Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I haven’t been updating much because I keep waiting to report some progress. However, progress comes very slowly in Uganda, and I have to redefine my expectations of productivity and efficiency. We still haven’t moved into our house because our container has not been released. We cannot get our container released until we apply for our work visa. However, we cannot apply for our work visa until we get one more signature from the Baptist Mission of Uganda, who will now be processing our work visa. So…we wait. We do that a lot now.

In the meantime, we are getting the entire interior of our house painted. It is moving along nicely and looks very nice. All of the homes here are white on the inside and white on the outside. It seems strange since Africans seem to enjoy color. However, they don’t use color in their homes.

We met an incredible lady yesterday, Mrs. Suruma. She is Ugandan and started a Christian secondary school (high school) nine years ago. She has 150 students, and over 90% of them are orphans. She has a dorm and classrooms and is paying for almost the entire thing herself. She gave an incredible testimony of how God lead her to do this and how He keeps providing for them to continue to keep the school running. The school is right next to our house and the Suruma’s house is on the campus. Our boys’ favorite classmates are the sons of Mrs. Suruma and will be 100 yards away. We were so excited to meet her and hear God’s calling on her life. We are praying to see if God would lead us to be a part of her work, especially since it is primarily orphans.

We are being advised to get a fulltime armed guard for our home for at least the first few months. New mzungus are often the target of crime and we can help set a tone that our home is secure by hiring a guard. We are praying about how to proceed with this and how much guard work is required.

We visited an international church on Sunday evening and had a good time meeting other missionaries from the States. The boys really liked it and made some new friends.

We had a nice surprise yesterday when we got an email from two of our classmates from Mission Training International. Scott Ickes and Stephanie Jilcott are in Kampala for two days with their team from Western Uganda. We had dinner with them, and were able to visit and pray together when our boys were not interrupting. They get so excited whenever there are white people to talk with.

Finally, whenever Tennessee beats Bama it is cause for celebration, even if the victory margin is narrow. Tell Brian Rhodes congratulations on the birth of his new daughter and condolences on another loss to Phil Fulmer. I think this makes Phil’s record against Alabama 11-3. I know how much the Alabama folks hate Phil, similar to the Vols distain for Steve Spurrier.