Some thoughts from the author…

Welcome Back! Karibu Sana!

The road to church was good, today. The best it’s been in a long time. Gone were the potholes and washes that plagued us before we left for furlough. They must have graded the road recently, because they were still working on a section of it toward Kabazana and the rain hadn’t had a chance to damage it — so within the last month.

We rounded the bend to Ngarama and I could see Elizabet and several of the church children waiting outside the church. They were laughing and yelling in excitement as we pulled up.

Several of the other church ladies ran up just then. We all stood there laughing and crying and hugging and saying “You are very welcome!” (Karibu Sana) and “thank you!” (asante sana) over and over again. 

My heart felt like it would explode from the joy and excitement of it!

All the children had grown. Some of the boys we left are now young men some of the girls are young women.

Gloria’s baby boy, Trevor was shy and didn’t want me to hold him, but he flirted with me all the way through church at Isanja. She was still expecting him when we left last year and I’ll I’d seen so far was pictures. I think he’ll warm up to us. 😉

Both Kabazana and Sangano had prepared food for us. I understood Kinyarwanda today when the one of the ladies who’d cooked for us said “We’re happy you’ve returned.” I was so surprised to understand her that I couldn’t even reply in Runyankore which is the language I know best here.

I hope there will be African rice, stew, and beans at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb. It’s some of the best food I’ve ever had. Oh, can our church ladies cook!

A few weeks ago, in the throws of all the goodbyes we were saying I wrote about the sadness it caused. There is so much joy in saying hello! In seeing people you haven’t seen in a long time, on both sides of the ocean. Just think, one day we will say hello and never have to say goodbye again! That will be the day!

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Pizza! (Part 2.1)

Months ago, I posted about pizza crust. I promised I would follow up with how to make our homemade sauce. Afterward, it occurred to me that, in order to properly post about the sauce, I would need to be back in Africa so you, dear reader, could get the full effect of our process for getting sauce.

Pizza sauce for us is more than just a delicious recipe, though that is an important part of it. It’s also about the acquisition of the ingredients, the proper processing thereof, and then cooking it all until it tastes just right. 

Years ago, when my kids were small and I’d make homemade pizza, I’d just buy sauce at the grocery store. I wasn’t convinced that homemade sauce could taste as good as store-bought.

Then we moved to Uganda. An 8-oz. jar of pasta sauce cost almost $10 and I knew we’d need at least two of them to make pizza for our family if I skimped on sauce. At first I “cheated” and used tomato paste and herbs to make a sort of sauce that we used for pizza sauce. It was cheaper than using the ready made pasta sauce but it was easier than making sauce from scratch. The canned tomato paste here has a strong metallic flavor. The more I used that method for sauce, the less I liked the flavor of the sauce and the more I could taste the metal. 

So I pulled out my trusty family cookbook — a treasure that was given to me as a wedding present, with recipes from family and friends all over the world (It’s my go-to recipe book for almost everything). Inside, I found a pasta sauce recipe given to me by Sandy Panagos, a dear friend who’d been almost like a second mother when I was growing up. Years ago, I insisted that her sauce had come out of a bottle and she insisted it didn’t. One day, when we were doing school at her house (that tells you how long ago it was!), she made her signature sauce. I still could hardly believe that something that tasted that good didn’t come out of a bottle. (Oh! how naive I was!) She included the recipe for me in the family cookbook.

Yes, her recipe includes cans of processed tomatoes. I can get canned tomatoes here in Uganda, but one can costs as much as enough fresh tomatoes to make quadruple her recipe. So I use fresh tomatoes instead of canned.

It starts like this:

I go to the Wednesday market to buy produce and buy a large basin of tomatoes. They cost anywhere from $3-5 depending on the season. (The large basin holds around 20 pounds of tomatoes.)

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(You can see a large basin of tomatoes to the right in the above picture.)

I then bring them home and wash them. We sterilize all our produce in our drinking water and disinfectant. It’s a long, drawn-out process. Honestly, I don’t miss this step when we visit the US — where you can wash your produce in tap water and don’t have to worry about getting intestinal parasites or e-coli from it. The wash water from our produce here turns brown and has a layer of dirt in the bottom of the pan, so I’m happy to do this step in the process.

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Once that step is finished, I can refrigerate the produce until I’m ready to make the sauce. 

I know most books about preserving vegetables say you must peel and seed your tomatoes. The skin and seeds change the flavor, especially if you are canning them. I’m not canning them, so I skip this step. I’d make some flippant comment about being too lazy, but the whole process is already so time consuming that the peeling/seeding step would take it from being doable to being a tedious, miserable chore. There are a couple adjustments I make when I cook it, but more about that later.

When my sauce comes out and looks like this:

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thick, red, flavorful, I could just eat it out of the pan with a spoon. It’s so good. Sandy Panagos was right. A good homemade sauce is far better than anything you can get from the store!

(I promise to share the recipe when Part 2 continues!)

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How’s Africa?

“How’s Africa?”

“What’s it like in Africa?”

We’ve been asked these questions over and over again when we visit the US. While I don’t mind these questions and I understand where they are coming from (a desire to get to know and understand the place where we live) they are difficult to answer for several reasons.

First of all, most Americans view the continent of Africa like they do the United States — as a conglomeration of country/states. It is nothing like that. Africa contains 55-57 countries (depending on where you get your information 😉 ). Travel is difficult and restrictive at times as you navigate the various processes for obtaining visas in each country. We’ve traveled to several of these and each one has a different procedure. The procedures change on a regular basis as well.

Second, Africa is a huge continent. The continental United States would fit in Africa just over 3 times. The Sahara desert alone is the size of the continental US.

Third, the continent has many different biomes, spans two different hemispheres, and four time zones. Both the northernmost and southernmost extremes of the continent will get snow. If we ever got snow where we live, 80 miles south of the equator, the world as we know it would be coming to an end 😀 . That said, a couple hundred miles from here, in the Ruwenzori Mountains, you can climb on glaciers.

For these reasons, among other things, I can’t really speak to the entire continent of Africa.

I can, however, share about my little corner of it, the part that I call home.

So, over the next few weeks and months, I’d like to tell you about my little part of Africa. Whenever you see a “How’s Africa?” title, expect to learn a little more about where I live and the people that live here. It won’t be a travelogue. You can find that kind of information in the CIA fact book.

I’m hoping to make this more personal, the things I like, maybe a few things I don’t like, how things work here and why we do things the way we do. I hope you enjoy it!

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“Welcome home!” said Mr. Spider

Upon our arrival back in Uganda, our home was a perfect example of Newton’s second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of an isolated system always increases.

Our house = isolated system

Our house = increased entropy

We discovered a forest growing in a part of our yard that no one could reach with trimmers. Trees and weeds had grown up through the cement, proving that it would not take long for plants to reclaim the earth if all the people were taken away. 

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Upon entering the house, we discovered a thick coat of dust all over everything. Honestly, it was not as bad as I’d anticipated. The worst part was the veil of spider webs draped across the halls and openings. You know how in the movies when people go into the crypt or the haunted house and they have to brush webs out of the way? Yeah, some places were like that. 

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Another disturbing detail was the pile of bird droppings just outside our back door. Pile is not an exaggeration. (Where is the barfy face emoji when you need it?)

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We found our dust masks and started working — sweeping, dusting, mopping, wiping down walls and counters and shelves, removing all the cobwebs, pulling weeds and trees, sweeping the cement to remove the dirt. In a few hours we pushed back the entropy, slowly restoring order to our living areas. We needed to sleep in our house by that evening so we had to get it livable as soon as possible.

I’m so thankful for my hardworking kids! They jumped into the work, like it was a competition to see who could get the most accomplished. I think they did more work than I did!

Toward evening, we noticed that the water pressure was dropping in certain sinks in the house. We checked to see if water was still on in town. It was, so we kept working. We cleared grit from pipes that hadn’t been used in a while. The pressure seemed to improve.

The pressure for the hot water heater to the kids bathrooms remained weak. They ended up taking cold showers. 🙁 It was late and we couldn’t get a plumber to check it until morning and they needed showers after all the cleaning!

Once the kids were in bed, James and I started to clean up so we could go to bed. James had no sooner gotten in the shower and started soaping up than the water stopped. Nothing would come out of the shower. He dried as best he could and checked our water tank. (This required climbing a rickety ladder in the dark, onto a platform held up by two metal poles where the water tanks sit.) It was empty. That meant there was no water available to our bathroom. Turns out, while town water was still on, the pressure was so weak it wouldn’t fill our tanks. We’d used up our water because we didn’t realize there was a problem.

We were filthy. There was no way we could put our nastiness into our freshly made bed. The kid’s bathrooms still had water, so we snuck in there while they slept and took cold showers, too.

What a welcome home! Nothing like this to get us reacclimated to life in Uganda!

(Oh, and it only took part of two days to unpack. I could have had it done in one day if I’d have applied myself. It’s almost depressing how easy that was after all the work to get it packed in the first place!)

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The Packing Challenge – Part 3

Again, I thought I was done after Part 2. However, I know people were praying for us in our travels, and I need to brag on God and what He did on our behalf.

We’d repacked everything, readjusted, moved things, gotten everything to weight. In some cases, I knew I was pushing the weight limit allowed by the airline. (50 pounds or 23kg — BUT 23kg goes all the way up to almost 52 pounds because a kilo is 2.2 pounds.)

We’d used an industrial scale, the finding of which was a God thing. It just so happened that the son of the people who picked us up from the train had a scale he used to fill propane tanks and it just so happened that he was on vacation and wouldn’t be needing it until after we left and it just so happened he didn’t mind if we used it for our luggage.

We got everything repacked on Saturday afternoon so we didn’t even have to think about it on Sunday. But think about it I did, almost to the point of obsession. I knew I was worrying. There was little I could do to stop myself. All I could do was use the worry as a motivation to pray. So many people told me they were praying too, whether through text message, Facebook, or at church.

Sunday afternoon I called Debbie Guimon. I don’t know how many times she’s made this same trip, many times with large amounts of luggage for the orphanage in Soroti. She couldn’t offer any definite answers, but she did give suggestions for how to handle things if the airline turned out to be as particular as Amtrak had been.

We left for the airport at 7AM on Monday and arrived almost 4 hours before our first flight was scheduled to leave. There was no one in line before us and the good people at Delta/KLM focused on our luggage, as did the TSA people.

They only questioned the weight on one bag — a piece that was already overweight (70lb) but needed a couple pounds removed. Then, they allowed the overweight bags to count toward our luggage allotment and didn’t charge us extra — a savings of $300!

TSA was just as great! They didn’t let James handle any of the bags they searched, but they willingly zip tied the containers and put everything back the way they’d found it. Going through the luggage since then, I’ve not found anything out of place from where I put it!

Everything was still in good shape when we got to Uganda. All the luggage made it intact. Everything got through customs.

Today we head to our house and begin the unpacking process. I love unpacking. It takes so much less time than packing. 😛 Just take the items out and put them in their place. Ah! The relief of it! Order from chaos! It also means this challenge, for this trip, is finally at an end.

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A Downside

It’s one of the most painful things we have to do.

It makes our life feel transitive, impermanent, without real physical or emotional ties. It hurts. 

It’s a struggle for my kids in particular. This hurts a mother’s heart.

We do it here, then we have to do it again in Uganda.

We have to say goodbye.

We say goodbye to family. This grows harder each time we see them. People grow and age and life circumstances change. Will this be the last time we see my grandma? Our parents? I hope not, but there is no way to know. Will my kids still have fun with their cousins next time they see them or will they have changed so much that there isn’t a connection anymore?

We say goodbye to good friends, people who are like family to us. Unlike family, they have no obligation to us. It’s more of an effort to see them and sometimes we wonder if we’ll ever have another chance.

We say goodbye to people in our church, both our home church in the US and our churches in Uganda. Some of our Ugandan church members emigrate to other countries and we might never see them again this side of heaven.

We say goodbye in each and every church we visit where connections are made. People are busy. I’m busy. We go on with our lives and don’t keep up with those connections like we should.

We’ve said goodbye to missionary friends on the field as they move their family back to the states. Their children are friends with my children. It adds to the isolation we sometimes feel.

Technology is a wonderful thing. It means my kids can keep in touch with people in the US, even talking with them face to face from time to time. They can know their grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. They can see their friends.

But technology is a double edged sword. It also means we keep busier than we ever have before. Social media makes us feel connected, but the connection is on our own terms, at our own convenience. It can increase feelings of loneliness for people living overseas, because we see all the activity of those in the states and we feel left out. Even worse, sometimes we struggle with feeling ignored, insignificant, and forgotten. 

So, as you pray for missionaries, pray that God will give grace through the goodbyes.

(Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a downer, but merely to express one thing we face and deal with as missionaries. We say goodbye and go on in the joy of the Lord. Some days, however, it is a struggle.)

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The Packing Challenge – Part 2

There was never supposed to be a part 2 to this story. I felt like my last post on it was sufficient.

Then we got to the train station Saturday morning.

James and I worked all week to get the packing done. We weighed, repacked, weighed again, repacked some more, until we got everything up to the weight it was supposed to be. Or so we thought.

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Upon arriving at the train station at 5:30 Saturday morning, we were informed that the bathroom scale we were using was 2 pounds off and all our bags were overweight. Amtrak would not allow them to be checked. They had to be 50 pounds. They wouldn’t even allow them if they were 50.5 pounds. 🙁 

I cried. Again.

It did not help that I’d only slept about two hours the night before. (A combination of nervousness about waking on time and lower back pain from all the packing.)

Thank God the train was delayed which gave us enough time to make all the adjustments. We found a way to reduce the weight enough that Amtrak would take the bags in question. This added a box we would have to carry on to the train, but we had no other options.

Then we waited.

And waited.

Then waited some more.

An hour an a half after we were originally scheduled to depart, the delayed train arrived, we all got on with our carry on luggage and found a place to sit.

Thank God for train travel! It’s so much more convenient than car travel, especially when you are tired! We arrived in Chicago along with all our bags, unloaded and met the people who were to pick us up. By some miracle they got all our stuff and our bodies into the vehicles they brought with them and carried us to where we’d be staying over Sunday.

They also had access to an industrial scale. We were able to weigh each and every piece of luggage to verify the weight and add or remove things to get it right! Now we’ll see what happens when we get to the airport tomorrow. Should be interesting, and, as always, never boring.

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The Packing Challenge

Numerous times we’ve had people say to us “We appreciate the sacrifices you make!” While we acknowledge the sentiment, we don’t feel like we are sacrificing by living on the mission field.

I have a corner full of luggage that can attest to this lack of sacrifice. :-/

It’s difficult to condense one’s life into a series of 50 pound pieces of luggage, but we must do this every time we make a trip back to the US and return to Uganda. We have to take items we will need but can’t get there. This includes:

  • Sheets for the next couple years. Cloth wears out faster in a tropical climate. We go through about one set of sheets per bed, per year. Growing up, I had a set of sheets given to me that lasted me until I got married. The rate at which sheets fall apart in Uganda came as a huge surprise to me.
  • Clothing is much the same. We line dry everything and we’re careful not to leave it out too long, but it just wears out faster, especially socks and underwear. We have to pack clothes for 6 adult sized people and 2 child sized people for the next term, planning for the growth of the kids in the family. There are clothing markets in Uganda, but the clothes they sell no longer fit my older boys. It’s difficult to find quality clothing in the market. (I’ll come back to this in another post.) 
  • School books for all six kids for the next school years. And school supplies. Just before we left on our last furlough, I started to see higher quality crayons and markers available there. But we still can’t get good colored pencils or mechanical pencils of any kind.
  • Shoes for all of us. Half of us can’t buy shoes in our size in Africa. So if we need them, we have to take them with us. You can buy higher quality shoes there, but you pay for it. It’s cheaper for us to watch for sales here and take the shoes with us, even if it takes luggage space.
  • Chocolate chips – or any baking chip we might want. You can’t buy chocolate chips where we live. The available chocolate is poor quality. I stock up on chips here (and dried blueberries and cranberries) so we have them for baking when we get back there.
  • High quality kitchen implements. I cook a LOT in Africa. It takes hours every day to prepare food there, even meals that are “easy” in the US. We’ve invested in a number of items that will make this take less time. 
  • Mexican spices. We can get Chinese and Indian spices but not Mexican. Indian chili is NOT the same as chili seasoning. Found that one out the hard way. If we want something to have a Mexican flavor, we have to take the spices to flavor it. 

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I had the packing well in hand in preparation for leaving for Uganda.

I was wrong.

Or delusional. 

Probably delusional.

Remember how I said that every piece must weigh exactly 50 pounds and be securely packed? Yeah, well that’s easier said than done.

It’s rather like putting together a 15,000 piece 3D puzzle with pieces in a variety of shapes, sizes, weights, and volumes and in total weighs over 1,000 pounds.

I had most of the packing already “finished.” Friday, I had the kids sort all the things they needed to have packed and make a pile. Saturday, I worked to get one piece that was full but did not weigh 50 pounds up to weight. I worked on that for an hour. No matter what I did, the container could not hold 50 pounds with those contents. I finally had to stop and move on to another container. Then that container could not reach 50 pounds no matter what I did. By this time, I’d been working for several hours. I was hungry, hot, and tired. And I was crying.

I think I’m just bad at packing.

Saturday night I barely slept. Remember the puzzle analogy? I laid awake thinking of ways I could get those pieces up to the right weight and still have room for everything.

Conclusion? I opened every piece of luggage with any flexibility on contents and pulled out the heaviest items. Then I took the lightweight items out of the containers and distributed them among the luggage. My nice, neat, orderly row of packed luggage was ruined.

But it worked. I filled the containers. They weighed 50 pounds. I fixed the suitcases and made those weigh 50 pounds. I cheered every time the scale hit the desired weight.

It’s a process. 🙂

It also ought to be a challenge or a reality show: Packing Xtreme. Pick up your life and make it fit in as few 50 pound pieces of luggage as you can using only a bathroom scale to check the weight.

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Friday Funny – Teal’c vs. The Tree

We had workmen in our yard repairing our dog pen which left us with a quandary: How would we restrain the very guard dog whose pen they were repairing? Teal’c was a great guard dog. Any stranger in the yard was fair game. You could not claim his bark was worse than his bite. He did not bark.

The only solution we had was to chain him to the tree by his collar. He had shade. He had water. The kids went out and played with him now and then.

I think he thought he could pull over the tree and get loose. He really wanted to get loose.

He started out standing up and pulling against the tree, but eventually got tired and sat down. He sat this way for the better part of the afternoon, dare I say, doggedly trying to pull the tree over. We tried distraction. We tried redirection. Nothing worked. 

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(I hesitated to post this picture for fear of accusations of animal cruelty. That was not the case whatsoever. He really was that stubborn and tenacious. He’s the dog that figured out how to open the gate and let himself out of the dog pen – thus the need to make repairs on the pen. He then figured out how to open that gate. We finally installed a full-sized door with a latch he couldn’t reach and stopped our escape artist in his tracks.)

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How a Book Comes About – Part 1

My best friend, Rachel Miller, just released her second novel. She is prepping for the sequel to those books and blogged about it on her author blog. She finished her post with the questions: Are you an author? What plotting/outlining methods and tools do you use? I decided to answer her question in my own blog post.

My own plotting methods differ greatly from Rachel’s. This is not a bad thing. I would imagine there are as many methods as there are writers. I’ve read a few books about novel preparation and every author has his or her own ideas of how to do it. In my experience, we fall into one of three categories:

  1. Plotter – A plotter plans their book from start to finish before they sit down to write the actual words and scenes. This might include an outline, historical research, character profiles, and back story. Tolkien wrote an entire language for his novel preparation. Stephen King (who claims to do as little research as possible, but wrote an 800 page book about the Kennedy assassination) has written entire novels from the back story he created for his characters. 
  2. Pantser – Chris Baty coined this term in his book No Plot? No Problem! It refers to a novelist who does little to no preparation for their novel. They may have an idea of a character and a beginning plot device, but they “go where the story takes them” as they write it. This may be an over-simplification of the term, but you get the general idea. 
  3. Plantser – This combination of the last two terms sums up where I fall into the novel plotting/outlining spectrum. It refers to basic plot/character/setting development, followed by “going where the story takes you” ;-). 

When I’m planning a novel, I think of the basic plot premise, beginning, middle and end. I make mental notes for myself, high points – or plot points if you want to call them that, scenes I want to include in the book. I know I need 20-25 of these in a 50,000 word novel, though this number is flexible, depending on how long it takes to write each point and how many perspectives I’m using. (Talents has 4 main characters and each section was 12,000-20,000 words long. I didn’t need as many plot points for each character since I was intertwining the stories of 4 different people.)

Then, I think through the characters. I name them. (This is my biggest struggle. The main character names come easily but the supporting characters are harder.) I think about who they are, how they would respond to different situations and to each other. I’ll work through sample conversations in my head before I ever write a word. I picture what they look like. 

This is how I resemble a pantser:  I don’t write anything down. It’s like watching a movie in my head so I just write down what I see. Sometimes an additional scene will present itself, so I’ll write that into the book. Sometimes I decide I don’t like where it’s going, so I’ll change it as I go. It’s more fluid than an outline but more planned than just winging it.

So far, I’ve never struggled with the dreaded writer’s block. There have been a few times when I had scenes I didn’t really feel like writing, maybe they were painful or included events I’d rather avoid. I’ve even put off writing those for days. A couple times I wasn’t sure how to get the protagonist from where I had him to where I wanted him without using an obvious plot device. (Other times I embraced and flaunted their use! Hah! Sometimes you just need a good plot device in a book!)

My rather loosy-goosy method has produced 8 novels so far. It’s by no means an exact science, but I don’t care as long as it gets the job done. Now I just need to buckle down and get those books edited.

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