Merry Christmas!!

To save time i'm just pasting my email up here for anyone who didn't get it...voila!

Hi everyone! Yup, it's been a long long time...i can only apologise for being so slow to even think of writing letters, i think i might resort to that for some of you now that i'm discovering the internet is a very precious and rare treasure!!

thank you so much for all your emails - i haven't actually read any for weeks since internet access has once again been impossible, but if i ever finish writing i'll read and reply then!

some news in brief (how do i begin to summarise more than 3 months?!!) we completed the lecture phase of DTS (discipleship training school) at the beginning o







f November, travelled west t







o Fort Portal where we stayed in 2 villages, each for 4-5 days. The people were lovely but spoke hardly any english, there was no power or water so we had to walk a fair way downhill to get water in jerry cans...20l of water gets pretty heavy when you're scrambling up steep hills! We were mainly visiting people in their homes every morning, explaining what we believe to them and asking if they had any questions or wanted to become Christians, and most afternoons we had "crusades" which for my part involved standing on rickety wooden stages and attempting to sing and dance to songs in languages i don't know...fun!! a few times we performed the dramas we'd rehearsed, then one of our leaders preached and we prayed for people afterwards. i wish my description of the atmosphere could do it justice - it was so crazy to have all these hundreds of kids just turn up from nowhere, pushing against the barrier wires and chasing after me and Katy just to hold our hands or touch us (us muzungus are HUGELY interesting - even our neighbours' kids spent most of each day just staring at us or shouting "muzungu! muzungu! every time we passed....5 times a day, every day without fail...)
one thing i'll never forget about Fort P was moving in between the villages - somehow we managed to fit 11 people,their luggage, a sounds system with 4 giant speakers, our cooking pots and pans plus sacks of food to last 2 weeks, all into a small pickup truck. 2 of the girls and the driver sat in the cab, the rest of us were piled in the back with the stuff - it was great!! We saw so much amazing scenery - the west of Uganda is just like NZ with beautiful hills, forests and mountains, and many cows! It's Uganda's dairy region, but also has giant tea plantations and rice fields. Oh, and one lady who invited us to her house gave us a live goat! i was so excited til i realised the impracticality of bringing it back to Jinja with us (an 8-hour journey in a packed minibus is not the best place for a goat) but i just couldn't bring myself to let the others eat it - it was a beautiful female, exactly what i want when i start my herd of milkers - so Emma the school leader took pity on me and swapped in for someone's scraggy little billy, who promptly became dinner. all in all, i think it was a good swap for the other person!

Then we spent 2 weeks in Kakira, just down the road from our base - we had power, but no water...in fact, even our one water source that was a carryable distance away dried up, so the boys had to resort to cycling to the base with 2 or 3 jerry cans tied to the back! I have new respect for them - my one attempt failed so miserably, it was not a pleasant experience! my only comfort was that henry, who rescued me, also crashed several times and definitely struggled throughout the ride - so at least i'm not yet a weedy girl!

Now we're in Arusha, Tanzania - the only major difference is that i understand the language even less than before, and the people speak less English! Otherwise the two countries are very similar, the work is the same, the kids still shout "muzungu!"...
actually, one highlight of our stay so far is i came across a lady who wanted me to pray for her cow!! i know i said i wanted to work with cows and help in some way, but i wasn't expecting it to randomly happen on one of our evangelism visits! I think i frustrated my interpreter a bit by asking a zillion questions about the exact problem - it turns out they used AI, and the cow always threw big calves and had never yet delivered a live one - they always got stuck and died, and the cow herself was the tiniest Friesian i've ever seen, so i wondered if they import semen from our giant Western holsteins rather than collecting from their own African "local" bulls. i have no idea if the woman understood what i was saying, so i'm glad we have a God who answers prayers, even for those things we should be able to figure out on our own!

the other fun thing is walking through a banana forest to get to our church here...it never gets old : )

sorry for those of you who were expecting stories of well-digging and feeding the hungry - i was a bit disappointed myself when it turned out not to be part of our program, but i've enjoyed just meeting with so many different people who live in a completely different way from us, being able to talk to them and listen to their views on life. And tomorrow i'll find out how these guys celebrate Christmas - it seems so unreal sitting here in the hot dusty city of Arusha, when usually Christmas means freezing cold weather, mucking out and milking!

Merry Christmas everyone, let's all hope this isn't my last email for another 3 months!!!

love alex : )