Rhythm of Africa

"It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end."  
- Deuteronomy 11:12


This land has a rhythm or a groove to it.  I must admit that last week getting back from the village provided an abundance of chaos.  This week though everything seems to fall at the proper time.  You just have to move with the flow of the week, the flow of Africa, the flow of God's plan.  It's a flow I could follow forever: up at rooster crow, hand washing clothes as the sun rises, project, praise in the heat of the day, another project, preparation as the sun goes down. 


On Friday so many of our number were down sick (mostly exhaustion from working in the heat) or working on special projects, that we downsized from two feeding programs to one.  We bumped along to Victory primary school to feed the hungry.  For the "Boosch" (millet porridge), I collected water from a flowing pipe.  Hauling Jerry cans back and forth consumed most of my morning.  Clouds hung dark across the sky, but waited until we had boarded the vans.  Anyway we joked that we could truthfully claim to have spent Friday the 13th in a drainage ditch during a thunderstorm.  (I refrained from posting this as a facebook status for fear of alarming my mother.)  


We also put on a program for the children: praise and worship, games, and a bible skit.  (Whenever I talk about a program this is what we do- different MSTs take charge of each event.)  Below: some students showing their attitude for the camera. 

The yard after teachers herded all of the rowdy children back into the buildings. 

Later in the evening, a group of 17 MSTs from Kansas/ Missouri joined us for supper and worship night.  To add to the merry circle of 40+ people, a British Airlines pilot dropped by with his accordion.  Charlie (an English MST) and I attempted polka dancing, but did in fact bang heads.  

To end, I cannot leave out the Great Guacamole disaster.  

 Charlie leaves on Monday and we're all very sad to see her go.  So we decided to have a movie night complete with western world snacks.  (Can you believe we had to explain a sandwich to the Ugandans?) Anyway, after praise and worship (10:45 ish), the tiny kitchen had at least 5 people crammed into it washing the mountains of dishes (by hand with grocery sacks as scrubbers) not to mention multiple people passing through.  I volunteered to peel the avocados for guacamole.  For the next hour all the concentration in my being focused on not cutting myself with the massive knife furnished from the Ugandan kitchen.  Apparently sometime in the first 15 minutes, mama Nina told me the avocados weren't ripe.  An hour into cutting Emily, another MST, and I finally tasted some.   Emily spent the next few minutes sucking candy to remove the taste while Nina rolled over laughing at us for wasting an hour of our lives.  We had to settle for  plain "crisps" with our movie. 

Nina was still laughing this morning.