Finally Back Online!

A "quick" recap of recent events:

We participated in the Kampala quarter marathon (10K) with over 20,000 other people! This was quite exciting for me because I’ve never been interested in running and I’ve never done a serious race like this. It turned out to be a lot of fun and not as hard as I thought it would be.

We had Thanksgiving dinner with the students and staff of the Uganda Studies Program at UCU and almost had a taste of home. The mashed potatoes and gravy really hit the spot and we ate way too many desserts, but the turkey turned out to be really disappointing. It was cut like a chicken, marinated, and thrown on the grill for a few minutes. The flavor was okay to be sure, but I couldn’t get a real bite out of it because the meat was so tough! The rule with meat here – you have to boil for some good time before doing anything else to it…it’s so tough. So, not exactly the turkey dinner I was hoping for, but at least we watched “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” (once the power came back)!

We celebrated Michael’s birthday on Saturday the 12th and ended up having a great party! I really laughed at how things worked out because it would never work in the U.S. We sent text messages to about 2 families on Friday night and called a few people Saturday morning. A few friends arrived in the morning and by 2 we had over 10 people in our house ready to eat some good pork for lunch. Haha! And we were concerned that no one would show up…

Michael is gaining business little by little with his travel company and cake making, and I’m getting new cello students here and there as well. I’m really enjoying teaching at the music school and now the International School of Uganda as well. It’s interesting teaching children and adults because you really have to adapt the teaching style for maximum effectiveness. I’m trying to market myself to other international schools and also take up a few private students, teaching in their homes. By January, when schools are back in session, I will likely have 15 students all together.

Something that we could really use prayer for is a project we are trying to start up at Salama School for the Blind. It’s a wonderful school with passionate children in whom I have seen great musical potential. A few months back, God gave me a vision for these students – that they can be great musicians if someone will take the time to teach them. Upon meeting with some of the directors of the school, I found that we were an answer to prayer. They had the same vision for some time, but no one to teach the students.

Because of my connections with Kampala music school, I’ve been able to round up the teachers and instruments we need in order to give lessons to these kids. We are thinking of calling it the “Joyful Noise Music Project” and offering guitar, piano, voice, violin, and cello lessons for now, but of course we hope to add more opportunities in the future. The project will basically focus on equipping them to play worship music – familiar choruses and hymns. They are already very passionate in their times of worshiping through music, so we hope that one day they will be able to have their own worship bands and even string trios or quartets. In the future they could even minister in churches and raise money for their school through this.

We’re planning to begin in February when all of them have returned from the holiday break. We’re very excited and we believe that God can do many great things with this project, so please join us in praying for this. I will keep you posted with more specific challenges and things to pray for as they come up.

Hope you’re all enjoying the snow during this festive season! As for me, I’m really having a hard time realizing that it’s Christmas. The decorations are sparse and the average temps are in the 80s…not a flake of snow in sight! I don’t miss the snow so much but, I miss that warm, cozy Christmas season feeling. Does that make sense? It just doesn’t feel like Christmas at all.

For the first (or maybe second) time in my life, I won’t be going to Uncle Tom and Aunt Kay’s house on Christmas Eve…I’ll be going to my mother-in-law’s house in the village to eat good African food and just visit with everyone around. Things will be quite different indeed, but still good. Merry Christmas everyone!

Oh and by the way, we’re most likely getting ourselves a puppy for Christmas!