Daily Life for Wendy

I usually get up around 7am or maybe just before.  If the power is on, I make coffee from the electric pot, or if it’s off, I boil water for instant.  Then I wake up the girls while Aaron wakes up Micah.  If the power is on, I turn on the heater to warm up bath water (every other day J).  If it’s off, I boil extra water for coffee and bath.  We have a bathtub, but water is scarce, so we never fill it.  We have a pitcher that we fill with half hot, half cold (we have a British water system, so they have one cold one hot and you have to mix it yourself—that’s one area where the Americans have the British beat—I love our combo water taps!)

Then, I make breakfast.  On Monday kids have cold cereal, milk and juice.  On Tuesdays, we make a fried egg on store bought white bread thing called Love Toast because I butter both sides of the bread and cut out the middle with a heart shaped cookie cutter.  That’s Emma Shae’s favorite day and she has been known to cry if we switch the routine.  Sometimes I can’t go to town on Monday and get it, so it gets bumped to another day!  On Wednesdays we have cold cereal again.  On Thursdays, we have a boiled egg and cinnamon toast that I make in the oven on homemade bread.  Fridays usually back to cold cereal and then Aaron makes pancakes on Saturdays and sometimes if we have instant oatmeal from the U.S., Sundays are oatmeal days.

After I fix breakfast and while Aaron is polishing Emma Shae’s shoes black (they have inspection every morning of shoes, nails and general “smartness”), I get the snack ready for the 10am break time at school.  We fill their water bottles. Water has to be filtered and we have a bucket that we fill with tap water and then we let it drip into a container with a tap.   I also make lunch—they used to eat the lunch there until recently there were bean weevils that the Ugandan kids knew to pick out and the kitchen staff didn’t report.  Leslie wrote a letter and the principal dealt with it, but it was too late for our kids, so now they pack a lunch.

Then I stay on the kids to finish breakfast, brush teeth, make sure their uniforms, hankies, erasers and backpacks are all fixed and ready to go. Micah and Emma Shae meet the Hines on the road to be picked up for school—our mini bus stop.  Then I hurry to take my bath before the staff comes.  Then I rush around gathering things like clothes and laundry basins, etc. for Grace to do laundry.  She and Precious come at 8:30 am.  On Wednesdays, Christian used to come also, but recently we hired Grace to wash clothes only.  Christian is a student that we hired to help out with school fees—it was temporary but became permanent.    I write out a grocery list and an extra duty list for Precious.  She cleans the house, but I have added some baking and food prep or shopping to her duties since I started home schooling Mallory.  Ugandan is not a baked goods country, but I trained Precious to bake bread and I have found she can bake almost anything I can teach her except tortillas for some reason.  I also gather the days lunch money and set it out—cash only, which sometimes I have to scrounge around for small change.  It is customary to provide lunch—usually you would have people cooking the lunch, but I tried that and it was very cumbersome.  You would have to have an outside kitchen and another staff person, which we don’t have and I try not to have Precious staying all day because it’s not peaceful to have a full house.  Our house is pretty big for Uganda, but it’s small for me and I am not used to have having house help all day.

At 8:30am, we greet Grace and Precious and discuss the day.  Greetings are very important.  We ask each other how we are, how was the night, how are the family members and so on.  On Wednesdays we pray together and then start.  Usually once or twice a week, this time is interrupted by Sunday Thomas who comes around selling vegetables that foreigners like—broccoli, leeks, spring onions, red cabbage, herbs like cilantro, dill and parsley.  We used to get a lot more people dropping by asking for money or help with things, but they don’t come so much anymore.

Then I try to remember to eat breakfast, read the Bible and gather Mallory’s things for home schooling.  If we don’t do that, we do it in the afternoon.  We might have a tea or visitors or have to do town shopping.  Recently, I was meeting once a week with Leslie and our German friend Stephanie to watch a TV show called Top Chef.  That was fun!  Mallory’s school usually takes a couple of hours.  At 10am the guys who work outside come and we stop and greet them and discuss the days work.

Sometimes I send Precious to town with a list.  Often I have to go myself.   We have a small fridge and we have irregular power, so we usually have to shop daily.  Also, we are an outpost town, so things have to come from Kenya and Kampala and we don’t always have the same grocery items, so we check daily in case something good comes in.   I usually go to the post office, the vegetable market and two supermarkets.  We don’t have recycling and have to burn our rubbish, so we also keep a bag of things that don’t burn well—bottles and such and I take in to the city dumpster.  I usually go to the ATM once a week since this is a cash society.

Then I come home and make lunch and start on dinner prep.  We have to bleach our vegetables, so that takes planning and time—20 minutes to bleach and then a thorough rinsing in filtered water—I have trained Precious to do that also, if I remember and have the items ready.  She typically leaves at lunchtime, which is 1pm.  Aaron comes home around this time.    Everything is made from scratch, including sauces, so it all takes planning and thinking ahead.  I try to do things the day before, but it doesn’t always work out.  We also have a tiny sink, so we spend a lot of time doing dishes.  Then I try to have lunch and read and I try to have a nap because town is over stimulating and tiring .  People are always coming up to you or calling out to you and driving is tricky—my friend once told me they learn in driving school to look 360!  Boy is that true—you are navigating large trucks as we are the road to Congo and Rwanda and also people from the even more remote villages stock up in our town.  Also, there are people everywhere and at any given time herds of goats or cattle.  Large groups of school kids are there in the morning, at lunch and at 5pm. 

At about 10 minutes to 5pm, I go and pick up kids from school—I am the evening car pool driver.  Then we come home and finish making dinner.  Wednesdays we watch a little show—right now we are watching Little House on the Prairie which can be good or quite depressing.  Once, the kids went through Liberty’s Kids about the Revolution.  On Sunday evenings we always watch a nature program.  Then, if the power is on, we heat the water and give baths or we heat up kettle water if the power is off.  We try to spend time reading before bed, girls go at 8pm and Micah goes at 8:30 or 9pm.  Aaron and I either read or watch a movie or a TV series in the evenings.  Sometimes we are in a time of prayer, like right now praying about our future.   Two Mondays a month, I go to a meeting with the university staff spouses and we study the Bible and pray together.  Afterwards, there is always tea and bananas and talking, but the university gate closes at 8pm and we live right outside the gate.  For awhile, Aaron and were switching off on Wednesday s going to the

staff fellowship meetings, but that got interrupted and we are having a hard time going back.  It is awesome, but we are usually pretty tired by the time we get back.  Also, in the evenings once a week, Clement comes by to sell vegetables that foreigners like or we get visitors.  People typically eat at 8pm or later here and their house help is cooking the meal—people have live in house help.  So, visiting comes between 5-7pm or sometime around that window.  On most nights, we go to bed between 10 and 11pm. 

Also, we try to have regular times out with the Hines either home dates or we drive to the lake and eat a meal at the Belgian hotel on the lake. Once we had Americana night—hamburgers, fries and queso and we watched The Avengers.  It took 3 days to gather ingredients and to make the meal and we put all the media in our car and drive it up—TV, converter and computer to play the movie.  We just laugh how that would be such a simple date night in the U.S., but here it was a big event—worth every effort. 

The rest of the time is interwoven with various unexpected events.  The power and water outs consume a lot of time and effort to work around those disruptions.   The kids are home for a whole month or two in between terms, so that brings a new routine and often travel plans.  We spend a lot of time with cultural differences, good or bad.  It is a very slow paced, relational life here, so we spend a lot of time talking and listening and observing.  This past Sunday, a friend gave a sermon and talked about her first time on an airplane—no one had told her what to expect and she was by herself.  She thought she was going to die going over Lake Victoria and then the airports were busy, fast and confusing.  She experienced cross cultural differences both in Kenya and Amsterdam before arriving in the U.S.  It was comforting to share that cross cultural living is a challenge—even on the most basic levels because you don’t know what your questions are at times and the culture doesn’t even think about most of their living since they have been doing it since birth!

So, it’s hard to express what do I do all day.  And as I write this down, it sounds so simple, but it is busy and tiring!  I once read about the term “ebb and flow” from the Irish saints of old.  That flow eluded me in the U.S., but ironically, as I have pressed through the initial chaos and continue to have life experiences that put me deeper out of control of my own life, the ebb and flow has come naturally.  That has been especially true with Mallory coming home and managing that schedule in a culture that has a million interruptions.  I love it and am so thankful for that gift that God has given us!