Ok Massive Blog update coming right up. And I wont feel offended if you don’t read it all. Just pick the heading you like and have a read. Its quite detailed this time as I am using it for journal use also. The other Journal the girls gave me I am using more for scrapbooking and hence will lack the small details of day to day activities.

BUSHIKORI
So firstly I should update you all on my work at Bushikori and the events that take place in a normal day for Maz.
Ok so I wake up around 6 and have some quiet time with God in prayer and bible reading. I’ve successfully worked my way backwards through the books of the Bible. I decided to go backwards as every time I read it from Gen-Rev I always get stuck at Numbers of Judges and don’t make it much further.
Then I “take tea”. Which means having a cup of tea with some food of some sort. Most commonly its plain bread, or some left over Irish (which mean potatoes as in Irish potatoes), sometimes there is nothing at all so then you just drink tea. (Ugandan tea consists of loose tea leaves with a large amount of sugar (which is odd because sugar is very expensive here) and no milk as they don’t have fridges and milk is also very expensive. (It costs 1000 shillings for 1L which is about $1 Aus. But considering most people in the villages might make about 2500 shillings a day its very expensive)
Then after I take tea I go and bathe. I fill a round basin with cold water then carry it to the bathing cubicle. I have a bar of soap in one hand and splash water on myself with the other hand.
Next I pack my things and walk out onto the path that passes through a line of huts with maybe 5 families in them. I have a little fan club that is made up of 8-10 kids ranging from 1-5yrs with a majority being around the 2year stage. They are soooooo cute! They consistently run over to me to shake my hand (kneeling if they are girls) and then they greet me. Even though I I have done this every morning for the last 3wks they have only failed once to come running giggling and screaming to greet me. Today they saw me coming from 50m back and they started jumping up and down and singing “muzungu, muzungu something something something muzungu”. (the something = a Lugisu word I don’t know).
I then wait on the side of the road and wait for the Bushikori School bus to “pick me”(for some reason they just don’t bother to say “up” on the end). While I wait for 5-20mins (differs from day to day) I get many “Muzungu how are you?”. I also get to see many Karamojan girls that have walked the 10kms from town with a huge sack of coal on their heads. The Karamojans are the most primitive people in Uganda and will get a blog write up all of their own. It’s a very very interesting tribe of people here in Uganda. But anyway they are very poor people and have to work very hard to get very little money.
Once the bus has picked me (and sometimes Mama Flora (Mary) shes often running late), we get to BCC. We go to Morning Glory time. Then go back to our offices and work. I generally work on projects, type documents to help admin, or am running my Bible clubs or preparing for them. Then at 1pm we head over to the kitchen to eat posho and beans or rice and beans. (doesn’t really come in other variety). Then at 5pm we get in the bus with many many people (far too many than can possibly fit). Get home. See my lovely fan club again as I go. Then 5:30 church starts so we sing and praise God, pray and then the Bishop speaks for a while then we pray.
Most nights I help to cook supper which we don’t eat until 10pm or 11pm. So often I feel I cant eat much as I am about to go to bed but often im so hungry at that stage that I eat close to a normal meal size.
Then Patricia and I head to bed. We attempt to kill some malaria carrying mozzies. Then I crawl under my mozzie net that I think really attracts the mozzies. We turn off the light or blow out the candle and go nigh nighs.

Patricia and Bea in traditional outfits called Kitengi. Two daughters from the Congo missionary.

OFFERING
I just wanted to tell you all this story because it nearly made me cry when I saw it and it can be such an amazing example that as Westerners we could learn a lot from seeing more poverty more often. Ok so when I still lived with the Duffields I would go to the Church of Christ on Sundays. Most of the Americans in Mbale go to this church as they set it up but Ugandans are trained to lead and preach. So every week we have the offering where you walk to the front and put in your tithing and or offering (they separate the two.). So one week a man stood up, went outside, brought in a rooster with its legs tied together so it couldn’t run away, and put him in front of the table with the offering baskets. This man was an old man, dressed in very poor clothes (even very poor people wear nice suits to church, so he must have been very poor.) and had just given a chook to the church. They are so valuable to families and can fetch a nice price or are cooked for very special occasions and he had given it to God. I had tears in my eyes. I thought of the times when I have held back from giving my money because I thought I was poor. Me who had clothes enough to dress 20 other people, books, cd’s so many things that I could give away and so much more money than this man could even imagine and here was a poor man that gave what he had.

updates

Hello to everyone. I must apologize for my drought in updates. I have been very busy with work at Bushikori.

Holiday fun clubs: Bible studies

-Ok so since my aim to come to Uganda was to serve wherever Bushikori needed help, I decided to work on the spiritual growth of the children sponsored by Bushikori Christian Center. I held a seminar for senior students 4 weeks ago as an attempt to encourage senior students in their walk with God and to challenge them a bit before they head back to their Universities. We focused a lot on bringing glory to God in all we do so of course it was a challenging study. We had a guest speaker come in for the day and I ran a Bible study. It went wonderfully and the students gave very positive feedback.

I then started a holiday program for the children in primary 1 thru to senior level 6 (which is the same as grade1 thru to year 12.) Every Wednesday morning I would run the bible club for p1-p3, then Wednesday afternoons were p4-p6. Thursday morning was p7-s3 then Thursday afternoon was S4-S6. All up I taught around 70 children in 2 days, each week. The session started with games such as fruit salad, poison ball and other such kiddie games. For the senior students we did the more mind thinking games or just the general get to know you games such as “have you ever…..”. We then had a singing session and we sang songs such as “he is the King of Kings” and “Jesus loves me” and for the older kids we sang Ugandan praise and worship songs. After the singing we had the Bible study or Bible lesson. Each group of children came with their own challenges that made me work really hard. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to match certain activities with the age groups being taught and working out the level of understanding that could be taught at the different age groups. I can now see how helpful a course in Education would be if you were to take on such a role as teaching children the Bible.

So the holiday program has come to an end this week and I really enjoyed the chance to teach the children new things and to see how excited they are to learn about the Bible. They love the new games and loved playing with real balls (as they are used to kicking around some plastic bags wrapped very tightly to form a ball). I gave out lollies to the children when they answered questions so they were all eager to listen carefully and know the answers J (it was a bit sneaky but it worked)

So now that this program has come to an end I am now in the process of planning the Saturday programs that will run throughout the year. We are hoping to go out to the villages and around the school hostels, rotating from place to place. I am also hoping to begin a Bible study for teen girls in the hope of growing them into mature women in Christ. I have befriended an American girl that is starting a teen girls study through her church and an English girl that may start a study for teen girls in the slums of Mbale. We are hoping to bring the 3 girls groups together every few weeks and let the Ugandan girls grow a network of support as they grow in their faith.

Living with Ugandan People

Last Saturday I moved out of the comfort of living in a Muzungu (white person) home, eating Muzungu food and living near and around other Muzungus. I moved to a slummy suburb known as Bugema. I live with Mary, the Ugandan receptionist at Bushikori. I love it so much. They are teaching me the Lugisu language and teaching me how to cook Ugandan style on little coal stoves. We make posho (ground up maize mixed with water and cooked to make a food that looks and tastes like play dough without the salt. Its very very tasteless and has almost no nutrition value.), Matoke is a type of green banana that is cooked in water wrapped in banana leaves. We also eat pork, chicken or beef stews. I will take some food photos so you get an idea what an average meal looks like. They really don’t understand what variety in food is. You could count on your fingers almost the different food they eat and the variety they eat it in. So everyone cooks the same way. I try to explain how in Australia there could easily be 100 ways to cook chicken and they just don’t get how that could possibly be.

So anyway I live with Ugandan people, I bathe out of a basin filled with cold water (which makes washing hair kind of difficult), I wash my clothes in the same basin. We have a drop toilet/pit latrine that doesn’t have a toilet as such but rather just a whole cut out of the concrete floor so you have to watch where you step.

Our neighbors are a family from the Congo. The father is a bishop and a missionary in Uganda. They are extremely poor and yet they look after their own 6 children, 2 widows with their kids as well as 10 other orphans. So I am surrounded by children that just want to play all the time. I have decided to mentor the Bishops 3^rd daughter who is 12 years old. We are planning to meet once a week for prayer, bible reading and all other fun things that mentoring involves.

There is a little church set up for this bishop so we have praise and worship, prayer and bible teaching twice a day. Im learning some French songs as well as Swahili as the bishop only speaks these languages. I have been trying to remember any of my French I learnt in yr7 at school and all I can say in Bonjour, how are you, and my name is Marianne. So we do a lot of hello’s cos that all we manage in each others language.

Ok so I just wanted to update you all and I will post snaps asap to make reading the posts easier.

God Bless

Lots of Love Marianne