A Week in the Life...

Hello all!!
For this entry we figured we’d just give a quick recap of what our typical week looks like here. We’ve had several people ask us about that, so we thought that would make a good topic for a blog!  And I bet you’re thinking, “Wow, I can’t wait to read about what Gary and Erin do each week! They’re the most exciting people I know, I better sit down before I read on!” While that may be true, one of the things we’ve had to get used to here is that basic things like grocery shopping take way more time than they used to.  So we’ve had to tone down our excitement in favor of just being able to get all of the necessary things done in order to wear clean clothes and eat dinner.  Life just seems to take a little longer here. 

So starting with Sunday, we head off to church just before 9 or 11, depending on the rest of the day’s plans.  Often on Sundays after church we do much of our weekly shopping.  Traffic is usually lightest on Sundays, so after church is a good time to catch a boda or taxi downtown to go shopping if we need.  There are shops closer to where we live, but there is much more variety and options when we go downtown to shop.  But we don’t have to do that all the time.  More often than not, we find our favorite Sunday afternoon activity is just heading to Ciao Ciao - which is pretty close.  Ciao Ciao is an Italian market where we can get groceries, lunch, and yes, even ice cream. This is about a 40 minute walk, one-way, depending on how motivated we are to get that ice cream. We like this walk, because it tends to be a bit quieter and offers a little more shoulder-space along the road, making it feel a little more pedestrian-friendly.  From there we head home.  We’ll do a little work to get ready for the week, clean house from all the dust that is here in Africa that continually likes to cover everything, and do some laundry. 

Our laundry is all hand washed - however, we personally only have to wash our ‘undies’.  We actually have ‘house help’ that comes for a few hours twice a week to do the bulk of our laundry.  We weren’t sure what to think about having house help when we first arrived, but it is a life saver!  Just hand washing our ‘small clothes’ takes a bit of effort, and we fumble around with it a bit.  Doing laundry is a bit of a story just in itself that one day we'll have to do a blog on.  ...But I will give you a bit of a teaser until then – this is the first time we’ve ever ironed our underwear before.  We have to iron everything 2 days after we wash them to make sure the mango fly eggs are dead (they like to lay eggs on wet fabric), or else their eggs will hatch and burrow into our skin.  Just hearing that (without the other colorful stories concerning examples of this) have made us very diligent with our ironing – especially of the underwear. 

the making of a Rolex

Anyway, for dinner, Sundays have become our rolex nights.  Rolexes are one of the ‘fast food’ options here in Kampala.  Gary runs around the corner to pick them up at a stand that makes them up in front of you.  Rolexes are basically fat, greasy tortillas filled with a fried egg, tomatoes, and onions - and are awesome!  Hopefully we will be able to recreate something similar when we get back to the States, but our health providers probably won’t be too disappointed if we don’t.  Afterwards dinner, hopefully we are all finished up with everything related to the preperation for the week and can top off our weekend with a pot of popcorn and snuggling up with a movie on the laptop or a cut-throat game of cards.  As we said, we’re very exciting folks.

a ready to be consumed Rolex

Mondays are a lot less exciting.  School at Heritage starts at 8:00 and goes until 3:00.  Erin walks and gets there around 7:30 or earlier.  She teaches 5 classes a day – so it works out that she has each of the 6 grades (7th-12th grades), 4 times a week.  Gary leaves around 7:30 to get to the eMi office around 7:45.  Devotionals and morning meetings at his office are at 8:30.  Usually we both work a little late during the week.  Erin is still getting used to all the extra lesson planning that goes into her schedule, and Gary will work as long as his wife will let him.  There is plenty of curriculum to be developed and projects regularly stream into the eMi office, so we both feel very useful and needed here.  Strangely enough, one of the things that surprised us the most being here was that we were both anticipating a lot more down-time when we moved to Africa.  But both of us feel like we are leaving plenty of work to be done when we turn off the light at night (or turn off the lantern depending on if we have power or not).  There is plenty to do and everything just seems to take longer.  So both being very efficient with our time and making sure we stay balanced and leave time for each other, are issues that have to be dealt with in whatever continent we are on.  We are still definitely working on both of those. 

Tuesdays after school, Erin goes to go to a great Bible study with many other EMI wives – a Beth Moore study on Daniel. It has been very good and a great time of fellowship and has helped a lot in reminding her of why we are here – to serve. From there, Erin will either catch a ride or will walk home, often times stopping by one of the side-of-the-road produce stands and pick up eggs and other goodies. Usually she stops by Christine’s stand - a little hole-in-the-wall place (literally), and there’s no doubt Christine wonders what we do with all of the eggs – we’d probably save money if we just bought a chicken. (Erin eats several eggs for breakfast every morning.  Gary’s cholesterol has him pass on that.)  And then Gary comes home and one of us will cook dinner, depending on who has more stuff to do.  We’ve been splitting the cooking duties, which has worked well and made us both happy. 

Wednesdays are pretty good.  We are in the full swing of the week and are hopefully feeling pretty good about how it is shaping up at this point.  This past week, Gary has been helping out with a project trip and has been spending many days out on site, and coming home and drawing things up in the evenings.  But it is progressing well.  Recently on Wednesdays, Erin has started going for walks with some friends after school for exercise.  This has been very good, both for the exercise and for growing and getting closer with friends.  

It gets pretty dark just a little after 7pm and it gets light about 6:45am – and it’s that way all year round since we are right at the equator. We brought little cheap battery powered lanterns that have worked pretty well for us when the power goes out. We didn’t imagine we would be using them as much as we are though. We never know about the power here.  It is usually off at least every other night, and how long it is off is anyone’s guess.  It could be off for 24 hours, or maybe it will come back on around midnight or so. That’s the important part...we’re ok with it going out in the evenings, just so the power comes back on before it’s time to take a shower in the morning.  We have a little instantaneous water heater which is just for the shower.  This is the only place we have hot water, but it sure is a nice place to have it.  Making dinner is a little more challenging in the dark, but it’s ok since we have a gas stove.  It is also ok, because washing the dishes is a lot easier in the dark when you can’t see anything!  Both of our work places have generators, so power outages don’t affect us much during the day.  But it does make it extremely hard for most people to make a living when what they are doing requires electricity, because you never know when it is going out and how long it will be out.

Thursdays are a little more of the same.  Everyone is very social here and there is definitely a big sense of community.  So, at the very least, and often times more, two nights during the week, we have either been invited over for dinner or we are having someone over – which is quite a change for us.  But it is very nice having a close network.  This usually determines how many stops to a roadside market we need to make during the week.  We have a mini refrigerator, so we can’t stock much food in there.  And with the power going out all the time, we wouldn’t want to keep too much in there anyway.  But it is fun stopping to get fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, eggplant, eggs, etc. at the roadside markets regularly anyway.  And speaking of shopping, Erin also usually ends up doing an emergency lab supply run about now.  She tries to make it to the weekend, but usually frantically realizes by the end of the week that it’s not possible and finds a critical need for some liver, or hydrogen peroxide, or who knows what for another lab.  So she gives Robert a call, our favorite boda driver, and he comes to pick her up and runs her around to wherever she needs to go.  He’s also helpful, because usually we have no clue where to go to get what she needs, so he is able to enlighten this silly Western girl. Running quick errands here usually takes at least an hour (and that’s with wheels – 2 hours if on foot).  We’re thinking of going to a Bible study with many of Erin’s co-teachers on Thursdays after dinner that meet at a home right down the street.  We may have another volunteer activity with a medical facility that occurs on Thursday nights which will conflict with this - but if that falls through, we will definitely keep going to this Bible study.

Date Night at Cafe Roma

FRIDAY! We made it! Erin especially loves Fridays, because school starts off with Chapel for the high schoolers first thing, and then for the remainder of the day, other grades of the school meet at different times for their Chapels. So for the whole day, Erin has the sound of little kids singing praise songs floating into her classroom from across the courtyard.  It would be nice if every day was like that.  Fridays also include an extra mid-day planning period for Erin, which is a nice treat!  She usually works at the school until Gary gets off to try to not have to work so much on the weekends.  And then Gary picks her up, and we’re to the best part – date night!  We’ve been trying to be very good and treat ourselves to a dinner out to just sit, relax, and enjoy some good end-of-week debriefing.  There are several affordable places not too far away.  One of our favorites is Café Roma – they have pretty good pizza, yummy desserts, and quite potent African tea (very heavy on the ginger).  

And then comes Saturday which includes sleeping in.  Things are pretty active around here, so it usually doesn’t take long for all sorts of sounds to fill the air – horns honking, roosters crowing, goats crying (the kids are pretty whiney), music playing, and the sound of children screaming their heads off…all before 7.  But it is nice just to sit in bed and listen and know we are in Africa.  If the power is off, things calm down a lot, and you just get to listen to the hum of the generator across the street which is nice too.  On Saturdays, Erin usually makes a big ole breakfast – which has included pancakes, eggs, biscuits, corn cakes, or whatever strikes her fancy.  She has been very resourceful since you have to make everything from scratch – nothing premade here, so making a big meal always feels like a bit of an accomplishment. And big breakfasts feel like the appropriate way to celebrate the weekend.

Like for you at home, if we want to try and go see something new, Saturday is the day to do it – whether it is going to a local craft markets, or going to Jinja, or running around Kampala with the eMi interns.  Our list of places nearby we want to go sight-see is growing fast, and we are falling behind.  Or you can spend most of a Saturday just running around doing some pretty random errands – like hunting down propane to cook with all over Kampala because everyone is sold out, or going down to ‘furniture road’ to find a little table to use for a desk.  ‘Furniture road’ is a road where there’s just a huge amount of people packed solid for a mile or two with all of their handmade furniture out along the side of the road to sell.  Or we’ve spent more than one Saturday going for a marathon walk through Kampala. 

In any extra time on Saturdays, we'll usually fit in a little work, spend some time communicating with family, work on the blog, and, if we are all lucky, Erin will sometimes do some extra baking; which is always a hit with her husband and the neighbors.

So that’s about it at this point.  We still feel like we are figuring out our weeks, and we both want to take advantage of being here and get involved with some other things.  So I’m sure our typical week will be changing soon – but that is a week in the life of us here at this point! 

We miss you much.  We definitely have our moments of home-sickness.  But we are very happy we are here.  As always, we are grateful for your support and how you have been loving us from so very far away. We love and miss you all so much, and as you have a moment, we would love to hear what’s keeping you busy these days. And yes, you can even write to us and brag about your awesome fall weather, and we will try not to think badly of you. Much love, and many hugs!