Lets try this again

First off I need to address a very important issue. HAPPY belated BIRTHDAY ADA JUNE and Happy Anniversary to Luke and Liesel! I was thinking about all of you on your special days and Liesel I loved getting to skype you a little bit on your anniversary!
I am currently sitting under my mosquito (here the qu is pronounced like how you pronounce the qu in squeeze) net as I write. I cherish the times under my mosquito net at the end of the day it is a time to unwind, read, write and just reflect on the day. Sometimes these times are more difficult and require more discipline than others to get through my reading for the day and it feels like more of a check list than really connecting with God, other days it feels like my life source. I am learning though how to follow Christ more closely even in the every day. We can so often long for those times where we feel his presence so tangibly, for me this was so true of the beginning of my internship and as I was applying to medical school, but the true test of our faith I think comes in the everydayness of it. I have been trying just throughout the day to be in more connection with God, praying through the little things and learning to thank God for the smile on another’s face even when I can’t understand the words they are saying. Occasionally this gets funny looks from other people or people falsely thinking I understand the Luganda they’re saying, but all the same I enjoy finding joy in these small things and returning the thankfulness to God. And really it feels like a fullness sometimes, inexplicable times of just a fullness and a deep sense that this everydayness is where true life is. OK, so like I said I’m under my mosquito net so bear with me as this is part blogging part journaling and unwinding from the day.
As I was brushing my teeth thinking about this blog I intended it to just be a what I’ve been up to blog, so I will get down to the business of telling all you wonderful people what I’ve been up to an ocean away (for most of you ☺). Life has been so much busier since my advisor came. I suppose part of that is that I am now well past the half way mark of my internship and all those things that at the beginning I said I would do I now have to really start getting down to the business of doing. One such thing will take about 5 hours tomorrow beginning at 7:30 AM. I kept telling the girls at work that I would get my hair plated (your natural hair is braided/twisted with synthetic hair), so this is the weekend. As I was looking at my calendar I realized that I don’t have that many free weekends left with traveling to go visit my brother in Nairobi, the girls in Rwanda and perhaps Jason/Megan in Tanzania, so this was the weekend for plating. I will use what they call princess hair the color of coffee brown (like the color of black coffee basically) and get my hair in the style twist. Basically my red hair will be intermingled with a dark brown color for about the span of 3 weeks depending on how fast my hair grows and how quickly my mzungu hair makes the synthetic hair slip out. I am excited because I have always wondered what I would look like with different color hair and this is a chance to kind of see it without dying my hair (I’m pretty sure my mom would kill me if I dyed my hair, not to mention the countless fans of redheads ☺). SO that should be fun/painful/interesting.
Another thing I have kept saying I will do but have failed to follow through is meet Julie Buster’s friends who have been doing missions here in Kampala. Now as I have passed the 2 months left mark I figured I should make this happen, so I will meet Loring and Dan Morris with their 3 sons tomorrow for lunch. This should be fun to just connect with a family, but I know that it will also make me miss my own sister with her 2 kids and my nephew who I have yet to meet. I am excited to hang out with some kids who aren’t afraid of my white skin. Though, recently I was able to hold this little girl (about 7 months) for like 20 mins and she only cried when I began to sit down. Because there aren’t diapers here though I was definitely peed on (here it’s called sou sou… kinda cute don’t you think). But it was so fun to connect with this little baby girl, but I hated having to hold her during the immunization as the nurse at first tried to stick her with an empty needle, so we had to do it twice. Then I was elected to hold her older sister for a measles immunization. That girl was bigger and therefore had a bigger bladder and therefore I had an even bigger pee circle on my apron. Apparently if a kid pees on you here they say you will have that gender kid, so I guess I’m in for twin girls though I always imagined myself as the mother of a bunch of boys… only time will tell I guess.
At work I have settled into the much slower pace and I take the free time to read books written by Ugandan and Kenyan authors (some great and fairly inexpensive novels) or talk about culture with my co-workers. I have started my independent study and I really need to be doing more work on that during my down times at work, but it is just hard to get motivated at times.
I’ve had a good amount of Wheaton students come through my house and stay. Recently Breanne Wroughton came through after a retreat we had with my advisor in southwestern Uganda (though I think I already wrote about this). About a week, maybe 2 later Meghan Quigg and Deanna Shippe came through my house as well. They are currently studying just outside of Kampala at the Uganda Christian University in Mukono. It was so interesting to compare our experiences (they are living in a dorm) with friendships and families, etc… We stayed up until about 1:30 just talking and it was a blast to get to talk about our shared experiences at Wheaton and now our experiences here in Uganda. I was a bit more excited about going back to Wheaton after our time together, but mostly I’m still a bit freaked out. One of the things that freak me out is the weather. I am so hot all the time here and to switch to having to wear hats, scarves and gloves seems like a shock to my system every time I even think about it. I also wonder what social dynamics will look like as so many of my roommates from last year have graduated. I know that I still have a lot of friends at Wheaton, and probably even more new ones to make, it will just be different and sometimes different is scary. Another huge fear is the whole timeliness thing. I am about 15 minutes late to work every day and I have just gotten used to the rhythm of not having to be so on time with life and waiting for thigns more. Having to be on time to class and just generally having a more structured schedule will be a huge switch. I have really appreciated adapting to things here some and I know that Wheaton is just a whole different world. Then beyond that I have med school to start thinking about and it’s all just a bit crazy!
I would appreciate your prayers as many of these things can overwhelm my mind. Pray that I would continue to be present here and just cherish every moment instead of letting my mind fill with worries about my future next semester, in the next 5 years and even beyond that. So many of the things I’m learning I feel like need to become rules in my life that I follow for the rest of my life. For example as I think about how to live incarnationally and the downsides of living on a compound to really achieve this I want to make rules for myself like never live on a compound if I live overseas in the future, or think about not hiring house help or just a bunch of stuff like that. I don’t think that God works like this, I think that lifestyles depend on so many things and he doesn’t condemn those who are living on compounds or those who have house help. It’s just that I can get really wrapped up in what my future may look like that I then think baaaaahhhhh how am I going to live out this faith. This is definitely a question we need to wrestle with, but we also just need to live in the present and take one day at a time, living reflectively in the moment and intentionally as we move towards the future. God did not make us to worry about the future or regret the past, but rather to live in the moment as all of creation is being reconciled to him in the here and now. There is an already and a not yet aspect of the Kingdom of God, but these are simultaneously being worked out in the right now of life. So please pray that I could let go of some of these big questions and leave them for another day years down the road where they belong, and instead live intentionally in the here and now just cherishing every day and moment reflecting on what God is trying to teach me today.
OK again, I have digressed to topics more deep and reflective than this was intended to be, but I’m telling you it’s the mosquito net (and probably that cup of coffee that I had about 5:30 today in town… oops). So next Wednesday I head to Rwanda on a bus to visit Kendall and Breanne. I anticipate that we will also visit a genocide memorial which I have heard can be very intense. Please pray that I will be affected by what I see and that I will better connect with their experiences by visiting them. I will have about 3 weeks here in Kampala before heading out again to go visit my brother in Nairobi and perhaps the interns in Tanzania. Then I have another 3 weeks or so before I again board a bus to Nairobi, but this time I won’t be coming back to Kampala but headed to the states. This is a really hard thing to think about as I feel like I haven’t been here that long, but I also know that God has other things in store for me in the States. I am looking forward to seeing people there, it is just with great sadness that I leave my community here. So that’s my life of late in a nutshell. I hope to post pics of my new hairstyle on facebook soon.

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