Our Best Day Yet

Today was a great day with many things to be thankful for:

1. Our 11th team member, Raelene, arrived safe and sound very early this morning - so our whole team is together now.
2. After a flurry of late-night phone calls and emails, our host Paul convinced the airline baggage office to release the 4 delayed bags, so they arrived at the Guest House with Raelene after all.
3. We continued to be blessed with good weather - meaning that it was relatively cool and foggy until later in the day, with no rain. The locals are wearing jackets and complaining it's cold, but to those of us from Salem it feels wonderful not having too much heat and humidity!
4. We made more progress on the house we're constructing and the walls are climbing higher.

We're all happy to have Raelene here with us, and the Dettwylers, Cindy and Dan are all very grateful to have their luggage again!

It's hard to believe that we have only one more day of working at the site. We've grown very fond of the work crew and already are anticipating that we'll be sad to say good-bye. We have gotten to know their names and created a nickname of "The Big Boss Man" for the older, heavy-set man who is there to monitor our progress, materials usage, hours worked, etc. They also have developed some nicknames for us. Cindy has been Cinderella since the first day, and it turns out that there's a popular local song about a girl named Cinderella - so that's why the workers had heard the name, but had never heard the story until Jill D. told it to them. They've played the song for us multiple times now, so at least the chorus sounds familiar now.  They also decided that "Heather" was too hard to say, so they were going to call her by her middle name - Ilene. Except that was too difficult to pronounce also, so she is now "Irene".

The men seem to be genuinely interested in getting to know us and hear about our families, work and lives in America. They also enjoy joking around with us and laughing at our antics - whether it is trying unsuccessfully to flick the mortar onto the wall and make it stick, or singing Disney songs to keep ourselves motivated when we are getting tired of stacking bricks.  Yesterday morning we did the "Hokey Pokey" for them, which they loved - so we did a reprise at the end of the day, and the foreman Moses even joined us! Our goal for tomorrow is to get even more of the crew to "shake it all about" with us.

Some of our favorite moments of the day, though, are when we see little children as we're driving to and from Watoto. We turn heads wherever we go, since many of the Ugandans have never seen Caucasians - let alone a bus full of them. Some stop in their tracks and stare, others point and call out "mzungu" which is the Lugandan name for white people. One guy went by us and yelled out, "Hey! Hey! I love you!"  Most everyone will smile and wave to us, but the very best reactions we get are from the adorable little children. Today there was a group of schoolchildren in a yard who squealed and raced over to the bus, waving and cheering to us as we drove by. And on the narrow dirt road that the Watoto Village is on, we always see at least a handful of children along the way who seem delighted when we pass by.  Today we got the feeling they were anticipating our arrival and waiting to greet us. We've decided that tomorrow we'll take one of the bags of candy we brought from home and pass some out to the children we see.

Here are just a couple of the many, many photos we've taken of Ugandan children. (Celeste already has taken almost 2,000 photos, but for now we are just pulling some from Heather's camera since it's a faster process.)

All of the schoolchildren here wear uniforms.

We continue to feel blessed to be here and are so enriched by the people we meet. We really appreciate the comments our family and friends have written on the blog and hope that all of you are enjoying our updates.

Blessings to all of you,

The SS Nazarene Watoto team