Clearly, I drove to the office...

We’re in Uganda! It seems a bit surreal, since the view out of my window could easily be in Madagascar.

Monday morning we left Nairobi at about 11, and flew out over the Rift Valley, then over Lake Victoria and to Entebbe. Landing at Entebbe was very cool...the airport is on a peninsula and also it’s just one of those places that I’ve heard about and never imagined I’d get to be at. We went to get our Ugandan visas there, and then we had a 5 minute flight to Kijjansi, where MAF is based.

We were welcomed very warmly and taken to our house. Our house is in a small compound with 2 other houses, and is quite a bit smaller than our house in Madagascar. (Actually, I don’t know how much smaller it is, but most rooms seem much smaller.) The garden is lovely (Matthew proofread this for me and told me that you don’t know what a garden is...the yard.), and the girls ran around playing very happily. I feel very grateful for all of the hard work that was put into getting a house ready for us on such short notice (about 5 days!). The house was all ready for us, including being stocked with bread, eggs, jam, cereal, milk and fruit. Also, there were notes of welcome attached to baked goods from about 5 families!

MAF tradition (worldwide, as far as I know) is for all visitors to be put on “hospitality.” For instance, this week we have 4 dinner invitations and one lunch invitation. (And someone told all of these people when their day is...they are all very gracious, but it’s not as though it just happens.) This is the first time in my 4 years of MAF life that I’m on the receiving end of hospitality. It’s been very interesting. :-) We’ve eaten a lot of good food so far. (The black olive/rosemary/parmesan scones being at the top of my list of favourites!) I’m afraid that I might not be losing weight here like I hoped I might. :-)

This MAF team is more than double the size of our team in Mada. There are Dutch, English, Scottish, South African, Swiss, Swedish, German, Chinese, Americans and Canadians here. There are lots of kids, too, including 3 families that have adopted (or are in the process) Ugandan children.

Driving here scares the crap out of me. They drive on the left side, and the roads confuse me for some reason. Matthew sees no reason for them to be so confusing, but I just find them to all look the same so far. :-) I probably will start at some point, but I’m not in a hurry.

We did go shopping to one small store and I’m very excited because even in a small store I found brown sugar (beautiful, soft, dark brown sugar that I will take bags and bags of back to Mada!). One thing that makes shopping here a lot easier is that the Ugandan shilling is worth almost the same amount as the Malagasy ariary.

Nights here seem very loud to me. We can hear the general neighbourhood chatter and socializing, dogs barking, some kind of frogs or insects that don’t want to take a break, a mosque that I haven’t seen yet and of course, birds. It hasn’t caused us to lose a lot of sleep yet, since we are still catching up from the hectic last week.

The first afternoon we were here was quite warm. It rained during the night and now it’s been very comfortable and even quite cool in the mornings. The only downside to that is that our hot water in the bathrooms hasn’t been working. :-( Right now there is a man here trying to fix them. (The water is heated in a small electric heater right on the shower head...supposedly.)

Today a young lady is here to help out with the laundry and other cleaning. Because MAF housing doesn’t include a washing machine, and we obviously aren’t going to buy one for such a short time, she is doing our laundry by hand! She seems to be a very hard and thorough worker, and so pleasant. It’s strange for me to be talking to an employee in English and gives me a funny feeling. I’m sure I’ll start speaking French to her some day. :-) Today I also felt so free, for lack of a better word. It felt so funny to have someone else working on the housework, while I just did schoolwork with the girls. That is somewhat normal since I’m used to having Mme Pauline around, but here it’s also the fact that I have nothing, really NOTHING else to do! No Bible study, no grocery shopping, no school drives, no random errands, no long chats with Mme Pauline or anyone else, or anything. I almost felt like I didn’t have the attention span to do schoolwork as long as we could today! I’m not used to so much uninterrupted time. :-)

I’ve been working on this blog entry for several days now, waiting for when I have a chance to get to the MAF office and use the internet there. The MAF offices here aren’t at the hangar, since the hangar is about a 20-30 minute drive away. Matthew has been gone today, tagging along on a flight to start to get a feel for how things are done here. If he gets back before it’s too late, I might be brave enough to try driving over to the office. We’ll see if my addiction to the internet is stronger than my fear of driving here. Ha ha.

Photos will come another day...