Greetings from Africa!

Now that I am feeling better, I thought I should put up a post here before ya’ll thought I had disappeared for good! On top of jet lag, I have had a head cold and my malaria pills have been making me very dizzy since we arrived here on Wednesday morning (Tuesday night for most of you. The time difference here is 9 hours.) The last 5 days have gone well, in spite of my circumstances listed above. This country is beautiful, confusing & dirty—all at the same time! But there are familiarities weaved throughout life here too. I’ll break it down for you: Beautiful: The children, the trees, flowers & bushes, the mountains and hills. Confusing: ordering food at a restaurant, driving (even more scary than confusing!), the money (1800 schillings = $1). Dirty: ME! (*smile*), actually just about everything is dirty almost all the time. You don’t realize how clean the U.S. is until you’re not there anymore. Familiar: cell phones, electricity, running water and indoor toilets (YEAH!).
The missionaries we are staying with here in Mbale are from Texas; there is actually a whole team of them. So our Africa experience so far has been infiltrated with a bunch of “ya’ll” and good ol’ southern hospitality, which makes culture shock that much more interesting.
I wish I had more stories to tell, but we really haven’t been doing much yet. We’ve just been busy re-adjusting our sleeping habits and slowly venturing out into the world around us. This week we are crossing the border into Kenya, where we will visit our future home, Kitale. While we’re there we will be helping with See Ministries, another group here right now that conducts eye clinics and hands out free eye glasses in communities here in Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya for 1 month each year. We will also be working with a short term group from the states who will be in Kitale doing repair work at the children’s home that we are going to work with, and we are going to try to find a house to live in! We plan on moving to Kitale November 1st, after our training at TASO. That’s a lot earlier than I expected, but that’s how things go on the mission field! Well, that’s all for now. Hope you enjoy the pictures—and I’m sure I will have some great stories for you after our adventure in Kitale this week. Until then, God bless you! (they say that a lot here as a salutation)