En Jac Ooo Sahmba!!

We have officially moved into our new home! We live in a guest house behind the Pease family. They are a missionary family from Dallas, Texas and have come under the International Mission Board in order to minister to the people of the Islands. We met the Pease family at a house church we attended a couple Sundays ago, and they have graciously invited us into their home for the remainder of our time in Uganda. They are WONDERFUL!!! Krisann and Eric have two young children, Colby (11yr.) and Emily (7yr.) who are quite entertaining and a joy to be around. It has also been such a huge blessing to be able to just live with and be with a family. Right now we are sitting down to watch the disney movie WALLE, just after stuffing ourselves full of homemade apple crisp.......

This past weekend we had planned on traveling up to Kapchorwa in order to check out the area and determine whether it would be a prime place for the future NGO. However, we both became a bit ill (never really figured out what it was) and so decided to stay home rather than attempt to travel upcountry on a bus for 7-10 hours when already feeling quite nauseous. Postponing our trip due to sickness actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise (quite a common occurrence here in Uganda) as we learned from Kelsie and Travis there is a missionary couple up in Kapchorwa who is friends of theirs, who also has an NGO and is looking to partner with another non-profit organization. So the plan now is to contact this couple as soon as possible so that when we make the trip we will be able to meet up with this couple and discuss NGO plans and visions and such.

We were finally able to purchase shoes for the Abba Home kids!!! This has been quite a hassle as shoe prices tend to vary greatly and of course b/c we are Muzungus they jack up the prices as soon as they see us coming. We tried to buy the shoes through a pastor friend of ours, but soon realized that he was actually ripping us off, rather than giving us a great deal. Not uncommon, sadly. We resolved to make a trip to the Kububu (saturday Entebbe market) this afternoon to purchase the shoes ourselves, without any middleman.

A little background on the shoes.......... because Uganda's school systems are under British influence, the children must not only have official school uniforms, but must also have black leather shoes in order to attend school. If they do not have either, they simply cannot attend. Apparently teachers are very strict about this sort of thing. You would think that because Africa is such a poor country, that it wouldn't matter what they wore to school...Oh but it does.

After walking to the market, we made a deal with Vincent, a certain shoe salesman that we would purchase 26 pairs of shoes at 16,000 UGX per pair (that is about $8 per pair, and they usually charge about $15-$20 per pair). But just after we had struck this amazing deal, we realized we had left our notebook full of all the children's shoe sizes--back at our house. So we trekked back to our home, retrieved the notebook, and that's when the ridiculous shoe-shopping process began.......

Vicents shoe stand had only about ten pairs of black shoes, which we knew that if he didn't have the right shoe size or enough shoes, than his neighbor stand would generously hand his shoes over...and if his neighbor didn't than he would ask the other twenty stands that were there at the market...and so on and so forth until all 26 pairs were found. Okay so the way that they measure feet is slightly different than the way we do it in the States. In the states, you ask someone what there shoe size is, they say it is a size 6. You ask a Ugandan child what their shoe size is and they will tell you to get a piece of paper with a pencil and trace their foot on the paper; which is what we did that for all twenty-six kids. So we pulled out our notebook with 26 traced pages and began sizing the shoes up!! Vicent had the first five pairs of shoes, but after that, he began calling out his neighborly partners and then the shoe craze started---We had about fifteen different people in our faces with their shoes hollaring out that their shoes were the best and that we needed their shoes because they provided real leather unlike the others!! It got quite insane in the market today. Not only were they hollaring because they had shoes, but they also had kisses they wanted to deliver and kept saying, "MY COLOR, MY COLOR KISS ME!" Finally, MuMu called back ENJAKOOSAHMBUH---which translated to Enlish is I WILL KICK YOU!! They back away very quickly with those sweet words.

We began hauling the twenty-six pairs of shoes off in an oversized rice bag only to find Vicent and about twenty others trailing behind us telling us to dump the shoes for counting...We were all just thinking, "Oh no!! They are going to try to tell us we didn't pay for some of the shoes or they might just try stealing some of them back.." We had no idea but we panicked..and then from out of the bushes came these military men in green with machine guns and that is when we almost ran for it, twenty-six pairs of shoes and all!! Vicent assured us that they were just counting for their own records, the military men disappeared just as quickly and as sneakily as they came, and then we packed up and left for bliss-the Peases home!!