Time Stands Still

Time stands still when you’re travelling to Africa – at least that’s how it feels. The time: Thursday at 9:00 p.m. Kenya time. 11:00 a.m. Thursday morning, West Coast time. I have officially been up since 7:20 a.m., Tuesday morning. We are on our last leg of the plane trip, waiting in the Kenya airport for a 10 p.m. flight to Entebbe. We will then sleep and move into our house on Friday morning. It has been a really long time getting here; however, we are having a great time. When we landed in Kenya, we were all starving. Somehow, and believe me, this is a miracle in our family, all six of us slept through the meal service. If you know my boys, sleeping through anything that has to do with food, lets you know how very tired they are! We went to Java House in the Kenya airport and had milkshakes, Panini sandwiches; I had a great cup of tea. Kenya has the best tea I have ever had, better than even England – blasphemous, I know.
I have a growing excitement, as do we all, for what we are going to experience in the next six weeks. Tuesday as we were preparing to leave, I got a phone call from Bransen: “Hi Mom, (long pause) I REALLY don’t want to go to Africa anymore” he said with quite a bit of sadness in his voice. Uh oh I thought it’s a little late for that. I knew that he was probably feeling nervous about the unknown, and I knew that I wanted to be there for him, and not negate his feelings, but I really didn’t know what to say. “Well B, we’re leaving in just a few hours you know” “Yeah, but I don’t want to go anymore.” “Do you want to stay home with someone else? You know the tickets are bought, the arrangements are made.” “No, I want to stay home with you…” Hmmm…we didn’t really make a whole lot of progress, it was a running conversation the rest of the day, and he went to sleep still wanting to talk about not going after all. Thankfully, he woke up in the morning with great anticipation. I didn’t wake up that morning, because I never went to sleep. Tim had been telling me all day on Tuesday that he was feeling really good about where we were at with things, and thought we could be ready by 9 p.m. and get a decent night’s sleep. I looked at him as if he were a complete fool, because I know that no matter how hard you try, there are always things to be done. At 2:30 a.m., I was still cancelling the newspaper (thank God for the internet!), calling the police department so they know what is up (thank God for small towns!)

So far I haven’t thought of anything that we forgot, that is large part to my sister, who came over about 9 p.m. the night we were leaving, and talked me through everything, making sure I had thought of everything, then she helped me make a list and we hit Wal-Mart at 11 p.m., for those things we needed that I had almost forgot! Thank you Michelle! We did forget something in Amsterdam…Westin left his sweatshirt in the boarding area, his only piece of clothing that has long sleeves…that’s not a good thing.

While in Jinja, Uganda, we will be doing an assessment of the hospital there, as enroute we learned that GE is going to upgrade that hospital as well. Did you know that the hospital in Jinja, which isn’t a remote village, but a normal town in Uganda, has no running water or electricity? That boggles my mind folks; I know it is just the beginning of the boggling that is going to go on in my mind over the next six weeks. I mean, our spinach is triple-washed before we even buy it for goodness sake, and they don’t even have running water in the hospital. Things that we so take for granted, they don’t have. I’m wondering how anything gets sanitized, cooked, life-saving machines can’t run…what really can that hospital do? We will see, hopefully we will be able to get a water system and generator in place for the hospital, that alone could make a huge difference in saving people’s lives.

Friday Morning: We slept last night at a hotel near the airport; we all slept very well, quite grateful to lay out our tired bodies horizontally. I have elephant ankles…what is up with that? Obviously my circulation isn’t what it should be, but why do I have to worry about things like that…I’m only middle-aged, and everything I read tells me that 40 is the new 25…I don’t think a 25 year old would have elephant ankles just from a long plane ride…someone’s not telling me the truth here!

We are waiting for a ride out to Jinga, where we will get settled into our new house and the village we will spend a lot of time in. I am very excited, so are the boys – we have no idea what to expect and I’m trying not to expect anything, so it will all be well.


I HAVE AN ARMED GUARD OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW…more on that later. Ahhhh…our fearless leader has taken sick. Seriously, Tim ate something bad I think (although I think it is curious as to why we all aren’t sick). He is feeling dreadful…I asked him how he feels compared to when he had Malaria…Malaria wasn’t this bad he says, as his body quivers with a round of nauseous. Okay, seriously folks, Tim was my lifeline for the first few days. He was going to spend the first two days getting us set up in our house, helping me to know my way around town, etc. Now he is lying under the mosquito net, oblivious to everything and the boys are looking at me and telling me I got them into this—now what? Somehow, it is the family consensus that this entire trip was Mom’s idea. I keep reminding them that my idea actually was just that we spend the summer together as a family, it just so happens that Dad is the one going to Africa, so we needed to come along…they aren’t buying it, they still think it’s all me.

Dinner is a problem. We have no refrigerator, so everything we get, we have to get and prepare that day. The market is not within walking distance. Did I tell you all that they drive on the opposite side of the road in Uganda? We have a left-handed stick shift Toyota Land cruiser, and I’m thinking I’m going to have to take it market soon…scary thought. Chase thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world; he wants to go RIGHT NOW…I think we should give Tim a little bit longer to recover.

Now, I am not complaining, but I want to let you know how things are here, so that you can know how it really is. So let me start with our house. It is in one of the nicer sections of Jinga, it is considered expensive by Africa standards. It is in a compound which is nice, meaning there is a gate and a fence all the way around, at night we have an armed guard that walks around…armed as in a great big, scary looking gun (I took him dinner last night, because I want him to be our friend!) Nancy and Sam Tushabe, wonderful Ugandans who run the children’s village we helped to build, and will be in charge of the coffee house, have helped us secure the home and car. So I asked Nancy, why do we need a guard, what is he guarding us from? She reassured me that it was just a precaution, since we are Mzungu (white people), there is a chance someone may want to see if we have something valuable. But she assured me that with the armed guard, no one will bother us. (I could write an entire page on my feelings regarding guns, etc. but suffice it to say that I am being stretched by having an armed guard in our compound.)

Okay, back to the house. It has “proper plumbing” which means that we have a toilet, and a shower (which is a shower head, right next to the toilet, and a drain in the floor.) Sometimes we have water, and sometimes we don’t. We have no water right now in the kitchen. Let’s talk about the kitchen. There are shelves (no cupboards), there is an oven/stove that will work when we have electricity (which I am told is random), we have a small sink that doesn’t have water in it, we have no lights in the kitchen, and no refrigerator. This is going to be interesting. Those of you who know me know that first off, I spend A LOT of time in the kitchen, by virtue of the fact that I have four, growing, hungry boys. We have TWO refrigerators, to hold the milk we go through every week. So this is going to be interesting to say the least. Our beds are three inch foam on wood frames, covered in mosquito net. There is either bird poop or my kids’ think it is lizard poop, periodically on the walls and curtains. I have also found quite a bit of rat or mouse poop, but no vacuum cleaner. I’ve swept up what I can, the rest, well…I am embracing the experience, God help me! It rained last night (that is a whole other story, Tim told me it wouldn’t rain at all, so we have not come prepared for rain, Nancy says that the weather has been weird all year…global warming effects? I don’t know). Anyway, back the rain…I just can’t imagine how they deal with the rain here, because many, many people have mud floors, and tin roofs, and dirt roads, and dirt everywhere, which we all know turns to mud when it rains. We are so blessed, that is what I keep telling myself. We have NO IDEA how blessed we truly are.

So far there is no internet, and I’m not sure when that will happen, we are hoping to get it to our house. In the meantime, I am blogging, and not posting. That doesn’t work too well, but everyone will just get many blog entries when we finally do get internet. We have a new motto since we got here…TIA…it means “This is Africa”. We use it frequently, such as when we realized there isn’t water in the kitchen, or the electricity goes out, or our car is two hours late to pick us up, or something we bought doesn’t work. We actually borrowed the phrase from a movie, “Blood Diamond” which I seriously recommend that you NOT watch the night before you are moving your family to Africa for an extended period of time (note to self!) More later, I am going to join a game of catch with Smarties candy…we Reynolds’ are resourceful!

Ciao,

Cheri

Saturday night: We didn’t drive to the market, but the kids’ and I walked into town. All was well, until we were accosted by a thug, as we were later told. He started with the boys, holding a business card and asking if they had given it to him, then he came up to me, and asked me, then he grabbed me by the waist and squeezed, then I lit into him! Big time! I started yelling at him and pushing him backwards and told him to leave me alone and never touch me again. My finger was in his face, and he backed away fast. It scared me, and when I get scared, I get mean! That soured walking into town for Bransen. He doesn’t want to go again. I kind of feel like I passed my first test and survived. Tim is in bed still, not feeling good at all.

Sunday afternoon: Well, now we know we don’t have any hot water for showers. Brrrrrr…however, I start a big pot of water on the stove, and do the final rinse with warm water to heat me up, it makes me appreciate warm showers! Tim decided to join the living and we went to church this morning, and Nancy decided to “get our feet wet” slowly so she had us go to a church that she thought would be fairly American, run by some missionaries. We get there; they have already started…oops! Anyway, about 25 minutes later, the preacher is finished and says that is all, thanks for coming. We look at each other and Nancy and I tell her, that is even shorter than fast food church in America. So we meet some people, and start to head out, and they look at us weird…you are leaving now? Isn’t it over we asked? Just Sunday school, church starts at 10 a.m. – we weren’t late after all! Then we had a fairly African church experience. Exuberant singing, lots of talking that we didn’t understand, however, the preacher did preach in English and they translated into Lugandan. The boys loved it, and were quiet--whew. After church we went to Two Friends Restaurant for pizza, but they weren’t serving pizza until 6 p.m. It was only 1 p.m. and there was no way we could wait, so we ate other things, and then went up to look at Bujagali Falls and found a place that lets you bungee jump—oh boy! I guess this is what the boys’ were talking about when they said the trip could be fun if I will let it be fun? We’ll see, I’m sure there will be bungee jumping stories, I just don’t know if they will include me as a participant or an observer.

We have met a few of our neighbors. We have a youth hostel next to us, filled with probably 40 children who don’t go to bed until midnight, and get up around 5:30 a.m. I don’t get it? Don’t they need their sleep? I know I do, but 40 children are not a quiet group, that is for sure. They are boarders going to school…the fortunate ones. They work very hard, always washing their clothes, or doing chores, laughing and happy with life! It is truly a sight to see. They are quite curious about the Mzungu’s living next door to them.

We have a young woman who is coming in to help with laundry and cooking. Now this is a new and uncomfortable thing for me. However, I will never be able to accomplish all that needs to be accomplished, and have to do chores the African way. So it is a necessity. As soon as I learned that she has no job, so this is truly a blessing for her, I felt a lot better about it. You should see the laundry she is washing right now…six people…lots and lots. Her name is Anife, and she has trained to be a caterer. In the back of my head, I am hoping she will make a great employee at the Coffee House. She has only cooked us one meal so far, but it was really great! The boys were so thankful and appreciative. I think I need to make them wait until they are REALLY hungry at home, then maybe I can get some gratitude as well…
We spent the rest of Sunday, acquainting ourselves with the town, and continuing to fix up our house and make it a home. The electricity went out around 6 p.m., so I was going to try and cook vegetable soup, but couldn’t—you guess it, back to Two Friends for pizza! Yum. We found out that the two friends are a mother/son duo, Europeans. I thought that was very sweet, my boys were trying to figure out how the mom and son could be friends…

Monday morning: We are going to get internet this morning, try and secure a location for the coffee shop, go to the fish hatchery to talk about tilapia fingerlings, lots to do, I am really excited! I made vegetable soup this morning; it is on the stove simmering right now. No one has tasted it, but I’m thinking since they’ve only had a granola bar and tea so far, they might actually think it tastes good. We ran out of water this morning, and you have to climb up a tower and turn the water on and fill it. Westin drew the short straw and headed up, straight into a hornet’s nest that we were unaware of…five stings later and a big jump down from up high, he ran in the house kind of rattled. The bites were swollen up big, the younger boys came running in also because they were in the back yard playing with fire…did I just say that? TIA! Thankfully, I brought a large stock of Benadryl products. Had him take some, and sprayed some on his chest and hands, and after about two hours, the swelling has gone down. He looked at me and said matter of factly…hey, I guess I won’t die.

Ciao for now, it is time to serve up some vegetable soup!
Cheri