Isaac's Hair

We haven’t gotten Isaac’s hair cut in over 6 months. It’s long. Jesse and I have had a long standing debate on what to do with it. Jesse wants to braid it or have locks (dreads) put it. I’ve loved his curls, but now that we are here in Uganda, have felt like we just need to shave it off again. The men here all have shaven hair. & I get a little tired of getting dirty looks when people ask if Isaac is a girl or a boy and i tell them a boy. But I decided to go ahead and try to get his hair done...and hey if it looks terrible then we can always just shave it off, right!?

(a picture to show you isaac's hair)

So off to the salon. We go in to ask how long it would take to get what we want. They say an hour and a half. (we had brought our little movie player with us). We say great. They tell us that they guy who is going to do his hair has about 5 minutes more with his client and then we are up. Since we are at the salon, Rachel and I decide to go ahead and have pedicures done.


Now you might think we are really spoiled to have this done, but trust me our feet get really really disgusting here. We wear flip flops everywhere. and there is dirt and mud everywhere. It’s fine, but it is nice to have them scrap at least the first 10 layers of dirt off. I would put up a picture of our disgusting feet, but I don’t want to scare off any readers :) (especially you Ryan & Candice).

Well anyway so we are getting our toes done, and Jesse is just waiting with Isaac and Levi. and he keeps waiting and waiting. We actually get done, 45 minutes later, and Isaac is now just getting in his little chair. The guy looks at his hair, and proceeds to tell us that b/c his hair is so fine it’s not long enough, and we would not be happy in 3 days when it all falls out. Bummer. I’m glad he was honest with us, but I do wish he could haven told us that right when we got there. So now we don’t know what to do. He said it needs to be about an inch longer. So do we wait it out to let it grow that long, or do we just shave it? I know such a dilemma. : )

Freedom

We got a car! Jesse has been searching since he’s arrived, and we finally got ours this past week. It’s been a long hard search for him. As he told you all earlier it’s not been an easy task. In fact even with this car we now have, we were told we could pick it up Wednesday June 3rd, then the 6th, then the 10th, then 15th, & finally the day we got it the 18th!


I didn’t realize how much freedom I would feel from having a car though. But this past weekend it was so great to just be able to hop in our car and go wherever we wanted to go. And when we were done at the grocery store, to just get in our car and go home, with not having to wait 30 minutes for a taxi to come get us.

If we didn’t have kids it wouldn’t be as much of a big deal. Most people around here get around on Bodas (motorcycles). It’s how Jesse gets to work. I have not rode one yet, which Jesse gives me a hard time about. Honestly, i’m a little scared. If you saw the driving here, you would understand. But besides that, there is no way with three kids that I can get around with them on a boda. Now I have seen 3 kids and 2 adults on one before, but I know we are not that talented. So we’ve been tied down to using Taxi’s. But they aren’t all over, like tuk tuks were in Sri Lanka. So you have to usually call to have one pick you up, hence the long waiting.

So I love having a car! :) I drove quite a bit this weekend, b/c Jesse could be in the passenger seat telling me where to go. & only once did I almost hit another car. I find the driving kind of fun, b/c really anything goes. It is weird driving on the other side of the road, but luckily there are usually lots of cars everywhere so it helps remind you what side to be on. My biggest nervousness about driving is not knowing where I am going. There are no street signs, and the roads curve here and there, up and down hills, so even looking at a map is not always helpful. So hopefully I will be able to find my way home!

Classic Oversteer

When I was twelve or thirteen, my dad taught me how to drive.

The good thing about learning to drive in Nebraska is that there is no traffic to worry about. The bad thing is that your first few times behind the wheel come on gravel roads. For those of you who have never ventured to the great state of Nebraska, the land is flat, the corn is tall and the roads are gravel. That is to say that the driving surface is not paved, but rather is hard packed dirt covered with about an inch of loose sand and gravel. In the American-built, rear-wheel-drive vehicles that most Nebraskans drive, the surface initially feels somewhat like loose packed snow or black ice on a paved highway.

On a fateful Saturday afternoon in June, my Dad and I had just finished pulling a heavy, horsepower-laden engine from an old Ford Mustang and installing it into my Dad’s lightweight, rear-wheel-drive Ford Courier pickup truck. We had worked all day and were pretty proud of ourselves, but it was time to go home. My Dad climbed into our full sized Chevy pickup, and told me to follow him home in the now-supercharged Ford Courier. I couldn’t have been more excited.

About two miles into the trip, I experienced (or more accurately, engaged in) what I like to call “classic oversteer.” The truck started to get away from me a little bit, but I stayed on the gas, determined to fight through. I pulled the wheel to the left to correct my course, and the back end swung out to the right. I pulled the wheel to the right to correct my mistake, and the back end swung even further to the left. Soon I was fishtailing back and forth across the road that I was careening down. Fortunately, the fishtailing only lasted a couple of minutes. Unfortunately, it ended nose down in a culvert at the bottom of the valley. That’s right, I dumped the truck over the steepest bank I could manage to find, and totaled the truck, new engine and all.

I tell this story because learning to drive on gravel is a lot like learning to lead a team in Uganda. You get into the truck excited and ready for the challenge, feeling like a grownup with the new responsibility. You have way more horsepower than you have any business handling. You start down the road, and it is a lot of fun. You get into deep gravel, and get a bit out of shape. You make a few mistakes and you overcorrect for each of them, making even bigger mistakes. If you are not extremely careful, you can find yourself jerking the wheel back and forth, overcorrecting for every misstep, and praying that you don’t run the whole thing into the ditch.

I have an amazingly talented team of twenty-two professionals, including four Americans, one Australian and seventeen Ugandans. We have eight attorneys, four social workers, two investigators, two pastors, six administrative professionals, and me. For some reason, I have been chosen to lead this team in our efforts to bring legal relief to widows and orphans who have had their homes stolen from them by opportunistic thugs, who often happen to be their former in-laws. We receive case referrals from churches, non-profit organizations and our own legal training seminars, hearing horrific stories of defenseless women and children being thrown from their homes in their hour of need by the very people who should be protecting them. We meticulously investigate the facts of the cases to determine if the law has actually been broken. If it has, we represent the victims in legal proceedings, which may include negotiations, mediations and/or civil and crimination litigations, all designed to re-claim the properties that were stolen. And finally, we work to reintegrate the victims by providing for their basic needs for food, shelter, medicine and psychosocial support. The team was doing really well before I got here. In the first five months of 2009, we educated hundreds and hundreds of people on the laws protecting widows and orphans, recovered the homes and property of over 40 victims and secured the arrest of four perpetrators.

I just pray that I can keep this truck moving down the road as I take the wheel. The problem is that my natural tendency in a new situation is to over steer. I come in focusing on praising the team for its accomplishments on Monday, focusing on our shortcomings on Tuesday and back to the hope for tomorrow on Wednesday. I want to be everyone’s friend one day, I feel the need to exert more authority on the next, and on the third day I want to play around again. I want to let people find their own way on Wednesday, I am micromanaging on Thursday and have resolved to strictly “measure by results” again on Friday. Back and forth, left and right, each time feeling the back end of the truck swinging wider and wider.

While this is my tendency, I continue to work, hope and pray that it will not be my destiny. The first step in getting through an oversteer situation is to just relax. The second step is to stop trying so hard to correct your last misstep. Just keep moving down the road and measure your responses to your own failures. Let the horsepower work for you instead of against you. Stop correcting and start driving.
I imagine that as time goes on, I will start to feel a little more relaxed and will be able to stop correcting and start driving. If I can, the horsepower in this office has almost limitless potential, and it is going to be a lot of fine to drive.

P.S. - For those of you who have never driven on gravel, ice or snow, and thus can’t relate, imagine the first time you played Mario Kart, and how you repeatedly drove Yoshi into one wall after another as you frantically searched for the center of the road.

P.P.S. – Mom, I believe I already came clean with you on the truck incident, but if this is your first time hearing the story, sorry I never told you.

Top Ten Things I've Learned In My First Month In Uganda

• Grasshoppers Make a Tasty Treat
In Kampala, there are street vendors everywhere. Men and women who stand along the side of the road and hawk their wares to anyone who happens to drive by (if you’ve seen the ladies who walk between the cars selling roses along Frying Pan Road and Route 28 in Virginia, imagine that times 50 on every street corner and you get the idea). Recently, there have been guys carrying Tupperware buckets selling little tin foil boxes. I asked one of my co-workers what they were selling, and they said “grasshoppers, they’re a delicacy.” Now, I was thinking she meant “string hoppers” - like the Indian food – but I was mistaken. She meant the little six legged critters with the big eyes that squish bigger than life on your windshield as you drive down the highway on a hot Nebraska summer’s day. I confirmed the meaning a few days later when one of the staff brought one of the tin foil boxes to the office. They heated a bowlful of delicacies up for me in the microwave, and waited for me to flinch. I didn’t. They actually were pretty tasty. Kind of nutty, and kind of crunchy. They remind me of something I’ve had before, but I can’t think of it. If I remember I’ll let you know.

• Riding Two Dudes on a Motorcycle Does Not Mean You’re Gay
There are a few ways to get around Kampala if you don’t own a car – Hire a special hire (what we would call a taxi cab) – Take a taxi (what we would call a public bus). Special hires are expensive and I’m not nearly smart enough to figure out the taxi routes. That leaves me with one inexpensive and pretty straightforward option, which is taking a boda boda. A boda boda (or “boda” for short) is a motor cycle taxi that you can find on about any street corner. It is actually a cartel system of young men on beaten up 250 cc motorcycles, who will drive you almost anywhere for almost nothing. At first it felt a little awkward climbing on a motorcycle behind some guy I hardly new (I really don’t think knowing the guy would have made me feel any better). After I learned that you hold on to the back of the bike and not the guy’s waist it seemed less awkward. Now I don’t think twice about it. I still think twice when someone suggests that I share a boda ride with another guy. Three guys straddling the same short framed motorbike??? Even I have my limits.

• Plumbing Conducts Electricity
As Amy has already posted, we are living in a wonderful guest house owned by a wonderful family, and we couldn’t be more blessed. That being said, the place has its quirks. One of those quirks is that the hot water pipes somehow manage to conduct a small charge of electricity. Not enough to kill you, or really even hurt you very bad. Just enough to freak you out when you’re standing in the shower and you reach to turn the hot water up and experience a shock somewhat similar to five times the shock experienced by licking a nine volt battery (if you’ve never done this, don’t – if your brother or sister has never done this, I highly recommend it). It also shocks you when you run the hot water while doing the dishes. Now, both my experience with the phenomenon and my host tells me that it doesn’t really hurt and it isn’t that big of a deal, but something deep down inside says electricity and water are not a good combination.

• The World Really Sees Us Through the Eyes of Television
I am really trying to spend a lot of time getting to know my staff, and part of that is just sitting around talking about nothing. In all of this mindless chit chat, I have really seen the power of American television, and how it shapes the way the rest of the world sees life in America. One of my African co-workers told me that she thought if you were black in America, you were likely in a gang, and if you were in a gang in America, you were definitely black. In another conversation, she commented about school shootings and how they were such an everyday occurrence in America. The source of both ideas – American television. What really got to me thinking about the second media-induced stereotype was that the day before she made the comment about school shootings, a Ugandan police officer got into a disagreement with a woman in a bar and opened fire, killing eight people. The story didn’t even make the front page of the paper here in Uganda, much less the American press. If that had happened in the U.S., it would have been a huge anomaly and it would have run at the top of every news cycle for six months. And the rest of the world would believe that all Americans live in fear of a dangerous and malicious police force.

• My Wife is a Sickly Saint
Whenever you travel with someone, you learn something about that person. When you move overseas together you look somewhat deeper into their soul. I’ve learned two things about my wife in our recent move. First, I learned that her immune system is not built for travel. She is recovering from her fourth major illness in three weeks. Upset stomach, fever, cough and cold – you name it, she’s had it. Second, she is not about to let a severe fever and stomach cramps get her down. Through all of her ailments, she has kept a really good attitude. Only once that I can remember has she said that she is ready to pack it in. If I was as sick as she has been week in and week out, and if I had been forced to be locked in a guest house with our three lovely, innocent, well-behaved, obedient and ever-joyful children, I wouldn’t have just talked about packing it in. I just hope all the bacteria (and my kids) give up before she does.

• People Eat the Entire Goat
The major staple in Uganda is matoke, which is a pasty substance made of smashed bananas (not the sweet ones that you and I are used to). It isn’t that good, but what is good is the rice and stewed meat that you get with it at most Ugandan restaurants. Given how tasty the stewed goat was at a local restaurant, I was pretty excited when we ordered takeout goat (I realize that just sounds really strange) for the office. I was less excited when it arrived. Apparently, there are two types of stewed goat that one can order from this particular establishment. The first is just like any stewed meat – bite sized chunks of meat similar to cubed roast cooked in a really tasty broth. The second, which is what I received on this particular date, was something else. Now, I’ve grown up around the farm, I’ve been involved in a lot of butchering and I’ve field dressed a deer, and I’m pretty sure that what was in that bowl, simmering in a tasty broth, is found among the parts that we generally left in the field. I want to say pancreas or gall bladder, but who really knows. Clearly, I had ordered poorly. The broth was good.

• Mother Nature Will Take it All Back
Discovery Channel recently ran a program about what would happen if man ceased to exist, and concluded that Mother Nature would wipe all evidence of man off the planet in about 1000 years. In Uganda, it would take about six months. If you drop your pizza crust from the table, in five minutes an entire army of ants is already dismantling it and carrying it away. If some unfortunate critter fails to make it across the road, a pack of stray dogs is carrying it away within hours. If the City paves a road in December, it is back to dirt in late February. If your sidewalk gets dirty on Monday morning, it is sprouting some sort of plant – if not a tree – by Thursday afternoon. For the latent environmentalist in me, it is good to see that in a place as polluted and nasty as Kampala, Mother Nature is not willing to just lay over and die.

• I’m Not as Good of a Dad as I Wish I Was
I always kind of felt bad for parents that are perpetually telling their children, “no.” You know what I’m talking about – “don’t touch that Billy, Sally stay away from the edge. No, Johnny, you can’t hit the dog, No, Don’t, Stop, I’m going to count to three….” With Rachel, I never really had to do that, and I often felt pretty good about myself as a parent. Pride cometh before the fall. With Rachel, Isaac and Levi, cooped up in someone else’s house with a yard filled with treacherous cliffs and strange bugs, I find myself saying “no” constantly. The worst part is that, the more I say “no,” the less my kids listen. I know this, and yet the number of “nos” that proceed from my lips seem to multiply daily. And if that doesn’t work, I add meaningless threats or a raised voice, which only serves to make me look stupid, to ensure that my kids have no respect for me whatsoever, and to absolutely guarantee that my kids won’t listen when I say “no” to something serious. Man, I suck at this.

• Shaggy’s Not That Great In Concert
The other night Shaggy (the rapper, not the Scooby Doo sidekick) played Kampala. We happen to live a couple miles from the venue he was playing, and there are apparently no sound restrictions in Kampala. I never really wanted to hear Shaggy in concert, but now I have. He may as well have been playing in our living room. While the music wasn’t that good, the concert was entertaining. The most entertaining part was listening to Shaggy do all of the mindless flatteries of the audience that have become standard for every concert (you know what I mean, “I’ve played a lot of places on this tour, and I’ve got to tell you, nothing – mean nothing – beats Dayton, Ohio on a Tuesday). In the instant case, Shaggy came out a spirited version of "Angel", and during the bridge, he delighted the crowd with, “Last night I played a crowd in Batswana, and I told them that the party is in Kampala.” Now maybe the party is in Kampala, and maybe it isn’t. In any event, I couldn’t help thinking that what he really wanted to be yelling was, “What the #$$I**@! I sold out Madison Square Garden five years ago, and now I’m barely filling the stands in Kampala at 15 bucks a head.”

• I Miss My Friends and Family
Every time I have a new experience here in Uganda (and that is about every time I take a breath), I think to myself, “man do I wish ____ was here to see this,” or “_____ would love that.” Worse yet, every time I have an “African time” or a “Ugandan promise” experience, I think to myself, man I wish I was sitting down at Five Guys with _____, or at the basketball court with _______. I can’t tell you all how much Amy and I miss everyone back home. Thank you for your prayers. We really, reeeeaaaaaalllllyyy need them.

Fun With Water

On Sunday we went to one of the churches we have been visiting. After the service they were going to serve lunch and have a giant slip & slide for the kids. They weren't kidding. It was HUGE!


They also had a small little pool out for the kids.


Rachel & Isaac ran right out to play. At one point in the afternoon I look down at Isaac, he has someone's dirty shoe and is filing it with water from the pool and then proceeds to drink it. Just in case you're wondering, no we are not supposed to drink the water here.

Today (Tuesday) we were taking a taxi to a friends house to let the kids play a bit. We are about 5 minutes from home, when Isaac begins to throw up all over the cab. I have to tell the guy to turn around b/c "sorry but my kid is yacking all over the place". The driver was very gracious, but it was disgusting. After helping the guy clean out his car, I go put Isaac in the bath. He's playing fine, and then leans down in the bath and starts lapping up the water... will he ever learn?!