Rafting the NILE!

Yep, that's right. I got to raft the Nile last week! SO cool!

We went to Uganda for a regional prayer retreat with other people from our company that live in various places in East Africa. It was a great week because not only did we get to go to the retreat but we got to do so many extra things as well! God is good and definitely knows how to bless me with good friends that I get to see all over the world. Alyssa and I stayed in Kampala the first night with our friend Carolyn, then went to Jinja for rafting and the prayer retreat, then back to Kampala to stay with Carolyn a few more nights.

First up, a visit with my aunt Janet and uncle Steve! They were in Kampala the week before I got there and were leaving the night I got there. I got to spend four hours with them, which was wonderful. Thank you both for encouraging me and praying for me. And shout out to my cousins Will and Cara--thanks for the magazine and chocolate!

 My favorite British aunt and uncle

 We had to get up REALLY early to ride the bus from Kampala to Jinja to go rafting. Can you tell we're excited?!

 WC stands for water closet aka bathrooms. HA! How great is this?!

 You know you're getting too close with someone when you accidentally bring the same outfit from South Sudan to raft in. Three people asked us if we were twins...what? Clearly not. If you look closely you can see the Nile river behind us. We spent about 4 hours rafting and the minute we finished it started raining! Rafting was great--the perfect mix of fun and terrifying when the rapids made our raft flip. 

 We spent the night at a hostel in Jinja. We were a liiiiiitle cramped, as you can see. Also sunburned, but it was for a good cause :)

This was down the street from where we stayed. What's wrong with this picture?

Nairobi!

Due to the whole mess of South Sudan's new travel laws, Alyssa and I unexpectedly got three extra days in Nairobi this weekend! Our whole team was going to Uganda for a prayer retreat with other missionaries, but if we had stuck with our original itinerary and left on Tuesday we would have to overnight in Juba, which would have made us miss the plans we had in Uganda before the prayer retreat starts on Friday. This was originally super frustrating but God knows better than we do and He turned the whole thing around and now because we had to make all new plans to leave Sudan at the last minute, we got to go to Nairobi three days early and see friends!

We stayed the night with three girls who are doing their two-year Journeyman term here in Nairobi. I know Emily and Ester from FPO and Alyssa was friends with the other Emily so it was wonderful how we each got to see friends! Alyssa and I will head to Uganda tomorrow and our plan is to go to Jinja to raft the Nile on Wednesday and go quad-biking on Thursday before the prayer retreat starts. This kind of thing is right up my alley and I am SO excited!

 Java House for dinner on Sunday night.

 Alyssa and Emily

 Me and Ester

KFC is the only American chain in Nairobi and it just opened a couple of months ago. Notice the African "tomato sauce" replacement for ketchup. NOT the same thing.

Blessed

Alyssa's dad and three men from her church are here for the world's quickest visit. South Sudan is coming up with as many pointless new travel laws as possible so between the new laws and the constant rain we've been having lately, their visit was getting less and less likely. But long story short, they made it here yesterday and it's been great to have them! A little part of me feels like it's my family visiting, too and it's been great to see Alyssa get to "show off" Toposaland to people she loves.

AND...I am on gift overload because not only did I get the rest of my own stuff (I only brought one suitcase with me to South Sudan and the rest of my bags stayed in Nairobi due to cargo restrictions on my flight) but I got a whole action packer full of American things from Cody, my mom, and Alyssa's family. I am normally not a gift person, but being so far away from anything remotely familiar has brought me to the point of almost crying when I opened an entire action packer full of cereal, coffee flavoring, seasoning packets, dried fruit, etc. Nothing special to anyone else, but it was a whole box of people caring enough to send me something. A whole box of thinking about what I might want. A whole box of remembering the things I like for breakfast and what kind of shampoo I use. A whole box of being thankful for things that I've never thought twice about before now. So wonderful.

I was going to take pictures but my camera is broken. Boo. But since all the best blog posts have pictures  I will leave you with the last pictures I took when my camera was still alive. We have the five cutest puppies you have ever seen. South African boerboel-Rhodesian ridgeback-rottweiler mix.

Pumpkin for a snack!

Haha, milk mustache!

My Day

There is no "typical day" here. I can't even think about what I usually do, because there is no usual for me yet. But I can write about today, and you can hopefully appreciate South Sudan a little bit more.

6:30am: Alyssa and I go for a walk hike through the mud. I've already been awake for almost an hour because of the birds that like to have a party as early in the morning as possible. Usually puts me in a bad mood and today was no exception. There are about 20 kids outside our gate when we leave. Exercise (aka walking somewhere with no reason) is an unexplainable concept to the Toposa, so we go through the same conversation every time.
-Where are you going?
-Uhhh, just over there. [hand motion toward the path]
-Why?
-Just to go.
-By your feet?
-Yes.
-[Laughter. We leave]
I decided during this walk that I needed to adjust my attitude because being that hostile so early in the morning was not going to set me up for a good day. For some reason I had the song I Will Follow You by Chris Tomlin stuck in my head while we were walking. I liked the song before, but I think I'm enjoying it less now that the "where you go, I'll go" part is a little more drastic.

9:45am: I started making bread to have later this week. This rainy season is not stopping so I was trying to take advantage of a sunny day. Last time I made dough bricks bread it was a disaster, but this time I did a better job and the yeast actually made the bread rise.

Late morning: Emails and reading on my Kindle while waiting on the dough to rise. A ginormous rat made an appearance running through the kitchen somewhere in this time frame. I almost vomited. The thing was huge. I don't do rats.

12:15pm: Lunch. Last week we bought the world's largest head of cabbage and we have been eating cabbage every day since then...and I think we're finally halfway through it. Lunch was coleslaw, lentils, passion fruit and a homemade tortilla. Rustic. The bread baking endeavor was a success, whew.

1:30pm: Carrie, Alyssa and I leave for Naskal to pick up the translator so Alyssa can tell an AIDS story and a gospel story in another village. We drive around Naskal and can't find him. A guy working at the clinic ran up to the car asking if we could take him to get the clinic vehicle since he needed to take a severely anemic child to the hospital. Of course we get stuck in the mud while trying to drive this guy to wherever the clinic vehicle was. Stuck in the mud means knee deep Sudanese mud, tires completely stuck. We had a winch to pull ourselves out with so 20 minutes and two uprooted trees later, we were good to go. Perfect picture opportunity but no camera.

3pm: We give up on finding our translator so we drive back to Paringa, stopping by another village on the way back.

3:45pm: Alyssa and I dig a trench in our yard for our shower to drain into. It's approximately one million degrees outside and at this point I can't remember a time before I started sweating. Bucket baths have never seemed so appealing. But then I remembered that I really did appreciate having a shower, and was okay with helping dig the mud pit drainage system so that the water won't back up into the shower.

5:30: Dinner prep begins. A healthy mix of carrot, eggplant, onion, cabbage (more!), and tomatoes sauteed in the skillet, successfully negated by a family sized box of Easy Mac. Yum.

YOU KNOW YOU LIVE IN SOUTH SUDAN WHEN...you ask "so, did you hear the bomb go off this morning?" and it's not a weird question. The UN likes to detonate bombs outside of Kapoeta so we hear them go off on a regular basis. Totally normal dinner conversation, right?

Where I Live

My tukel is a one-room concrete hut. Alyssa has her own tukel (the one with the blue door behind mine) and there is another tukel that teams stay in when they come.

Outdoor bathroom. Shower is on the right, and long drop outhouse is around the corner on the left. The water in the shower is one temperature (cold) but it feels good 90% of the time since it's usually pretty warm outside and will only get hotter as we get into January and February!

Mosquito nets are a must! Since there is no air conditioning it can make the bed a little stuffy, but it's better than getting malaria. I thought about moving the other bunk bed into the guest tukel but then I decided that it would be good shelf space. My action packer makes a pretty nice footstool. Most of my stuff is still in Nairobi but it's coming to South Sudan next week. Hopefully my tukel will start to feel less like a concrete room and more like home once I have all of my things.

Alyssa and I share the kitchen. We have a solar powered fridge, and a gas stove and oven so we haven't had any problems with cooking our food. There's no "dining room" obviously, so we eat on the porch. Samson is our ferocious guard dog who decided to take a short break to be in the picture. Everything has to be cooked from scratch unless we plan months ahead of time and bring it from Nairobi or request that volunteer teams bring things for us. We've made bread twice (once successfully, once needed some major work!) and tortillas several times. When Carrie and I were in Kapoeta on Tuesday we saw some people selling some really nice eggplants so we took advantage of the opportunity and I brought five home. Alyssa and I got creative and made lasagna with two of them. We cut the eggplant into slices and used them in place of lasagna noodles. Delicious!

One of the chickens decided that our porch was the place she absolutely had to lay her eggs. This is the second day we've found one on our couch. Yuck.

Our solar panel makes a nice yard decoration. It's been acting up lately so if any of you have any experience with solar power/batteries let me know! It would be nice to have enough power to get through an entire evening. It was working fine but the past few days we've woken up with no power stored in the batteries. I waited until the sun had been out for several hours before I started a load of laundry in the washing machine but it didn't even make it halfway through the cycle before the battery was drained again. Now I have the washer paused and I'm letting the batteries juice back up. Hopefully it will make it through the rest of the cycle by the end of the afternoon.

Clinic Update #2

The clinics are over and the team left for Beaumont, TX (via Kenya) this morning. It was really great having them here all week. I know Carrie and Shannon appreciated the English conversations and "normal" friendships even more than I did.

The last three clinic days were as successful as the first two, and we averaged around 300 patients per day. We implemented a new crowd control strategy that was new to the Toposa (to put it lightly). 99.9% of Toposa have never had to wait their turn in line and instead operate on the "let's all crowd around and see who can push their way to the front next" method. This was not only stressful to the group of Americans used to at least a few inches of personal space but it was also simply hard for the doctors to hear their patients with a million people standing there and talking. Our solution to this was to rope off an area around the trucks so that those who were waiting would be 20 or 30 feet away from those who were being treated. Of course the rope itself wasn't enough to keep them from ducking under it or keep them in any sort of order so two/three of us had to be the enforcers. The Toposa weren't thrilled with this new concept of following rules but we made it work with some creative methods. At one point I may have beat a guy with a stick but he hadn't understood my verbal explanation of why he couldn't just waltz underneath the rope ahead of all the women with sick babies. So we can cross "beat someone with a stick" off of my bucket list...

I'm also in the middle of perfecting the art of driving a land cruiser through the mud. It's rained pretty much every day so none of the dirt paths roads have had a chance to dry out. This makes for an interesting driving experience.

Thank you for praying for us this week! We had a five loaves and two fishes experience with the medicines that can only be explained by the Holy Spirit. Our original order of medicine from Nairobi didn't even get processed so we were scrambling at the last minute to find any medicine at all! The amount that we started with should not have lasted the entire week with the amount of people that we were seeing. Thank you Jesus for multiplying our medicine so that we had enough!

Clinic Update

Big time thanks to those who are praying for the clinics. Our first clinic was on Sunday in the village of Nataragat. It went pretty well (we mostly saw a lot of malaria cases, and one that we think has TB) and our plan was to have a clinic every day this week. Yesterday it POURED rain for hours so we couldn't go anywhere! When there are no paved roads every heavy rain turns dirt paths into mud pits. We are supposedly at the end of rainy season but it's rained at least 3 times in the last week and a half so I'm not convinced.

After it finished raining and the sun had been out for an hour or two we took the team on a walk to the nearest village by our compound. I was not really in the mood to go but I decided to go anyway, only because it was my only opportunity to not be the newest person there. I would actually know some of what was going on and be able to explain it to the others. It turned out to be a really nice visit and the team got to see a Toposa village and some even tried grinding sorghum...harder than it looks, people!

Today's clinic was definitely more interesting than the one on Sunday. We were in the village closest to us and had lots of needy people. Needy as in, just want us to give them anything and everything no matter if they are sick or not. But the Toposa are a hard people to love, and that's a whole 'nother blog post (or 12 blog posts) for later.

Be glad I did not take pictures today!!
One of the babies that we saw today, maybe a year old, had a giant infection in his neck, kind of behind his ear. I don't know what had happened originally but this morning he had a giant infected pocket of nasty crap that needed to be drained out. We hadn't brought a scalpel blade with us so Carrie and I drove home "quickly" to get one. One the way back we drove past the local clinic and got waved down by the workers there because a lady had been brought there with really bad angiodema and her tongue was so swollen that she couldn't close her mouth or talk or swallow. So we put her in the truck and I slipped and slid down the mud pit back to our clinic and we gave her an antibiotic injection as soon as we get there. I'm not sure what happened to her after that because I went straight to the operating room plastic chair to hold the baby's head while one of the doctors prepped him for surgery. Any by surgery, I mean we laid his head in my lap, wiped the area with an alcohol swab and betadine, injected the area with lidocaine, and made an incision big enough for us to drain the pus and blood out into my (gloved) hand. We didn't have any bandage tape so we put some antibiotic ointment on the incision, wrapped a gauze strip around the baby's head and I secured it with neon green duct tape, the next best thing. Sorry, I know all of that was a gross description, but it was part of my day. Swollen tongue, surgery in my hands, duct taping a baby.

Tomorrow we are going to a different village so you can pray that we will have enough of the right medicines and that the local Toposa believers will use their time at the clinics wisely and be able to share stories from God's word. I have also been dealing with an eye infection, but I think it's about over. Thank you for praying for our team!