Greetings from Uganda!

from

Essawa.
That is watch in Lugandan and the first word I learned. I'm not even sure exactly if that is how to spell it!

We are currently at day 5 in Uganda! It is beautiful here. The people, the weather, the landscape! It has been about 75 degrees everyday this far! We are staying with Charles and Eva Bameka. Charles and Eva live here and Charles is the only Lutheran pastor in all of Uganda. Eva is opening up a beauty salon to do hair for weddings, and yesterday she blow dried by hair (: They are really nice and their home is really nice too. They have a living room, with a flatscreen television, a playstation for their nephew Larry, and two working toilets!! o ya.
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Interesting fact: almost everyone here has a maid, both middle and upper class. It is considered rude for you to not have a maid, since you are not sharing your wealth with the poor. Our maid's name is Helen and she cooks, cleans, and washes our clothes for us. She doesn't know very much English and so that makes talking really fun! We are still getting orientated here.

We are officially past jet lag, thank God! Liz and I both woke up around 2am for a couple days.

The food is tasty. The most Ugandan-thing I've had to eat is a matoke (ma-toe-kay), which looks like a green banana but tastes like potatoes, with bean soup. Other than that, we've had spaghetti, pizza, ham and cheese sandwiches, omelettes, sprite, fanta, and tea. That's all simply because we are in the capital, Kampala, still.

We had our first village visit, and it was AWESOME. We're talking villages. We only went on Saturday night and stayed in a hotel and went back on Sunday for a church dedication.
The people in the villages are golden.
They are so respectful to white people. When we got there, one of the older women knelt down before us as a sign of respect towards us. She called us mother, which signifies that we are of higher status than she is. They also served us lunch and waited until we were done to begin. For the long 3-hour church service, they brought out the couch from the house for us to sit on. Seriously, they are so nice. After church, I met an old lady with a severely swollen arm that has been swollen for several months. I prayed with her and she was so thankful to have even a nursing student look at it. On the way out of the village, a woman stopped us and gave us a bag full of fresh mangoes.
These people also work really hard. When they say they have garden, most usually it is not the garden you and I think of. We went to one garden and it continued for another 5 acres. They had fresh matoke, bananas, pineapple, coffee beans, kasava, and much more... right in their back yard!

Life in Kampala is pretty busy. People are always traveling and the traffic is crazy. A three-lane road might fit 5 cars. Also, there is no breaking for pedestrians. You better run!

We are almost done with our training in Kampala and will go to our first village for ten days at the end of next week!! I am so excited and blessed to be at the hands of the people we are staying with! Their depiction of community is beautiful in every way.

"But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ's triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere." 2 Corinthians 2:14