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How’s Africa? — When the Water Comes Out Brown

What would you do if the water looked like that when it came out of your tap?

How about if it looked like this coming out of your shower?

The truth is, it doesn’t always look like this for us, either. (Our water had been off all day and this is what it looked like when they turned it back on.) Most of the time the water is murky or cloudy. Our whites don’t stay white very long. Showers, toilets, and sinks get a film of dirt over them between cleanings. We never use the tap water for cooking or drinking.

But not everyone here has that option. Many people use the water here, straight from the tap without boiling. Water is a necessity of life. They can’t afford a fancy filter or to buy bottled water so they drink what they can get. I’ve even seen children collecting water from ditches and puddles. I tell myself their mom is going to use it for laundry. Then I wonder how on earth she’ll get the clothes clean using muddy water to wash. But I know better than that. I know people drink and cook with that water.

So, what do you do if you visit a place where the water isn’t suitable for drinking? Here is what we do and it’s worked well for us the last several years:

1. Drink only bottled or filtered water.

We have a Berkey water filter at home and we use that for our drinking and cooking water. When we go places, they always serve us bottled water (you have to pay for it; water isn’t free here) and open the bottle for us while we watch.

2. Make sure water for coffee or tea is boiled.

Sometimes we’ll order coffee or tea when we’re away from home. We always make sure the pot they bring us is to hot to drink immediately. This ensures that the water, even if it came from a tap, was heated hot enough to kill anything inside it.

3. Love the skin you’re in

Skin, your largest organ, will protect you from everything else. I try not to shower or wash in nasty water (what good does it do, anyway?) but soap still binds with dirt and oil and washes it away, even if the water is, well, dirty. I keep Epsom salts around to use for soaking if we get infections.

We also treat the whole family for intestinal parasites a couple times a year, just to be on the safe side.

Next time you turn on the tap in your house and clean, drinkable water comes out, give thanks! Most of the rest of the world doesn’t have that.

January 17, 2018/0 Comments/by Anna

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Language Struggles

A few weeks ago I posted about my goals for the new year, one of which is to learn Swahili to the point I can speak and teach in it. The need for this was brought home to me the very next time I taught Sunday School.

A man wanted to get saved! Fantastic news! The only trouble was James and Zizi needed to talk to him at the same time I needed to teach Sunday School. Zizi knows I can understand Swahili pretty well and he’s been trying to get me to use it.

Thing is, I have used it with hilarious results. I come up with stuff like:

God bless Himself (instead of God bless you).
My name is what? (instead of what is your name)
It’s good to see (instead of it’s good to see you)

Apparently I have pronoun problems.

My attempt at teaching Sunday School was no exception. I managed to tell the man who was going to translate my tortured Swahili into Kinyarwanda the book of the Bible, chapter, and verse I was using for the lesson. *pats self on back for that*

It went downhill from there. I *tried* to say Ahab and Jezebel were going to kill Elijah. What I said was “Ahab and Jezebel were going to Elijah died.”

Yes, you read that right.

My translator gave me the strangest look. Then he read the verse and said, in Swahili, “Ahab and Jezebel were going to kill Elijah.” I knew he used a different verb than I did, but it didn’t register right away what it was.

So I repeated myself, “Yes, Elijah died.”

“No,” he said, “Ahab and Jezebel were going to kill Elijah.”

It went even further downhill, in that I *completely forgot* all the verbs I did know – ones like running, and saying, and eating, and sleeping, and nouns like food and water. In fact, I’m pretty sure I even forgot the appropriate English words at that point and started thinking only in pictures. Which does absolutely nothing when you are trying to communicate with those around you.

Amazingly, we managed somehow. Another man came to help. Between what little English he knew, what little Swahili I managed to muster from the depths of my cerebrum, and the Runyankore words they knew and I could use instead, we got that lesson taught.

I’ve doubled down on the language study since then.

I was happy that the next Sunday, even though I was asking questions about the Sunday School lesson in English and the kids were answering in Swahili, I was able to understand all but a couple of them. Understanding does nothing when you can’t use the words. But I suppose it’s a beginning.

Out comes the Swahili/English dictionary and Google translate. Somehow, some way, I’m *going* to leap this gap between understanding and speaking.

January 15, 2018/0 Comments/by Anna

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Goals: A Look Back, A Look Ahead

As 2017 draws to a close and 2018 careens its way toward us, I’ve been thinking about the goals I set for myself in 2017. I blogged earlier this year about a couple of my goals so thought I’d report on those and what I’m looking ahead to accomplish in 2018.

A Look Back at 2017

1. 52 Book in 52 Weeks

I’d set a goal to read 52 books this year and met that goal in mid November. This year, roughly 1/3 of the books I read were non-fiction. I’m not against reading fiction, I was just surprised by this outcome for the year. I’m currently reading book #59 but I don’t know if I’ll get it done before midnight tomorrow.

Bonus goal:

In January I started reading through the Bible chronologically. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to keep up due to all the traveling we did this year. Turned out I didn’t need to worry. I finished reading through the Bible in mid November. In fact, book #52 for the year was God’s Word. I thought that was pretty great!

In the process of all our travel, the Bible I’ve had and used since I was 17 started falling apart. 🙁 The binding broke and everything from I Timothy on fell out. As I continued to use it, Romans and on started looking iffy and I had to stop carrying it to church. I finished reading through it this year and I’ll be carefully using it for future Bible study. It’s hard to let go of an old friend!

I have another Bible my parents gave me when I learned to read. It hasn’t been used as much since I got the other one. I’ve been refamiliarizing myself with it the last couple months and using it when we go to church or attend classes to help the other Bible last longer.

2. Keep a Journal

My goal was to write in my journal at least once a week. I didn’t quite make that goal. Most weeks I kept up pretty well. Some weeks I wrote more than once. Other weeks, I was so busy it didn’t happen at all. That’s okay. The goal of journalling is to write things I want to remember, verbalize things I’m struggling with in an effort to lower my stress level, and write down goals and ideas I have. I accomplished those goals.

I started a new journal at the beginning of December, another one I’d gotten at the little shop in Egypt. It’s my favorite color and has smooth, lined pages. I’m loving it!

3. Bonus Goal #2: Fitness Tracking

James and I got fitness watches in 2016. The first week of January, the app announced an achievement award for making my fitness goals every day for the whole week. Being the overachiever that I am, I earned the “award,” virtual though it was. Then it offered an “award” for meeting the fitness goal every day of the month. Then another if I did it for 100 days. Well, you get the picture. It wasn’t a goal I originally set out to meet, but day by day the year passed and here we are. If I meet the goal tomorrow, I’ll have done it every day for the whole year.

Looking Ahead to 2018

1. 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Yep, I have that goal again. 🙂 It’s become a tradition. This year, I’m doing a challenge with some online friends. The first month I have to read a book published in my birth year. The book I’ve chosen in #4 in a series, so I have to read the first 3 books before I can even meet the challenge for January. Should be fun. There are several non-fiction books on my To Be Read list this year, too.

I’m not making a Through the Bible in a Year challenge this year. I’d like to concentrate my study on the New Testament, using a Bible Study book my friend Rachel Miller put together, In All Thy Ways.

2. Keep a Journal

My goal this year is still once a week, but I might try for a few minutes three days a week instead. Either way, it’ll get those thoughts and ideas out of my head onto paper.

3. Fitness Tracking

I’ll hit 500 days sometime in April. Why stop now? 😉 It’s become such a habit, that I’d feel weird stopping.

4. Swahili Study

I need to get over the hurdle of not being able to use the Swahili I understand. It’s frustrating to know what someone is telling me and not be able to reply. It’s mental hurdle that I’m determined to beat. I have all the tools I need to meet this goal, I just need to use them.

Once I’ve accomplished this, I’d like to start teaching Sunday School in Swahili for practice. It doesn’t bother me as much when kids laugh at me as it does when adults do it. So there’s that. Hah! 😀

5. Writing and Editing

I’ve got several books in various stages of the writing and editing process. This fall, NaNoWriMo introduced a goal tracker. Check the little box when you reach your goal for the day. I’ve set it up to write or edit one hour a day, five days a week. It’s more than the hit and miss I’ve been doing up to now and I’m looking forward to seeing how much I get done when using it.

That’s pretty much it for now. I’ve got some sewing and crochet goals but those are rather fluid, whatever is most pressing gets done first.

December 30, 2017/6 Comments/by Anna

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How’s Africa – Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas in Africa is, in many ways, the same as Christmas in the US, but in some ways it’s different. The differences surprised us when we first came to Africa.

First, and most noticeable, is the temperature. Christmas where we live falls at the end of the rainy season, just as it is changing over to the dry season. Some years we get our last rain for three months during the week of Christmas. It’s cooler than normal for here when that happens. But most years it’s hot and dry. We make plans to go swimming that week because it feels so nice to go in this weather.

Another difference is that people don’t put up Christmas decorations until about 2 weeks before Christmas. No one puts lights on their houses. All the grocery stores put up decorations and play Christmas music. But outside everything moves on as normal.

Christmas here isn’t a huge merchandise driven holiday, though it has become more than way since we first arrived. People buy each other gifts of food, or clothing and shoes. The price of many food items increases in the middle of November. We’ve learned to stock up on essentials like flour, rice, and oil at least by the beginning of November so we can miss out on that price hike.

Cost of travel also increases in December. People like to travel to their village to celebrate the day with their family and the taxi and bus services take advantage of that desire.

Thursday last week, James and I needed to go to town for a couple things. Town was crazy busy! We struggled to move around because of all the vehicle and foot traffic.

We walked down to town today and got pictures of those same intersections on Christmas Day.

You almost expect tumbleweed to roll across the road and a gun slinger to ride out of the dust. There were more people in town today than I expected, but still no where near what there are on a normal day.

All the protestant religions hold services either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, sometimes both. We had our big service yesterday and it lasted until late afternoon. There were choir specials. Many visitors attended. It finished with a big meal and cake. (You can read about it in my blog post about the wedding.)

We followed our Church people from Isanja and Ngarama home as they rode on the truck and sang hymns all the way.

So, while Christmas here is different in many ways, we’ve all come to love and embrace those differences.

December 25, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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A Wedding With a Murphy’s Law Twist

Sometimes you have those Murphy’s Law days, also known as “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong.” We’ve had a few of those days this week.

It started on Friday when I was making cake for the wedding today. I ran out of flour in the middle of a recipe and, in an effort to not forget how many cups I’d already added, I totally forgot to add the sugar to the cake. Oh. The. Horror. It can’t really be counted as cake if it has no sugar, right? No one here likes super sweet things, so I decided to improvise. The cake tasted fine, good even, it just wasn’t sweet. So I cut the layer in half, filled it with icing and put it back together, then iced over the whole thing. It actually tasted pretty good that way.

I’d baked all the cakes on Friday and planned to decorate them on Saturday. I made the same amount of icing I’d made before….and it wasn’t enough to ice all the cakes, let alone decorate them. Thankfully, I’d gotten extra icing ingredients, but even those weren’t enough to do more than just spread a layer of icing over all the cakes and smooth it out. How could we decorate them without icing?

Then I remembered the sprinkles I’d gotten on clearance last year in the states after Christmas. I’d planned to use them on the gingerbread houses we decorated but forgot all about them until it was too late. God knew I was going to need those decorations for the cake. I found some red ribbon and wrapped it around the cakes. Elizabeth came behind me and arranged the sprinkles. Problem solved.

This morning, James discovered that the marriage vows he always uses had been deleted from every form of back-up we have. He had to find a copy of the vows to replace the ones he’d lost before we could leave for church.

We were almost half-way to church when James remembered that he’d forgotten to grab a dress shirt to wear with his suit and tie. He had everything else *except* the shirt. This seems like a small matter. He could borrow one, right? Not so easy here. On average, he’s a foot taller than all the men. He couldn’t wear his suit without a shirt and he *had* to wear a suit for the wedding.

But everything worked out just fine. The cakes were beautiful and everyone loved them.

We found a solution for James’ dress shirt dilemma.

(I’m pretty sure Hawaiian shirts everywhere are screaming in protest at one of their brothers being worn with a tie, which goes against the point of even wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the first place. But sacrifices must be made for the greater good. 😉 )

We had a fantastic time with the children.

Three Wise Guys…er, I mean Wise Men even showed up to tell us about their search for Baby Jesus.

At the end of the day, Kiza and Jaqueline ended up married. Which was kind of the point of the whole thing.

December 24, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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Exciting Progress!

Remember when the church at Ngarama looked like this? We didn’t know how it would ever be repaired but we knew God is able to answer prayer. Our church people prayed. We prayed. God provided for the repair.

A couple weeks ago it looked like this:

It was progress but we were still sitting outside for church.

We arrived this Sunday and it looked like this:

There is the church that God built! The church thrummed with excitement about the new building.

We had to take advantage of the weather and get a picture of the church people in front of the building.

There is still a little work to do on the inside and some landscaping and cement that needs to be finished on the outside. They are busily building the toilet now that the building is almost done.

Elizabeth told me she wanted to learn how to teach the children in Sunday School so she worked hard to get the lesson ready for this week. She did a very good job, much better than I did my first time teaching children when I was her age!

Most of the adults were already there so they heard her teach, too. Everyone listened in rapt attention. She taught again at Isanja to a packed house.

December 6, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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Our Favorite Pies

Thanksgiving wouldn’t feel right without pies. Growing up, we’d bake as many as 15 pies for the holiday. Whenever my dad would remind us that this was almost 2 pies each, we’d stop to consider this fact and then keep baking anyway. We’d have leftovers for a week.

I don’t make that many pies anymore. We usually whittle it down to three or four kinds we love most and that’s what we have for Thanksgiving.

Here are recipes for our three most requested pies and the pie crust recipe I use.

I’ve never been good at pie crusts. That’s why I was so happy to get this recipe for shortbread crust in my family and friends cookbook. I use it without sugar for all my savory pies (we like quiche, shepherd’s pie, and chicken pot pie).

Shortbread Pie Crust

1-1/2 cups flour
1-1/2 tbsp sugar (may omit)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp milk
1/2 cup oil

Mix together with a fork until moistened. Press into the bottom of two 9 inch pie plates. Prick the bottom of the crust if pre-baking (10 minutes at 400°). Otherwise add filling and bake according to pie recipe directions

The first year we were in Africa, I realized I couldn’t get corn syrup. My husband loves pecan pie and his parents had sent us some just for Thanksgiving pies. A friend who was a missionary in Russia at the time gave me her recipe for Pecan Pie made with sugar instead of corn syrup. We all think it tastes better.

We have to bring our pecans from the US. This year I’m using pecans I got in Georgia last year while we were on our way to visit my sister — and driving straight into Hurricane Matthew.

Pecan Pie

1 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 tbsp all purpose flour
1 tbsp milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans

Place in a 9 inch pie crust. Bake at 350° for 1 hour.

Pumpkin Pie

2 eggs
2 cups pumpkin
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp. cloves
1-2/3 cup evaporated milk or light cream (I use milk)

Add all ingredients together in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into a deep 9 or regular 10 inch pie crust. Bake at 350° for approximately an hour or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Sour Cream Raisin Pie is, hands down, my favorite pie ever. I’ve had people say it sounds gross and then fall in love once they tried it. The one and only time I ever won a cooking contest was with this pie recipe.

Sour Cream Raisin Pie

1 baked pie shell
Wash 1 cup raisins
Add 1 cup water
Boil together for 5 minutes
In a separate bowl mix together:
1 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream (can use yogurt)
3 level tbsp corn starch
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs

Pour sour cream mixture over boiled raisins. Cook until thick, stirring constantly (only a few minutes). Pour into baked shell and cool.

November 21, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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How’s Africa? – Turkey!

Let me introduce you to our Thanksgiving turkey. No, he didn’t have a name. We didn’t know him long enough to give him one.

James mentioned to one of our national pastors, Zizi, that we were interested in buying a turkey or two. Zizi knew of a man in the church who had two for sale for a price we were willing to pay.

The man brought the turkeys to church so we could see them before we bought them. This guy was huge!

I’ll spare you the gory pictures but they killed the turkeys right there at church in a storage room behind Zizi’s house. They plucked them and gutted them and we brought home two turkeys ready to cook.

I popped the turkey right into the roaster and let it slow cook all night. It filled the whole roaster full — at least 22 pounds worth of bird, maybe more! The next morning, I carved it and froze the meat. Then I made bone broth for the dressing.

That’s one thing about living here in Uganda that you don’t get to experience in the US unless you hunt for or raise your meat. You get to be up close and personal with all your food from start to finish.

November 20, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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Ask

A few weeks ago, when we were at Ngarama, sitting in the sun because the roof was off, I encouraged the children to pray for God’s provision for their church building. Many of the adults were already there for church so they heard me too.

I had Theogene read this verse to them:

John15 7 001

Then I asked the children, “How many of you will pray for God to provide for your church to be fixed?”

All of the children and adults raised their hands. Some raised both hands. 😀

Guess what? God did just as He promised he would do. He provided for the church to be fixed!

More and more I’m coming to the conclusion that God is waiting to answer the prayers of our church people. He wants them to see that their provision comes from Him. It might come through us, but we are merely a vessel, a conduit of His blessings. We can’t do anything without Him, but as we abide in Him, He uses us.

All I know, is that we’d been asking for God to provide for this need for months. He waited until our church folks saw the need for what it was and asked Him for it. Then he provided for them.

James contacted the engineer so he could get started. They’ve been working on the building for a couple weeks now. Last Sunday we stopped by the church for pictures on our way home from Sangano. They’d taken down the walls that were broken, and torn up the cement floor so it could be replaced. Loads of construction materials had been brought to the church and dropped off.

They’d hoped to have the roof on by this week, but didn’t quite get that far. The church folks had to sit out in the sun for one more Sunday.

The walls are all built and the trusses have been delivered. They have the openings ready for the metal doors and windows.

It should be finished by the beginning of December. No one minded sitting in the sun today. They are excited and proud of how good it looks. The engineer has hired people from the church to help with the work. Their hands are helping build their church.

The best part is, they know that God answered when they asked.

November 19, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna

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Friday Funny – Garlic Shampoo

When I wash my hair, I like to come away smelling like freshly minced garlic, don’t you?

Guaranteed to keep the vampires away – or your money back!

(Actual shampoo/conditioner for sale at a local grocery store.)

November 10, 2017/0 Comments/by Anna