Fathers Day was quiet, calm and dedicated to David - he chose our “programme” and we all tried to give him the down time he needs. He and Quinn exulted in a spirited game of “war” too, so it wasn’t all quiet time!

N and Q prepared lists of their favorite things to do with Dad.

From Naomi: - Read Narnia with all the voices - Huggle - watch movies - cuddle to sleep - read Yugio
Naomi says the best thing about Dad is that “he is kind and fun” and “cool but weird” and the strangest thing about Dad is that ” he works on a computer all day.”

From Quinn: - snuggle - play war - eat together - watch movies - play chess - read Yugio and Captain Underpants - Just BE with him!
Quinn says the best thing about dad is that “he’s nice to be with” and “he’s like my best friend. No comment on the strangest thing about dad!

Happy Father’s Day to the daddy of my kids!

Since we’re still ages away from having very many families that can afford to educate their own children at university, Christ School depend heavily on the quota system to continue the education of our O/B’s and O/G’s (alumni) past the secondary level. Fortunately Uganda’s Ministry of Education is looking at changing the quota system to help poor and poor-performing districts such as Bundibugyo. Right now merit quota are distributed based on academic qualifications, with most qualifiers being from Kampala and several other wealthy districts. Hard for our students to compete with those whose parents can afford a much lower teacher to student ration and far better facilities and books. In future, we hear that while the merit quota spots will still most likely stay in the hands of wealthy districts, we in Bundibugyo can expect to get a greater percentage of the need-based quota spots, to make up for our lack of merit.

We want to just be successful any way you look at it but for now we’ll take what we can get. Bundibugyo is one of the last-performing districts in Uganda for education. A place where girl-children are routinely pulled from secondary schools to be given in early marriage ( a much better financial deal for the parents; they make money on the dowry rather than shelling it out on the fees!). Quota helps our students immensely - and we pray for many of our students to be among those scoring well enough to qualify.

In the interest of offering our students some extracurricular joys, some opportunities to learn beyond the mind-numbing Ugandan academic curriculum: we offer Clubs. Meeting twice a month on Friday nights, Clubs draw in staff as coordinators and students as avid attenders - enjoying their much-needed break from the daily evening preps. We have math and science clubs, stitching and knitting clubs, drama and music clubs. The night air pulses with the hum of happy students - enjoying their gifts.

This year we felt N and Q were old enough to join the fun and they did not disappoint us, hanging out with us all until 10 pm and exulting in the attention of their Ugandan friends who were quick to invite them in to the fun. Quinn (with David as back up ) played a spirited game of chess with Nkojo while Naomi stitched a beautiful embroidered flower and later began to learn how to crochet a border. Many thanks to Elaine, who donated all the crafting materials for the stitching club.

Tonight another student meal was ruined (inadvertently, we hope) by the kitchen staff - each time we’re sort of, but not quite sure, exactly what all the factors in the disaster are. But we know we have disappointed our students, that we have not served them well, and our hearts are sad. This term has been so full of cooking mistakes that we begin to feel we are testing our student’s patience . . . . Provoking them to anger . . . The very thing we warn our teachers not to do.

Each sound of grouping students calling, chanting or yelling brings me to the door, waiting to hear what is happening. I feel that we are living on edge, waiting for crisis. I have a very real sense of the danger of crowds, of groups and the quickness of people to turn against those they have previously known and cared for.

We need to persevere - there will be a solution to this problem, as there has been to many before it. We will find a way to end this year with students who are well fed . . . We just haven’t seen it yet.

I feel that food is an easy battleground for the enemy. It is full of symbolism; the idea of plenty, of being cared for, nurtured and of thriving more than merely surviving. For many years Christ School has been known for good feeding so it breaks our hearts to think we are letting our students down now. Just like our own children, we recognize that our students need food to grow their brains and bodies, need food to concentrate, need food to keep their moods stable despite the challenges of growing up. Pray for our food to be a blessing.

The price of rise here has nearly double since last year as have other food that we serve regularly to so many - so pray too for our food to be multiplied to serve those we have committed to feed and pray for the regular monthly funding that we need so desperately for the school, to come in. We’re already having trouble keeping up with staff salaries and food costs and with the prices rising so high we will struggle still more.

Happy voices babble on the circular steps of my front porch. I catch three, then four languages joining in a mixture of communication - the incorrect lisps of baby mouths somehow add beauty to all. These children give me my best chance yet at improving my Lubwisi; only children naturally include so much repetition and such a narrow use of grammar and vocabulary. Only these staff children mix their Lubwisi with English, helping me to translate what I don’t understand. Theirs is a simple Lubwisi, the kind I can sometimes speak. Naomi too has suddenly begun to speak Lubwisi, seeing the reason for it as she expands into African friendships. She has an irritating tendency to repeat the few phrases she knows over and over and over both to her friends and at home, to me. Her way of releasing the frustration of knowing so few words. But each day her knowledge will grow, I pray. We have to curtail our African English at home too - I find myself responding, as I bathe the children, “American English, please!” much the way I used to require an “indoor voice.”

As a beautiful Saturday morning starts with general cleaning at the school it flows into an afternoon of sports, handcrafts and conversation. The staff children and my own, join on our porch to help me prepare bugwanimbe, soya beans - edamame! Later they eat their naturally packaged snack (it arrives in the pod!) eagerly, sharing from a communal bowl with Naomi and Quinn. Staff kids, unlike our former village friends, eat regularly and are not compelled to snatch any food in sight. They make better sharers of the communal bowl.

Weddings happen often in my yard, enacted by the various sibling groups who make up our staff families; brothers marry sisters quickly and easily with most of the attention given to their finery. The single trunk I keep on the front porch, chock full of dress-up items from hats to shades to many simple but shimmery pieces of cloth, keep my children and their friends satisfied day after day. They erect homes, lay out gardens, build fires over the usual three stones and dig their own pit latrines for sanitation. All this using cloth and some much-worn clothing. Children are amazing.

I spend the morning making granola and yogurt so that tomorrow, Sunday we will rest and enjoy good foods, nurturing our bodies for the week ahead. Quinn picks basil leaves from his school’s garden and Naomi helps me prepare two batches of pesto; the perfect close to our endless summer days is pasta with fresh sauces.

David leaves early most mornings to walk around at the morning preps (homework time in the classrooms) checking for the teachers on duty and monitoring noise levels. After a full day of accounting, project management, team building and problem solving, he is out again each evening, checking the food line for quality, checking on evening preps. Students finally quiet down for the night at around 10 pm (which is when we leave it up to dorm staff to handle conflicts or disruption at night.) Students begin their day again at 6:30 with the optional morning preps, but we hear students even earlier, running around the track that circles our football pitch. Quinn is becoming slowly used to his dad’s erratic schedule, the constant comings and goings made very bearable by David’s rarely leaving the school compound. It’s nice to know that He is always within a few minutes walk, that someone can call him quickly if we ever really need him.

So we pass through our days; eating, laughing and sleeping together, joining forces to combat the problems of over-full latrines and lack of access to water. Living with this close community is a beautiful thing in so many ways - watching young people discover new joys every day, watching them become young men and women that they never would have been outside our fences. Yet there is a tension here, a constant realization of the threat of crowd discontent. Noises from students are a the ever-present meter of happiness. Some nights we stand on our porch listening to the volume and deciding whether to dive back into the fray that is student staff relationships. And it is a fray, for all of us. Tiring to be sure, and overwhelming. It’s hard enough to be parents to two - 350 is quite over the top for us and all the other staff who sometimes need parenting too. Yet we are adjusting slowly but surely to living out our lives in the place we have been called to.

How would you like these cuddly critters for your neighbors?! We share a front yard with two rabbit houses - each house holds about 25 bunnies - all of which are prodigiously producing, of course.

Naomi and Quinn like to hold these cute, furry friends - especially the babies, one of whom we have named Sniffles and another, Small.

Kizitu is pictured - our faithful rabbit keeper. He works for Master Alex, one of our agriculture teachers who also helps with sustainability in the farms and animal projects. Kizitu arrives in our front yard around 7 each morning to open the tarp walls of the houses and give the rabbits their first meal of abundant jungle vines. Kizitu finally finishes his rabbit care for the day around 6, after several trips to bring rabbit greens fresh from the bush and clean up after the rabbits.

Have you ever heard a rabbit scream? It’s an awful sound and one we don’t hear so very often. The rabbits scream when they are taken from their cages for immunizations - they don’t like them very much. They also don’t like being carried. People here carry rabbits by their ears, just like they carry chickens by their feet. The rabbits stay nice and still while being carried this way; they look calm but I’m thinking they’re just afraid their ears may rip off if they move!

Sadly these are not pets - in fact Naomi and Quinn are sometimes served rabbit meat for school lunches! ( just don’t tell them that’s what they’re eating!) Rabbits are a source of reproducible and hopefully sustainable meat production for our staff and eventually students. So we love these rabbits for a little while but we don’t get too attached. CSB’s rabbit farm and other sustainable farm projects were started with seed money from the Global Fund for Children.

It was a lazy day here at Christ School. Students enjoyed morning fellowship (aka church) in the assembly hall then gathered for their afternoon movie and lunch. Football and volleyball filled out the day.

Gunfire erupted briefly late afternoon, sending students (some of whom have lost one or both parents to rebels) running for tall grasses and other shelters. Their dark bodies in reds and blues, hiding, reminded me of the sadness of growing in violent places. Students here don’t need drills, they know them. Hide quickly and quietly. Hide well. Interviewing one of our sponsored orphans yesterday, I learned that at age 11 he lost both of his parents and two of his three sisters in a single day . . . . They were in their gardens trying to dig up food when the rebels found them, five years ago.
These days we are not facing rebels, though. Turns out this gunfire was from police, firing over the heads of a mob that had gathered, intent on shedding the blood of a goat thief, just caught. Police saved his life with their two volleys and took him off to jail as the disappointed crowd dispersed. Weekends in town (now that we live so close to the central market) are always an adventure when men drink and smoke local drugs, prostitution abounds, and the simple violence of heavy fists is always near at hand - there is little more terrifying than watching a young boy head-beaten (literally, they beat people with the force of their heads!) by the unreasonably and senselessly angry man he has just stolen from.

Interns have arrived; in a splash-landing on Monday into our rain-soaked airstrip. In the land of endless sun and rain patterns, it’s harder to find American-style seasonal markers. Interns are the first sign of summer for us - young, enthusiastic, ready and willing for almost anything, eager for adventure. Interns are the people who will ride home from the airstrip in the back of a pickup in the pouring rain despite how soaked they are, simply to EXPERIENCE MORE. And this surely a place to experience more - more beauty, more wildness, more sadness, more dancing and laughter - than many of us have seen before.

So these three young people; Katie, Jesse and Nick, have joined us for a summer of MORE. More adventures and experiences for them and more fullness in our lives. They usher in new cycles of life for us seasoned team members as they enter rounds at the hospital, sports at CSB and science experiments at RMS (our little mission school for our kids.) Summer is a time of heightened busyness and heightened enjoyment. We usually end it exhausted, but for now, we are in the beginning of the rush, enjoying getting to know these new people, watching them enter the highs and lows of life here, seeing this world through their fresh eyes, and letting them bless us through their unique selves.

Interns also offer simple practical helps - such as child care for team kids during adult meeting time, once a week. Our kids arrived for pizza, post-team meeting full of jumps, screams and laughter - new young people mean new listening ears, new stories, new skills to learn and new math problems to solve. For our children, interns are a pure gift and one that we, their parents thank God for each day.

Equally important is the impact they will have on the community. Our interns will complete surveys and do research which will enlighten both them and us and perhaps lead to new opportunities for long term ministries. They will solve problems we didn’t know we had as they enter food distributions and classrooms. They will see the poorest of the poor and the way we, the rich here, have learned to live in a foreign land. They will watch children growing ( or not) with the severest of malnutrition and see our children thrive on milk, bread, and meat that us mission moms struggle daily to feed them in the abundance that their bodies truly need. They will make judgments and feel anger. They will weep and feel deep compassion. Then they will rejudge, re-weep and reconsider. They will end their summers more unsure of everything than when they began.
Through it all they will see Jesus and through them Jesus will be seen. Sometimes in ways that we anticipate and plan for and many more times in the oddest of times and the most surprising of places. And perhaps through these experiences the whole trajectory of their lives will be changed, so that they will go on to live lives which change tens and hundreds and thousands of other lives, for eternity. Pray for them.

We had two suspensions today - discipline for students who, during the excitement of Saturday night’s meal issues, frankly verbally threatened or disrespected staff members.
School continued with the break of a holiday yesterday to celebrate Ugandan Martyrs Day. We had not planned any real activities for the students’ day off, so kids milled around playing football, volleyball and washing clothing or cleaning their sleeping areas, then went to watch a movie in the afternoon. I decided to try to contribute what little I could to a spirit of festivity so I headed to the girls compound where a few girls were assembled in the small kitube (like a gazebo). I held precious cargo, 12 rainbow colors of fingernail polish. I started with about ten girls which quickly grew to twenty then forty and eventually the whole school full of girls, about 120. When you count fingers and toes that’s an awful lot of nails and I was a painting machine, best valued for my unique designs, color on color.

As I looked around at the nail polish volumes being used up, suddenly I was afraid that I would lose one of the colors I love (silly maybe, but fancy toe nails are one of my indulgences of womanhood - I love them.) Though running out of polish is hard to do - we managed, slowly, to almost run out . . . . But I was praying as I painted, “God, please let these bottles flow like the cruz of oil in Elijah’s day, to bless many girls with beauty and color.” God was faithful - he often does miracles of multiplication here. And God also allowed me to release something that, though small, was precious to me. Sometimes it’s easier to release our physical safety or our security than it is to release something small that we really treasure. But I think giving what we value most is true love.

Today I sat in a meeting to suspend one of our sponsored orphans, counseling her guardian to help her back on the straight and narrow path that will lead to a better future for her. As this girl first protested, then cried, pleaded, then turned to sullen silence, I laid my hand on her leg and reminded her of her gifts. “You are a natural leader, you are bright, beautiful, and you have already come so far. Don’t throw away your future. Learn from this mistake. Be humble, accept the prayers and the counsel of us your teachers and grow stronger.” As her shoulders heaved in unhappy reluctance, her fingers came down almost on mine and I recognized the brilliant pink of those fingernails and the three horizontal lines that are one of my signature designs. Perhaps that beauty will help her time at home to pass with the knowledge that we are for her, not against her. I pray that her heart is not too hard, her soul too heavily guarded, for our love to get through.

2 Pierce children, sleeping in late after their three days with the Masso family

5 staff members, showing up in our living room by eight

350 students, assembling at 8:30 to voice their grievances; to listen and to be heard

100 students, staying on in the assembly hall for the weekly “fellowship” church service

1 David, preaching (by surprise - who knew he was the guest speaker?) to said students

20, big boys gently mocking the service from the back row

1 Annelise, getting in their faces

6 adorable staff kids showing up to play dress-up on our front porch after lunch

2 team leaders coming to lend moral support

25 boys, girls and staff playing volleyball with the novice annelise while all around students kick footballs, jump rope, read, study, chat and giggle

100s of hacking coughs from the my still thick-with-yuk chest

2 meals eaten by David in the student meal line — waiting patiently for his portion of sticky cahunga with beans; checking for quality and quantity, listening for complaints.

3 staff members, David included, “on duty” for the day, supervising students through their evening preps (homework)

Dozens and dozens of dishes, washed and dried and put back away

2 meals, cooked from scratch and eaten with gusto

1 frog hopping through my kitchen as I finished evening dishes in the almost-dark
1 scorpion, hiding among the goods in my pantry as I returned things to their places

1 ice-cold shower in the coldness of the African night - somehow fortifying me for the day ahead

And I hope, I pray, that hundreds of prayers are going up for all of us who live in this place . . . . .