What we do when we are not doing exciting things

Maybe this isn't something you think about when you read our blog, but on the other hand, perhaps you are wondering what we do when we aren't doing exciting activities like baking trainings, TLT, and visiting churches.  Well, there are all sorts of relatively mundane activities that we do as part of our work, which fill our time, and I want to share a few of them with you.

Both Anthony and I have the normal routine activities like cooking, cleaning, doing dishes, and washing laundry.  But that's just housework.  When I have free time, I read, sew (I've donated some clothes I made to the local church), and work in my garden where I experiment with planting and creating mulch, compost, and organic pesticides.  Although I do this for fun, it is helpful for my work because I am learning what kinds of techniques do well in this region.

But there are lots of "real" work activities we do too.  Our communication with our supporters through our blog and prayer letters is an important part of our work, so we make sure to take good photos and write stories about what is happening in our lives.  

We also spend time doing research and studying various topics to prepare training and teaching materials.  For example, I work on lessons about caring for God's creation (in general and through agriculture) and continue to refine my baking training materials.  Anthony has been writing sermons and trying to improve his When Helping Hurts curriculum.  

We meet with people from different mission and development organizations and from churches to discuss the work we are doing and to plan ways that we can work together.  For example, I have been advising a young man from our church in Soroti who has started an agricultural development organization.  We hope this will help enhance connections between all of us people from different Christian organizations who work in the same place.

I am doing research with one of the Ugandan agriculture field officers on edible wild/local plants in Teso (this region of Uganda).  We're trying to compile information about what plants are traditionally eaten and how.

While our supervisor, Edward, is in the US and Canada, I've been helping out by reading reports and project proposals from the partner organizations and working with them to revise them and make sure they will be understandable to an outsider who might read them.  I've also been making visits to their current projects to see how things are going.

And currently, I am planning with the main PAG church in Soroti to do a variety of trainings and to set up a demonstration garden on some of the church's land.  We want to do some comparison plots of Farming God's Way and traditional farming as well as some demonstration kitchen gardening (vegetable) techniques.  And then, the church wants to emphasize being good stewards of God's creation next year, so the pastor asked me to put together some materials with Bible verses and questions that small groups can discuss about caring for creation.  So right now we are in the planning stages, which means meetings and reading materials I have and writing plans.

So there you have it.  Some of the activities we do that are individually less blog-worthy.