Sunflowers

On Saturday the 4th, I went out to a village with Heidi. Heidi works with the woman’s ministry here and goes out to different villages nearly every day to teach them. I tagged along to see what she does, visit another village, and be around Africans. That particular day she was teaching them about greed, which is a difficult thing to teach here for multiple reasons. There were about 15 women there and that was a pretty decent number. Heidi taught her lesson and Beatrice translated for her. She has different translators for the various regions since there are so many languages spoken around here. I didn’t have much interaction with the ladies she taught because just after she finished they brought us our food for us to eat by ourselves. In some areas around here the custom is to leave the visitors to eat privately so that they do not feel embarrassed to eat as much as they want. In other areas, the hosts will join the visitors… just varies. Although I wasn’t there long, I really enjoyed the morning. The drive out to the village was beautiful… completely indescribable. There were fields of huge sunflowers. Heidi and I decided to trudge through a muddy field with lots of underbrush to get to the field that was just across from the church. I fell, walked out of mu shoe because it stuck in mud, and we were both covered in needles from one of the plants in the underbrush we trudged through. Pretty much it was all for a picture, but it was fun. We definitely provided entertainment for the Ugandans that watched us wondering what the mzungus were doing. It was also a great morning getting to spend time with another teammate and get to know her better. Relationships with team members are beginning to deepen and I am very thankful to be part of a really great team.
More falling geckos… last week at our community ladies’ Bible study two geckos suddenly fell from the wall and landed on Melissa’s head. She immediately jumped up because she didn’t know what it was. One of the geckos clung onto her long hair as she swung it around trying to get it out. Eventually they both scattered away and we refocused on our study. You never know what’s gonna come falling down on you or flying at you or crawling on you or what you’re gonna step in here… kind of a metaphor for life here, too.