Shifting

From Jean per Sms on 27.9.2011

tonight’s the night. We have left to Pine Lodge tent, home for 13 months, and moved into our home stone homes. Mosquito net is hung, stars are twinkling above, singing with rhythmic jumping and clapping can be heard from the next village over. We’re home, again, some meters away is Miriam’s hut-whose out on furiough.Also near is the hen hut, thankfully no roasters.

Mt Kadam is towering in the distance from our front window, tomorrow morning,above her peaks, the sun will rise. Now I’m just thankful for crowing into my bed, hearing the crickets and cows mooing.

Good news

From Jean on 7.7

Good evening, better news- we've been praying for the 6 shepherds who never came home after their 100 + cattle were stolen. Yesterday Valentina's 10yr old son Laki crawled home - WOW!!!!!. He was severely beaten especially scrawny legs left in the bush over 30kms away- he made it painfully home.
The joy mixed with overwhelming concern sprang from Valentina's face and voice and she relayed her good news.

Pray for healing inside and outside for the families affected. A sign of relief has settled here but there lingers sadness.

The other good news, after almost a year, we can finally come out of our tents, the roof is done! we will move our stuff in this weekend just in time.

meals

so, we're trying to get the roof finished before we leave for several weeks - and it's not the time of building, so people have been reluctant to bring the green sticks and sisal plants (for ropes) to do the work - and the roofers have . aaaahh . also lacked 'incentive' (for reasons entirely opaque to us) - so, there I was, early one morning, way out in the boondocks with a group of guys who were gathering the materials in the bush - I had skipped breakfast because I figured it would be a relatively short trip - it wasn't
- I wasn't in a position to help with the work, other than to load the stuff on the truck afterwards, so I sat there reading and taking notes for some team trainings - I noticed my alertness levels approximated a sine wave, which I attributed to blood sugar levels, when one of the guys walked past and commented on how tired they all were
- once again, I was reminded of how much work they do on so little resources - they hadn't eaten either - in fact, they typically don't eat but one or two small meals a day - one or more of those meals may be "nagwe," or, local beer (vitamin B or not, productivity Definitely goes down) - while I'm used to three meals a day, any one of which would likely serve them well as their 'one', and I tend to whine if I don't get them - go figure


- blessings
Tom

Dr.Dr. Jean

This is awsome, the way Dr.Dr. Jean is:
http://mosesschwester.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/dr-dr-in-action/#comment-289

One roof down and one to go

Today we went back into Karamoja and the rains have begun. I think its for real this time. So much so that my tent didn't stand a chance. Don't get me, wrong the tent i have is great but it was never intended to be used for 6 months straight. It sounds funny when I say that i live in a tent in Africa. Anyhow I came back today to find my tents center pole collapsed, so once again it was time for repair and the magic fix for everything is binding wire. Give me some bamboo, some papyrus mats, and I'll make just about anything. So the tent is fixed for now. I think this time now all the poles have been messed up. Another thing we did today was bring up one roof upside down on the back of a truck. It was quite a challege to lift the roof over a fence even with ten guys. Once we reached home the next challenge arose cause the road was not big enough for the roof to pass without tilting. We got what seemed like most of the idlers in town to carry the roof. So one roof down and one to go.

November the beginning of construction

Okay so this is my first time actually posting to the KKAB blog. So here it goes November has been the beginning of construction month. Since the time we have moved here (back in July) we have waited to put in a well and start constructing our houses. So here we are in November and things are
just beginning. Just a week or so ago we had Bob Wright come and put in a bore hole, big thanks to him and the work. At the current it is not finished, okay well the hole is finished but the pump is not installed yet, so no water as of yet. For us to get the borehole meant one thing, construction time is now here. So yesterday Bob Wright came up again with his team and we began to put the footing into foundation trenches. If water was around the job was supposed to be like 5 hours or less. Our problem was since the bore hole wasn’t finished and the submersible pump didn’t want to work that meant running back and forth to the borehole (about 8 Kilometers away). So Tom and Jean the entire day were driving a lot and moving water like crazy I imagine up to 2,000 liters of water. Meanwhile back at the land we had a crew shoveling sand, rock, and cement and then filling up wheel barrows and wheeling them to the dump site. I think by the end of the day we wheeled about 100 of them full of cement. Some would have stopped at a certain point but not us, we wanted a solid foundation so we finished at 9pm at night working by moon light. I wonder if this is a sign of what’s to come………