bye bye babies!

Today I got to join Els (the leader of Amecet) and two other staff, Simon and Esther, as we delivered the twins, Ben and Calvin, back home. It was "deep, deep in the village" - more than an hour away from the home, along ever-narrowing tracks - I'm used to walking along windy footpaths in villages, but taking an SUV along them was interesting to say the least! I was a bit concerned when the road narrowed to half the width of our vehicle, but Els assured me that wasn't narrow yet...and we literally did drive "along" 4-inch wide footways!
we had an amazing reception there - we'd found the twins' dad at his church, and most of the rest of the congregation hopped in the back of the truck so there were about 30 people sitting around under the trees by the little round mud-huts (finally, some REAL african houses : )
passing the boys round and watching Els talk to the dad. Then they gave us the classic Ugandan gift of a live animal - a turkey this time - who is happily gobble-gobbling his way around the compound now. I just loved the excitement that the whole village shared at the twins' return - they don't even live that close together - the huts we went to are only for the dad, his other children, his parents and a few students who stay with them, and there were no other huts to be seen - they were probably a field or two away. I felt a bit bad that I'd been able to spend all day every day with these babies for the past few weeks and hadn't appreciated a minute of it - they were kind of hard to feed at times, and when they vomited or pooed, they really meant it...but now these random villagers were beside themselves at just being able to see them.

Not only did I get to be part of all this, but I also missed the usual feeding, changing, playing, blah blah blah....all in all it was a good day!

No pictures of Ben and Calvin I'm afraid, but let's see if this picture of one of my favourites, Godfried, will make it onto the page...