Peace at Last

A little over 5 weeks of school holiday came to an end yesterday and the children returned to school today. The village is remarkably peaceful when they are not here! The mamas and mzungus don't make a lot of noise between them.

The holiday time has really been a great time to spend time with the children doing all manner of things. Sometimes its what they want to do, more often they want to tag along with what we are doing or at least do what they want to do in our presence. Occasionally that can be useful as they will very happily go and get that tool that you need or move the ladder from here to there as required. On other occasions it can lead to trouble as well, as when I was working with some spouting for the new house, making up the corner pieces, and a group of the boys were taking it in turns to drill and rivet. After a while there came a cry from one boy, "Uncle Ron, look what . . . is doing!" . . . had taken an offcut of the spouting and was "drawing" with it along the side of my car.

Anne spent many an hour in the admin block with children reading, drawing, colouring, doing jigsaw puzzles, drawing on a blackboard, learning words and numbers and letters. Both her and Trudi, our visitor, gave the one sewing machine a good workout, mending clothes and even making a few new items.

The highlight though of the holidays came last week on Monday when we finally opened the newly arrived container. If you haven't been following this saga, the container left Lilydale in September and arrived here in Jinja Customs Bond yard in mid January. Unfortunately it has taken this long to get the official documents from the government here to have the import taxes waived. But a little over a week ago, on Friday 13th May, we finally got approval to collect the container. We then had to wait to open it until Monday so that a customs inspector could check its contents. The arrival and opening provided much excitement for the children, and then the work began of unloading it.

There was a huge range of things in the container, but those that brought most excitement to the children were the bicycles and the slide.


I, on the other hand, have had a lot of fun looking through the boxes of old tools that have come, thinking of all of the times that I could have used that, or that, or how good it is to finally have one of those.

Also in the container was a very very large number of items of clothing of all shapes and sizes. Anne, Jane and Christine, with a few others have almost completed the mammoth task of sorting them. Some are ready for the children, some will be modified to fit the children, and some will be given to various people in the community to bless them.


The container also included building materials from a house that some hard working people demolished back in July in Wandin. Soon they will be put to use in constructing roofs for houses here as well as providing some of the bathroom fittings for the nearly completed guest house.


The children and all associated with the village here want to say a huge "Thank You" to everybody who donated goods and / or time and / or money to get this container here. It is a huge blessing, not just to the village, but the whole community.