This place is growing on me.

Saturday Games at Suubi
Dale And Richard playing Chess
Aron With a baby chick at one of our living hope clients.
Me at Watoto Chruch North







Hey everyone!

Things are very much looking different in our schedual these days. It's thursday, and we have it off. We're going up to Gulu tomorrow, for a whilwind tour of watoto's village and baby's home up there. Then on saturday morning we head back down through Murchison National park - the same place we went on safari several weeks ago- and have luch there, maybe go for a boat trip or a swim with our class mates.

After we get back from there it's sunday and monday off, ministry on tuesday and then we're back up to Suubi to build houses for three days.

What we've been up to the past week and a half has been a very interesting time.

We spent 8 days living in A watoto village called Suubi, staying in houses with families there. We ate, slept and hung out with the Watoto kids for eight days so far, and it may be more when we build next week.

What we'll be doing next week is what many vollunteers have done before us, which is build the houses the kids stay in.

A team might come from a church from anywhere around the world to build for two weeks. They will make houses for a Watoto mom and eight children to stay in.


That's the main thing Watoto Child Care does; they take in orphans or children that have very broken relationships with their parents and they give them a new life. The house them, give them a new mom, feed them and school them. They supply them with everything they need for a new start at life.

That's where we got to stay for a while, and it was an amazing experience.

Everyone in africa is incredibly generous, especially when you enter their home. They give you their absolute best and put you before themselves in everything. It sometimes makes you feel bad how much effort they put in to make you comfortable. Things like in the early morning they'd get jerry cans full of water for us to bathe. They'd do this on in the times when the water wasn't working. They'd get water from houses a couple minutes away. And on top of that make us breakfast.

But, being waited on was not what we were there for.

Everyday we'd have about a three hour session of a trauma rehabilitation program called Empower. It's a simple program just designed to give people a safe environment to talk about their hurts; to let them out and hopefully find some healing in that. It walks them through understanding stress and trauma, letting it out, forgiveness; nothing all that profound.

My experience with the program wasn't the biggest part of being in Suubi for me.

We had a group of about 15-18 teenagers, depending on the day. most of them didn't open up all that much in the group setting, and some of them did in one-on-ones. It's not that they didn't learn anything from the program, you just couldn't see it yet. I'm quite sure though that the bit about forgiving people who've hurt you got their attention.

The biggest part of being there for me was probably just being there. Living in the culture of the people, which is something I think I miss out on in Uganda.

We doin't spend much time in African culture.

We go to a Church started by westerners. It has it's african influence, but it still is closer to home than most churchs around here. Our main administrative of our program is white. The only people besides the staff in our guest house are white, and we rarly see the staff. The time that is spent with Ugandans is either in class with them (in the church), or somewhat of a rushed ministry.

The time in the village was a way more laid-back, social experience. There's no hurry at all. Supper's at seven, but it's always late due to African Time**.

Your free to wander around, everyone's door is open. Everyone says "hi" to you, mostly because you're a Mzungu.

It was very mice just hanging out with the Ugandans in their home instead of in the classroom.


More to come later.


**African Time is a term used to Describe how everything in Africa runs at least twenty minutes late. It's because Africans have an entirely different concept of time the the western world.

In the west 7 PM means 7 PM. No excuses.

In Africa, minutes and seconds don't seem to matter all that much. Time is more looked at in days, weeks or seasons. So people may show up for a meeting two hours late (no exageration) and there's no need to apologize. In fact, half the time everyone's late, so no one was made to wait.