Final Stretch

First Piki Ride!

Well it has been quite busy since most everyone left on Tuesday morning!  We started our day with a bang by heading to town to go visit Mama Irene at the hospital.  She has been in the hospital for a week and a half now and still has about a week to go.  From there we walked around town just looking around shops and markets, there are always a ton of people on the streets!  We also took this chance to take our first Piki ride home!( this is like a motorcycle taxi)  We were laughing the whole way, and most people were laughing at us because as girls we didn't sit side saddle so we looked like the men ha.  After lunch we headed into Namatala to spend some time with the kids. When we finally made it back home we ran into some of the IChooseYou walking home and decided to invite them in to work on homework, little did we know we had started a homework club!  We concluded our night with an awesome dance party outside.

Callie, Scott, Haley, and Christopher in the Kitchen

Wednesday started with me trying something new! The cook, Christopher, made us Mandazi for breakfast.  Mandazi is like sweet fried dough, and ours was flavored with a little bit of lemon.  I ate mine with a mixture of honey and cinnamon!  After breakfast Callie and I headed in to Namatala to help a little girl with a burn wound on her foot.  This was a less than pleasant experience.  The wound was infected so that required all of it to be cleaned off. The little girl's name is Gladys and she is just over two; she was quite the trooper despite being in extreme pain from the cleaning. After finishing up in Namatala we decided that it would be fun to try cooking!  So Callie, Christopher(the house cook), Scott(another american staying with us), and I went into the market to gather all of our ingredients.  Christopher did a great job showing us around the market and making sure we didn't get the "mzungu price" for our veggies. After we gathered our ingredients and spent some time at the coffee shop for internet, we went back to the house to start our experiment!  The meal actually turned out great! We had bow-tie pasta with red onion, eggplant, balsamic, tomato, olive oil, and garlic.  We followed our meal with an experimental dessert, fried cookie dough! Surprisingly it turned out good, considering none of us really knew how to fry or make cookie dough ha.  We ended our night with a bootleg version of Avatar. 

Our cookie dough, raw and fried!

Today was another busy day! We started by heading back into Namatala to check on Gladys' wound.  This poor little girl screams each time we walk up.  We re-bandaged her and headed to the school to talk with Teacher Sarah about which IChooseYou students needed extra tutoring.(This made for our second piki ride) After getting a list of kids who need tutoring we went back home for lunch, which consisted of Christopher's spaghetti(definitely the best I've had!). We went back into Namatala to pick up Masse and her brother Boyd after lunch, and we took them into town to see their mom at the hospital.  We left the kids with their mom and went back into town in search of some sweets for me, and some medicine for Callie. We picked the little ones back up and headed back to Namatala where we dressed Gladys' wound again. For dinner I tried something else I never thought I would, Matoke.  Matoke is a cooked plantain, and looks a lot like mashed potatoes when prepared! It was really very good with the meat sauce that was also prepared.


This has been a very busy but productive week, and I am loving what the Lord has been placing in our path!  I am really enjoying the relationships that God has given me in the village, it is such a blessing to be invited to be a part of these peoples lives.