Michaels house and Welcome Home!!

Over the course of the last three days we have worked, visited orphaned babies, and experienced heaps of different emotions. Thursday and Friday were both days of work in the village of hope. We slopped more poo on the walls (applied more render to the houses) and finally laid the pipes in the trenches that the men have been digging, but the big event was completing the farmer’s house. The farmer and his family moved into their newly completed house on Thursday with much excitement.

Our new home!!!

Ready for our furniture!

        

We visited the AIDS baby orphanage early on Saturday morning. We enjoyed a tour from the director, Mandy, and we were able to see the loving homes these kids are now able to live in. We all broke off into different groups and went to play with the different age groups. Some of us went across to a big field where the older kids were playing. We loved seeing the smiles on their faces as we kicked the soccer ball, threw the Frisbee, and just played with them. Another group went to the ‘toddlers.’ These kids were beautiful, extremely co-operative, and they loved playing with us. The third group was in the babies’ room.  Some of these poor babies had some sort of deformity or were very sick.  It was great too see that they were in good hands.                  
…..A post written by Sam Staunton…

A big challenge that we are still faced with, is trying to get the container that was sent from Australia 6 months ago released!  The law has changed here in Uganda and containers are taxed on the value listed on the manifest.  This means that they want to tax us around $13500.00!!  We have had 2 meetings now with our local MP (one in Kampala and one here at his home in Jinja) but are still in negotiations.  The President will be in the region next week and if we could get an audience with him, he may authorize tax exemption.  The other avenue our MP is following, is to get the customs department to ‘re-value’ the cargo and so drastically reduce the tax.  We would appreciate all your prayers.

Pray too for the team, as we continue to adjust to life here in Africa, and as we get involved with Ugandans in many different ways in the next week….