signs of the times

I really love reading signs here. I guess in Mada they're all in French, so any possible humour is lost on me most of the time. Here they're in English and I'm amused. Some of these are just advertising. That's not so amusing, but I thought you might like to see how people have whole buildings painted with advertising. (It happens in Mada, too, and I always have assumed that the advertising is a free paint job for your house or business, but I don't actually know if that's true.) You might have to click on some of these to make them big enough to read. Enjoy. :)

Happy Mother's Day!

This weekend is so relaxing and wonderful that I don't want it to be over. :) Matthew had 5 long, hard days of work last week, and well, so did I. When he came home on Friday night, I sighed a great sigh of relief and said, "Let's go out for pizza." Ha.

Yesterday we just hung out around the house, except for me making a run to the grocery store and a second-hand store. It was very refreshing to hang out together as a family.

This morning the girls were so excited that it was Mother's Day. :) They had all made cards for me, and gave me money to buy the bird book I've been eyeing. I have to tell you about C's card for me. It was a blow to my self-confidence. (not really, but it cracked me up.) It said, "Mom, Happy Mother's Day! I love you very much! Do you know what to do with the money in the box? Buy "Birds of East Africa!" We put in enough money! Dad thought that you could figure that out on your own, but I wasn't so sure. Caitlyn" Hee hee. So sweet.

We only have two more weeks here in Uganda, a week in Kenya and then we are heading home! I am alternately so excited to get back to our own house and nervous about the continuing political drama there.

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african hair

Caitlyn has been waiting and waiting to get her hair braided, and I finally arranged to have it done. It took almost 3 hours and cost me $5. She's very pleased, to say the least, and the other 3 girls are begging to have theirs done, too. :) We'll see. She has 15 braids, in case anyone is wondering.

Jinja

We're back. Tired, happy and a little bit sunburned. It was a good time away, if you overlook minor details like the hotel not having recorded our reservation. Ahem. And not having a bungalow big enough for our family. And Larissa being made to sleep in a crib because of said oversight. Oh well. We overlooked it and had a good time. :)

This is a tea plantation that we drove by on the way to Jinja. It was beautiful.

When we got to our hotel, we parked under a tree and right away I heard birds. We got out and looked and the tree was FULL of birds and nests. I've never seen anything like it. They were Little Weavers, and they were building nests and making a huge commotion while they were at it. It was amazing. There were hundreds of birds and hundreds of nests.

We ate lunch almost right away after we got there, and while we were waiting for our food, the girls played "Mother May I."

The cute little "Mother" who likes being in charge.

We swam for awhile after lunch and then we went for a boat ride. The hotel was on Lake Victoria, but very near the beginning of the Nile. The hotel had boats for hire, so we found another couple there who also wanted to go and we all went together. Unfortunately, our camera isn't really good enough to take pictures in a situation like this, but we went onto the river and for one hour we just went up and down the shoreline. We saw about 12 different kinds of birds, monkeys and 2 monitor lizards. It was all just so fun and so amazing.

This morning after breakfast, the girls swam again before we had to check out. You can imagine that a pool like this was a big hit. :) They are getting very comfortable in the water now, and like to try new tricks all the time.

When we left the hotel we drove over the dam (hydroelectric dam in the Nile) and went to find the Bujagali Falls. The photo above is the dam, and the photo below is the lower side of the river.

Here we are at the Bujagali Falls.

In this photo you can see the rafts and kayaks getting ready to go over the falls. It looked like so much fun, and the girls begged to go. Someday. That's the sort of thing that makes me look forward to having teenagers. :)

We stopped at a little cafe called the DeNile Cafe. :) We ate fish and chips and couldn't resist the passionfruit cake and ice-cream. It was delicious! I think I might have to figure that recipe out now. I saw this tree as we were walking to the cafe, and thought it would make a good picture.

Larissa was so tired on the way home, and convinced her Daddy to stop the car (proof that he's wrapped around her finger...) and get her blanket out of the suitcase. :) She was asleep soon after this was taken.

We stopped for groceries on the way home, then came the unpacking/sorting/cleaning up that comes after a weekend away. Now the girls are bathed and in bed, and we are relaxing. :)

Bowling and other stuff

Listening to stories on the mp3 player.

My girly-girls.

Caitlyn (she got a few spares and a strike with that thing!)

Aimee (I think she got a spare or two as well)

Sierra (she also got a few spares)

Larissa (she got two spares...she is aiming the ramp in this photo and she had a pretty good eye for it.) Unfortunately this is the best photo we have of her, and I had to crop my head off because I clearly didn't know that anyone was taking my picture at the time. :)

the week

I couldn't sleep after about 5:50 this morning and now I'm enjoying a slow, rainy morning. Two girls are awake and reading books. I'm still in my pjs, since I can't think of a good reason not to be. :) One of these days we'll have some breakfast and get on with life, but for now I kinda like this.

This week has flown by. On Tuesday Matthew had the day off (about his "days off": when he doesn't have flights here, he has nothing else to do. It's so nice for him to have this break from all of the office responsibility he has in Mada.) and we took the girls to the bookstore to spend their money and then we went bowling. We thought he had to fly on Wednesday, but in the end he didn't, and we found a place for the girls to play while we went out and did some focused shopping. Tuesday was fun with the girls, but I hadn't been able to get anything I was looking for. I'm starting to want to actually buy the things I want to take back to Mada, instead of just looking and planning. :) We had a dinner invitation on Wednesday evening, which was fun. Thursday morning Larissa got to go with some friends to a music morning for preschoolers. She was a little nervous about driving off with a carload of people she doesn't know very well, but when she came back she was very excited about her morning.

Today we are going to do school, then pack for our weekend away. Tomorrow we're going about 2 hours away to a town at one of the sources of the Nile. We're hoping to do a boat ride on the Nile and then I'm not sure what else there is to do. The hotel we're staying at has a pool, so I'm sure we'll use that a time or two. :) Tomorrow is our 11th anniversary, so it's nice timing.

Please keep praying for Madagascar. Things are not really improving at all, and it is quite sad to see this turmoil.

Internet!! At home!!

I never expected to get internet at the house while we’re here, so having a decent connection is really a bonus. After having no internet at the house since we arrived on March 30^th, I’m enjoying this with mixed feelings. It’s so good to be back in touch with blogs, e-mail, skype and facebook, but I find it is so easy to waste so much time here. I had been getting so much scrapbooking and painting done, and now it seems hard to find time to do those things. It’s a good lesson for me in keeping my priorities straight.

We had a good weekend. Friday night I went bowling with 8 MAF ladies and had a good time. I even managed to win one game, in spite of being very tired by that time of night. It’s so amazing to me that you can go bowling here, and not even at a completely ridiculous price.

Saturday we mostly hung out around here, but then we did go swimming and to the weekly MAF volleyball game. Our first tradition here has come out of those weekly volleyball games because we never get home till at least 6:00 and the girls still need to have baths before bed. So, we have pancakes for supper. With store-bought pancake syrup. (2% real maple syrup! Sad, isn’t it?)

Sunday morning I had a headache and felt a little off in the digestive department so I stayed home and napped while M and the girls went to church. We were invited out for lunch and the girls played so well with their girls, and we chatted so well with them, that before we knew it we had stayed till after 5:00! When we got home, the girls watched a movie while I gave Matthew a haircut.

Today we tried valiantly to get back into the weekday routine and just as the day was ending, we seemed to get over the Monday slump. :)

I can hardly believe that our time is over more than half gone. I have very mixed feelings about that, but mostly want to go home.

This Saturday is our 11^th anniversary and we are thinking of spending the weekend at a hotel in a town called Jinja. The girls are very excited to be coming along. :) I think we’ll be able to see some animals (probably nothing too exciting) and lots of birds, and possibly have a boat ride on the Nile. We shall see how that all works out in reality. (My cynicism rears its ugly head...that’s what 4+ years of living in Africa does to a holiday-planning individual. :)

the equator

21 April 2009

So, last night didn’t turn out quite like we’d planned. The Italian restaurant we were going to was closed, sadly. It was quite a disappointment, to say the least. We started heading towards the mall, but the traffic was very bad. Then we ended up eating at the American club, just a 5 minute drive from our house. (We’ll try not to think about the time and diesel we wasted up to that point.) We had a nice dinner there, even though we weren’t eating till almost 8:00, I think.

Matthew flew yesterday and today, and has the next two days off (barring unexpected flights). We’re thinking of driving to the equator tomorrow and having a picnic there. I’m mostly not really so hyped up about being at the equator, but at the same time it seems like an opportunity that should be taken when possible.

Today Matthew had a flight that made the rest of us a little jealous. He had to go pick up some people at Murchison Falls. Unfortunately for the girls and me, he found it a little hard to take pictures and fly at the same time, but he saw elephants, hippos, crocodiles, buffalo and a bunch of some kind of deer.

23 April 2009

Yesterday we went to the Equator! It was kind of fun to think of being on the Equator, for real. We ate our picnic lunch as we drove along, and I laughed at all of the funny signs along the way. (We passed the Comprehensive Hotel, the Hotel Stallion, the Best Hotel, the Blessed Supermarket, the Hallelujah Car Wash, Sofa World [it was a small world, after all], Microsoft Phone Center, Kampala International Hair Salon [housed in a refurbished shipping container] and many more.)

At the Equator, we took pictures, looked in the shops and then had a snack in a cafe run by Aidchild. The muffin we had was the biggest muffin I’ve ever seen, and our smoothies and coffee were also jumbo-sized. (Whispering:: I think there must be some Americans around there somewhere...) The drive there and back was beautifully green and I tried to take pictures. Our camera doesn’t take the best landscape pictures to start with and then there was the small problem of not finding any of the pictures from the drive on the camera when we got back. I’m not sure what I did wrong??? The ones from when we’re stopped are there. (More whispering::Matthew left the camera inside the cafe when he paid, and while he went back in to find it, I was debating if finally being able to get a new camera would be worth losing the day’s pictures. He found it. And I still don’t have all the pictures.)

Matthew and I had a date today – lunch and grocery shopping. Truly a married people’s date, eh? :) I had a great salad, which I’m determined to order often since a salad like that isn’t to be found in Mada. Going grocery shopping here is a funny thing. I have to keep stopping to gawk at all of the things that surprise me. Today it was canned soups, barbeque sauce and canned pumpkin. Oh yeah, there were also individual pudding cups for $1 each. Of those things I only bought the barbeque sauce, but it sure is interesting to shop with those options. :)

As I type this, Matthew is working to get an internet connection working at our house. I confess that my faith is small...not because of Matthew, but because apparently the whole scheme isn’t well tested. There is a possibility that I’m guarding myself against disappointment, too. :)

20.04.09

Well, we’ve been here for 3 weeks now, and are feeling fairly settled, I think. Of course there are things I/we miss tremendously about Madagascar. When we first arrived here I expected to be homesick and at first I thought that being here would make me more homesick for Canada. I have been homesick and even though last night I found myself blinking back tears while I was listening to the Rankins, I have been becoming intensely homesick for Madagascar. Not just for the country, because let’s be honest: it’s beautiful and the people are friendly and kind, but the politics are driving me crazy. Crazy.

This morning I found myself so lonely for Mme Pauline and her cheerful company and the way she does things. Salome, the lady working for us here is lovely. She is quiet, polite, and a very hard worker. I have no complaints, really. But she isn’t Mme Pauline, with whom I’ve developed a way of running a household. She knows what to do. I know what to do. And we do it together. I really, really miss that.

I miss my friends in Madagascar. Tammy and I had planned to scrapbook together one day. But then she was packing to evacuate. Now she’s back in Mada, and I’m in Uganda. I was planning to have Josh and Jocelyn and Judah over for Easter Monday brunch and then they were in Kenya and we’re here. (I know, I may have mentioned that a time or 20. It stank.)

My questionably-legally-imported sweet corn seeds are probably growing sweet corn and being eaten by Solo, the gardener. Our second crop of bananas are also probably being enjoyed by Solo and Mme Pauline. (You might remember that the first batch was ripe while we were in Canada...) My poinsettia is blooming.

I’m frustrated with the pathetic plumbing and water pressure in this house. Since my hair is so thick, I can’t ever seem to get it rinsed properly under the trickling shower. Now my scalp is almost constantly itchy and I feel like it’s coated in un- rinsed shampoo. I know that isn’t the end of the world, but I’ll sure be happy to get back to my own shower with its proper water pressure.

So, yes, I’m homesick. I want to be at home, in my house.

But, in the interest of fairness, I am not miserable here. Really. I know the above paragraphs sound pretty whiny, but I think I’m just processing the sudden changes that we’ve had in our lives.

I do like being here. It’s a beautiful country. The MAF team is very kind to us. We are rejoicing that $1 CDN is actually worth 1750 Ugandan shillings instead of 1300 as we were first told.

I like that the girls and I have almost nothing to do besides school work and art projects and playing outside and cooking and watching movies and playing games and going to the playground. (Because I have a desire to not paint this as a happy-go-lucky, sunshine and roses, fairy tale household: There are some days that I could join the circus after spending all day with them. All day. Every day. Days and days in a row. I know that some of you do that all the time, and I know that I’m their mother, so it is in my job description to do this as needed. But hello! When you’re used to some pre-school, this is a whole new ballgame.)

I like that Matthew doesn’t have overnights here. I really like that he isn’t stressed out here, but just tired from hard work. (Last week he flew long days Tuesday through Friday. He’s allowed to fly into Sudan now, so that means leaving the house at about 6:30 and getting home between 5:30 and 7:00.)

I like that when I decided to write a newsletter last week, I just sat down and wrote it. No interruptions, no feeling guilty because I felt like I should be doing something else, no having to leave to pick up kids from school when I was on a roll. Lovely.

It’s great to have some time to scrapbook and paint without feeling like there are desks to clean off and closets to clean out. I’ve also really been enjoying the fact that sleeping till 7:15 isn’t as lazy as I think it is, because the girls don’t need to be ready for school at 7:30 and Salome doesn’t come till 8:30. It’s going to be very, very hard to go back to setting the alarm for 5:30ish every morning.

So, there you have it.

Oh yeah. I also like that it’s my husband’s 30something birthday and we’re going out for pizza and gelato and I know it’s good because we went there a few weeks ago. :)

written on friday

I wrote this on Friday and haven’t been able to post it until now. Actually, I wrote more than this, but it’s funny. When I read it today, some of it didn’t seem so important anymore. Maybe I should filter all my blogging that way?

*In August 2008, some good friends of ours moved away from Madagascar to go work with MAF-Chad. It was one of those sad good-byes, because a) we really like them, and b) we had no idea of when we could ever see them again. I mean, they’re Dutch and work in Chad. We’re Canadian and work in Madagascar. It was one of those goodbyes that make me wonder why we chose this lifestyle. Well, guess what? He was here in Uganda this week! It was so great to see him again – the girls were as excited as if one of their uncles had come. :) He brought drawings and notes from his boys and our girls prepared a whole stack of little papers to send back with him. He showed us pictures of the family in their environment in Chad, so now we can picture where they are at a little bit better. They have my admiration. It is hot (38-44C), sandy, undeveloped, unstable and they don’t have a lot of options for recreation.

*Yesterday the girls and I were invited to spend the afternoon with E and her two girls. They are with MAF as well, but we hadn’t really met them until Monday because they’d been on holidays. The girls are 4 and 7. The 6 of them hit it off and played steadily from 11 till 4. :) E and I talked almost that whole time, so I guess we hit it off pretty well, too. I think we’ll be doing more with them before we leave.

*Today is our housekeeper’s day off, so it’s always more relaxing for me. It’s not relaxing in the sense of having less to do, but relaxing because we have the house to ourselves. I didn’t even take a shower till after 8. :)

*I’ve been trying so hard to be more consistent with my kids, to look for ways to let them be aware of the consequences of their choices, and to not let them run over me. It’s exhausting. The whining issue alone is enough to give me more gray hair. (Oh wait, I’m already getting them. Never mind.) I guess I fail to understand why they continue to whine, when I have been trying so hard to make sure that whining doesn’t get them anywhere. Whining makes me want to wear Matthew’s noise-cancelling headset around the house. I’ve been praying that God would help me to be humble, to have life-giving words, and to trust Him for wisdom.

*The weather here continues to be ideal, in my opinion. A cloudy, rainy day or two and then the sun comes out for a day or two. When the sun is out, it’s hot, but not unbearably hot. Today is overcast, but not raining (so far) and just a very pleasant temperature. (Like Red Lake in July when it’s overcast.)

*In response to your questions on the previous post, I made scones for our brunch on Monday. I just made a basic recipe out of my Betty Crocker book, and then I made two cream cheese spreads for them. For one, I mixed cream cheese, cinnamon, brown sugar and vanilla. For the other, I mixed almost equal parts of strawberry jam and cream cheese. Surprisingly, the cinnamon one was the clear favourite. (I just expected the girls to go for the pretty pink one.)

*The rat seems to be gone. We bought some poison and didn’t see any sign of him after that. However, a few nights ago Matthew and I were sitting in the living room and a little baby mouse ran in. Matthew made me block a doorway while he chased it around and eventually ended its poor little life. He was kind of disgusted with me that I felt sorry for it, but I can’t help feeling sorry for a baby mouse who gets taken out in the prime of life. Or something like that. :) The kitchen still has its invaders, but ants aren’t quite as disturbing as a rat or mouse. Ants might not poop all over, but they come in by the hundreds (thousands?) and make me feel like my kitchen is not quite clean. The other day I washed the cutting board and left it in the dish drainer to dry. I never even thought of ants because usually clean dishes aren’t much of an attraction, but I guess there was some little crumb of something left on it. When I came back awhile later, there was a solid stream of ants coming in the kitchen window and gathering on that cutting board. Thankfully, these are the tiny sugar ants and not the long (well over 1cm) ants that come out at night and run around the house in a seemingly indiscriminate way.

Currently:

Reading:
The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis)

Have a New Kid by Friday (Yes, still. I’d love some feedback on how you put this into practice in your family if you have read it.) (Dr Kevin Leman)

Enjoying:
A cool, rainy Easter day

Grilled cheese sandwiches with yellow cheddar cheese

My watercolour “lessons” from a book

The memories of the fun we had at the zoo yesterday (in Entebbe)

Feeling:
Homesick for Mada and my friends there

Happy that we’re making some new friends here

Not ready to really bond with my new friends here

Laughing at:
My husband’s funny jokes

The girls and their funny ways of saying things

Thankful for:
This time of less stress

A house to live in vs. staying in someone’s home

Cool weather, in spite of not having my favourite sweater along

Fun food

Missing:
My routine, friends, house and garden in Madagascar
Having Easter Monday brunch with our MAF-C neighbours in Mada (this would have been our 3^rd year...)

Watching:
Nothing, really, since we can’t download TV here (boo hoo)

Looking forward to:
Exploring more of Uganda

Seeing if I can get a babysitter for next week so that M and I can see a movie together in a real theatre

Having Easter Monday brunch with the other MAF-C family here

Wondering:
If I should make scones or coffee cake for brunch tomorrow

If I will really get back into Facebook now that Lent is over

If it’s bad that I ordered my kids’ lunch off of a kids’ menu that one lady called “nothing but processed rubbish” (I thought that was a bit extreme...)