new year - new blog!

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:51:16 -0500

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! We are really enjoying our time at home visiting with family and friends during the holidays and it has been great to see many of you already at the Christmas Hope Gala and other places the past two weeks we have been home. With the new year ahead, we have decided it was time for a new looking blog :) We will continue to enjoy our time at home...we fly back out on January 9th to return to Uganda so until then...

Death & Lunch

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:56:15 -0500

About 1 month ago we had a visitor from Gulu that brought us a chicken. We’ve had the chicken around now keeping us company but lo, a special occasion arose. In festive spirit of our last meal in Uganda, the chicken had to be sacrificed. Thus begins the saga from pen to plate. Our thanks to our friend the chicken who provided our last meal of 2008 in Uganda.

Meet Lillian

Tue, 9 Dec 2008 06:26:38 -0500

This is our new friend Lillian. She is an orphan from Gulu now living at St. Mary Kevin Orphanage in Kampala. We had the privilege of interviewing Lillian to hear her story and spending a few hours with her a few weeks ago. For those who will be at the Christmas Hope Gala, you will also “meet” Lillian and hear her story.

The past few weeks we have been spending a lot of time at St. Mary Kevin and are excited about the future possibilities of partnership with this school and orphanage. This past Sunday was a special “Talent Show” day where all of the students performed for the visiting parents, relatives, and community members. We were delighted to be there and had a great time watching the children sing and dance. They even got us to dance a bit with them too! For some reason, they really like to see white people dance :) Probably because we have no rhythm compared to these kids!

I have posted some news pics from our past few visits at St. Mary Kevin on our photos page so check those out.

Andrea

Filling Station

Tue, 9 Dec 2008 06:11:31 -0500

The other day we were at St. Mary Kevin’s and went for a walk with a few boys to see where they are currently getting their water. In a previous blog post, I had mentioned that the well at the orphanage recently broke and now they are getting water from a local spring - more like a pond of sludge that is shared with the local grazing animals.

We were surprised by how dirty the water was...some other springs we have seen have been small pipes that spit out water, though somewhat contaminated it still looks pretty clean. This spring pours right into a little pond filled with garbage and algae and the kids fill up their jerry cans from the stagnant water.

It is crazy how much we take something like water for granted...Jesse and I truly realized this day after walking about one kilometer to get the water and then carrying the jerry cans for the boys back to the school. An average jerry can that most women here carry from the local well can weigh 40 pounds. These boys had just small cans that probably weighed only about 10 pounds each but after the long walk back my arms sure hurt!

At our Christmas Hope Gala we will be raising funds to install new pipes in the well at the orphanage so that the children can once again drink clean and safe water.

Andrea

Abundance vs. Scarcity

Mon, 8 Dec 2008 08:19:16 -0500

I have been musing lately on the concept of living in abundance vs. living in scarcity. This idea seems to be accentuated when immersed in either extreme of the pendulum.

First let me look to the western culture since that is part of who I am and the lens through which I see. America is blessed beyond belief. Not many ask themselves questions of life or death such as: will I eat today? how will I get the medicine my child needs to live? will it rain tonight and flood my hut?

But rather we ask questions more along the lines of: what TV show will I watch tonight? where will we go out to eat? mahogany or maple? chocolate or vanilla? Questions of choice, questions of privilege and questions of no importance. We are a country and culture that has everything! Here’s where my thoughts converge: We are a culture that lives in material abundance but a mentality of scarcity. We have everything we need but we always want more. There’s a sort of scarcity mindset that says “that’s not enough-I want more!” We have a disease that in our abundance, we’re not satisfied and therefore operate out of scarcity. We’re not generally thankful for this dollar we just made but always thinking about the next dollar.

The opposite is true in many of my third world travels. Many friends that are materially poor--they literally have nothing-not food, not clothes, not a job--these are the ones that live out of abundance. They give the little they have. They find simple joy out of sharing their last meal because they live in the moment and aren’t concerned with tomorrow. Relationships become their abundance, joy becomes their abundance and today becomes their abundance. Those living in material scarcity help us to see the importance of living a lifestyle out of abundance.

Too often we’re prone to get caught up in this empty circle that leads us no where but back to the empty hole we’re trying to fill. Today I challenge myself and you the reader to step out of a life of scarcity and into a life of abundance--I believe we’ll get a lot more done that way and we’ll love each other better--I believe God created us for this.

Jesse