what happens.

Our Car's Extended Holiday in Kenya

As you know, our car has been having a little holiday in Kenya since the troubles broke out around election time at New Year. We are hopeful that it will be driven back this Saturday along with some of the other cars by a team of MAF Kenya lovely people! Please pray that it does happen. It would be wonderful to get our car back! Please do continue to pray for the situation in Kenya. It does not seem to be abating just yet.

Grannie Annie Comes to Visit

We have just had a lovely few days with Laurie's Mum aka Grannie Annie. The kids thoroughly enjoyed having her around. We didn't do much....life has been rather hectic round here, but thankfully Annie was happy to ride the waves of the chaos.

It was Grannie's birthday while she was here, so the kids decorated a cake,
and Laurie and I went out for a meal with her to a Chinese restaurant here - Fang Fang - along with Roger and Jean Tripp who are out here working with Mildmay Pediatric Care Centre.

Quick Prayer Request

I had a meeting with one of the pastors at church, his wife and the kids ministry leader today to discuss a new curriculum with them. We have decided to go ahead with it and will trial it this Sunday morning at the first service.
Please pray for the leaders who are going to be helping to lead this initiative and also that it would engage the kids and excite them about learning about Jesus.

Operation Christmas Child Distribution - Pader, Northern Uganda

Yesterday (Saturday), I flew a team, including a camera crew, from Samaritan's Purse, a US Charity. They were going to do a distribution of Operation Christmas Child gifts.
For those of you who don't know what Operation Christmas Child (OCC) is - it's where kids (usually in the States) put together a shoe box of stuff for a child in Africa and other developing areas. Usually, the box contains some toys, sweets (candy), some had toothbrushes and toothpaste and other miscellaneous items.
Anyhow - in Pader, the main town in the district, the local members of OCC had got together 200 local children from 11 schools to distribute the parcels. I was told that some of the children had walked 11km (almost 7 miles) that day just to take part.
As we arrived all the kids were singing their welcome to us - a great noise! Once everyone had gone inside (it was too hot to stay outside!) and the kids were sitting in their age group rows we had more entertainment - lots of drumming, singing and dancing from some of the children.
Then members of the team got up (and didn't dance) and explained to the children about where these packages had come from and who had sent them. They also told the children about how much God loves them and also that the children who had packed the boxes did too.

All the kids then came up in their lines, and collected a package and a book about Jesus and his life on earth. They then sat down and waited for everyone to get theirs.

Once everyone had their shoe-box, the kids all thanked Jesus for them and then they counted down from 3 to 1. Then mayhem!
Some of the kids needed help to open their boxes - too well sealed! Others showed us what they had got - people had sent lots of pencils, crayons, colouring books and school supplies. I was called upon to try to explain what you do with play-dough! I thought it was easier to show them so made a quick snake. In some of the boxes, the children who had packed them had written postcards, letters and Christmas Cards. I read a couple of them and was deeply moved by the love that came from them to these kids that they will most likely never meet. It really was Jesus' love that came across with the packages. So if you sent one, be encouraged - they really are making a difference in children's lives.

After the distribution was over, the children were sent home - it was great to see them laughing and shouting and carrying their boxes on their heads.

While the camera crew I had brought were doing some interviews with some of the kids, I just hung out with the rest of the team and we talked with some of the local volunteers. They all had stories to tell. A couple of them had been abducted by the LRA in previous years, some had lost family members to AIDS and other diseases. They told me of one boy who had been in the distribution - his parents had died of AIDS and now he was the head of the household looking after one sibling and the grandparents as well. He was 9 years old. It breaks your heart to hear this kind of story and many others like it - and makes me realise that by bringing this team I can make a difference and bring some joy into these kids lives.

Quote from the Local Newspaper - the New Vision

When Kenya sneezes, Uganda catches a cold.

Says it all!

Kenya Holiday

Apologies for not being in contact recently – but read on…and you’ll find out why!

On Boxing Day, we headed off for Kenya by car with 3 other families in convoy. There were 8 adults and 13 children in our group. The trip can be done in about 13 hours of straight driving, but we figured that with so many kids, we would have a significant number of toilet stops, and so our lead car/organizer extraordinaire – Isabel - planned two overnight stops. So the first day, we drove 7 hours. First we went via Jinja to the border at Busia. At the border station, all the husbands (culturally it makes things easier to have a man deal with officials) went to deal with the paper work. This is no easy task. There are about 4 different offices that need to have paper work filled in – visa, immigration, car insurance, car registration etc. To think that these all might be done by one person is far too easy! Each one has a different official with a different office, and it took about 1 ½ hours to get through the border. It was very hot on the border, and the kids got pretty bored. Once over the border, we got going again and headed for a campsite in the town of Kisumu. Tents were put up and we sorted out who would sleep where. In the end – 9 children went to bed in the same tent as Isabel and her husband James. Our girls had never camped before (they were given a torch from Father Christmas and a sleeping bag from Uncle Roger and Aunty Sue).
It started well, but by 9.30pm when the noise from the kids had not calmed down, we started removing children. So, Naomi ended up sleeping with us in our little tent.

The next day was a big day for Kenya – election day. The front runners were the incumbent Mwai Kibaki and the opposing Raila Odinga.
On that morning, we packed up and drove through the eerily quiet Kisumu main street (more on that later) straight for Njoro via Molo where we stayed at a very beautiful place called Kembu Campsite. This was about a 4 hour drive. Quite a bit of the journey was on roads with pot-holes large enough to swallow the car (ok, I am exaggerating, but not much!) This took its toll on our car, and it started making a bad clunking noise. Once at Kembu – the farm mechanic was called out to look at it, and correctly diagnosed and treated the car for a case of the ‘broken bushing on the left rear car suspension’. We were very grateful, and thanked God for providing someone who knew what the problem was and how to fix it in very literally the middle of nowhere! Kembu was significantly more upmarket (and more expensive mind you) than the first place. There were large lawns and the kids really enjoyed blowing off some steam. In elevation, this was the highest point of the journey and was jolly cold! We all dug out the warm clothes that we had brought. The stars were amazing that night, and the adults spent a nice time that evening being introduced to the Plaides and Haides and other constellations by Laurie who just about managed to remember some of his Astro-Physics degree.

The morning of the 28th, we had a short trip – 2 hours to the Brackenhurst Conference Centre in Limuru. This trip was amazing – it took us through the Rift Valley – along some really awful roads, and one superb road from Nakuru to Naivasha. You almost felt that you were driving through Derbeyshire on a big wide freeway – wonderful! We were glad to arrive at Brackenhurst though. This is an amazingly beautiful spot with quite a colonial looking main building which is owned by the Baptist Missionary Organization.

Coming here was the whole reason for our trip. Every year a missionary conference is held with teaching and seminars for the adults. The kids had their own teaching sessions led by a wacky group of Australians from Jannali Anglican Church that did a superb job of entertaining and teaching our kids Biblical truths – all while dressed up as Pirates! The kids were given goody bags on arrival – a winner for our kids – containing all sorts of Pirate-y paraphernalia. We had 4 wonderful days of teaching by Stuart Pascall. All the while, we kept our ears on the news of the elections. After the announcement that Kibaki had won the election and had been sworn in, it became quite apparent that many Kenyans were not at all happy. Violence in the capital – Nairobi began to escalate and also trouble in the West of Kenya, (Odinga’s home ground), that we had just driven through was also starting to get troubled. Kisumu that had been so quiet only a few days earlier was now a place of gun shots and cars being set on fire. Somewhere about then, there was a media black-out across the whole of Kenya. So we had no TV news, or radio news from inside Kenya. It became very hard to know what was really true. Various people on the conference had friends in certain western towns, and so with that information we started to make plans to return to Kampala. We tried to weigh up the risks of driving home. At one point our plan was to drive in a four car convoy to the border and not stop for anything. I have to say that at this point I was as frightened as I have ever been in East Africa. Most of the drive home would probably have been fine – but once we hit the Western part – we were a long way from anywhere and we would have had no escape route. It eventually transpired that a town called Eldoret – which was on our way home – had suffered very badly. A church containing 30 people who had gone there to hide and seek refuge had been burnt down. It is hard to imagine villagers doing this to their fellow villagers. To this day, it seems that Eldoret is still a place of violence. Despite being told to stay on the Conference compound and not leave – we still celebrated the start of the New Year with silly songs around a bonfire, toasting marshmallows on sticks and party poppers. (Fireworks had been bought, but the organizers worried that they would sound too much like gunfire). New Years Day was spent figuring out what to do. People from the conference were traveling in all different directions – some to Sudan, some to Tanzania. So, we got into traveling groups and spent a lot of time looking at the problem before a wise person suggested that we look up and pray about it! Duh! So obvious! It turned out that the road to Eldoret had been closed – which prevented us from driving home and clarified our decisions. After that airlines were called and we tried to reserve flights for the 2nd Jan. Then we had to try and get taxis to come and collect us from the Conference Centre. This didn’t happen as the taxi drivers were not happy about driving out away from Nairobi because of the violence in some parts of the city. In the end, we drove our own cars to the airport very early and left the keys with a trusted person from CMS (Church Mission Society). The cars were then picked up from the airport by a friend from MAF Kenya who has taken our cars to the compound in Nairobi. We are hoping to get our car back sometime this month but we are not sure yet.
After scrabbling around for the cash to pay for the tickets (no credit card machines here), we flew back to Kampala! In the end there were 25 of us on the flight. The children all cheered on take-off, talked loudly through the 1hour flight then cheered again on landing! Moments after landing – we turned on our phones. Laurie immediately got a call from MAF here asking him to come and help get the internet working! So, it was back to work with a bit of a bump!

As you can tell from the story, this was one New Year that we won’t forget in a hurry! There were many lessons to be learnt from the trip though. I learnt some things about myself that I didn’t want to know, but we also learnt a lot about God’s protection and guiding hand. There were many times when things could have gone very pear-shaped – but we were prevented from getting our selves and our kids into danger. Please do pray for the country of Kenya and particularly for those in the West.

Due to the roads being closed – we now have a severe fuel crisis as all Uganda’s supply comes through Kenya. Petrol is now nowhere to be seen and diesel is in short supply.

Christmas Day

We had a lovely Christmas Day. The girls were very relieved that Father Christmas did make it to Kampala again this year. Naomi had requested that Father Christmas leave her presents under the tree, as she didn’t want him near her bed! Bethany helpfully left him a note to say as much. Even so, Naomi ended up have several nightmares on Christmas Eve about five monsters coming to get her! Oh dear. We told her that it wasn’t meant to be scary, and that it would be just the same as if it were Mummy or Daddy coming up the stairs to their room (ahem).

Christmas Day itself was a beautiful hot and sunny day. We had a wonderful lunch at a friends house along with another British family. We had turkey and all the trimmings – crackers and Christmas pud too! There was even a chocolate fountain for dessert which the children (and Laurie) seemed to enjoy.

MAF Christmas Party

The run up to Christmas was very busy. On Christmas Eve we had a MAF Christmas Party which was for the international and national staff and their families. It’s the one occasion in the year where we are all together. The party was held down at Kajjansi Airstrip. It’s nice to hold the party down there as it reminds us for the reasons that we are in Uganda. The pilots probably feel that they see enough of the airstrip, but anyway! We had a plentiful array of local style food (the national staff tend to not like Western food). I don’t eat Ugandan food all that often, and so love the opportunity to eat matoke (steamed green bananas), posho (maize porridge), chicken stew, greens (a kind of spinach), Irish (potatoes), sweet potatoes and g-nut sauce (a pinky coloured sauce made from peanuts with the shells on – they are called ground nuts here in Uganda). This is all topped off with ‘soda’ – a bottle of any one of the following ubiquitous drinks – Sprite, Coca-cola, Fanta or Tangawezi (this is Swahili for ginger ale).

Several games were held – a Christmas Quiz and a tug-of-war. It was fun to see our night guards and flight followers enjoying themselves like this.