Land and Building

By Sara:

We've been making some real progress toward living on our land, so we wanted to show you some pictures of what has been happening over approximately the past year since we got land.

This is what it looked like when we got it:

This is the land being cleared of bushes:

The first building step was digging a trench and laying the foundation for a wall:

All of the work is done by hand, including mixing the cement.

However, this is how work can go so quickly:

Here's Anthony and our friend Martin, who is managing the building process.  We appreciate him so much; he is doing great work and is very hard working:

The guys digging the pit latrine:

After that, putting up a gate:

Obviously, planting a garden was a priority for me.  Here are some of the bananas and tree seedlings I planted right away at the beginning of this rainy season:

On planting day:

About one month later:

And then only two months after planting everything:

Then, work started on laying the foundation for our house:

And there is the filled foundation:

This week, they started laying out the rooms and putting up the walls!

Women's Ministry

By Sara:

I have been enjoying joining some of my friends from Soroti to do ministry in different areas.  Jane and Betty invited me to go with them to a church just outside of town to teach about improving relationships in the family.  This was part of the women's ministry in PAG - women from different parts of the pastorate go to visit other churches and share with them.  They rotate who is traveling where at various times of year.  Jane, Betty, and I planned some different topics and discussion questions.  It went well, though we didn't have as much time as we expected (about 2 hours instead of 5), since everything started late!

Here is Betty using the example of Ruth to talk about having loving relationships within a family:

Jane shared on the topic of good hygiene and caring for our family's health by the way we treat our bodies.

Another time, Jane and I were invited to a church in Usuk, about an hour north of Soroti, to teach at a one-day marriage seminar.  We facilitated some very lively discussions about how to honor people in our families and how to improve communication with one another and do it in a godly way.

While we were there, we talked to some of the women who had been at a baking training with me and Betty almost a year ago.  These four women (Betty, Esther, Josephine, and Deborah) are four out of 7 women who formed a group to bake cakes.  So far, they were hired once to make cakes for a wedding:

More Fun Farmer Activities in Serere

By Sara:

I continue enjoying meeting with the farmer group in Serere and studying the Bible together with them. We have done a lot of interesting agriculture lessons together, including one about caring for our animals well.  I learned how to make homemade salt licks for livestock from an ECHO publication and they said that would be useful to them, so we did it together.  Grinding dry eggshells, one of the ingredients:

Mixing everything together (some people didn't want to get their hands dirty and used a plastic bag):

The final products, before they are dried:

One woman went home and made her own salt block after her meeting.  She brought it to show to all of us the next time we met.  It was very professionally done!

Another time, we tested seed germination rates.  Everyone brought in some of the seeds they are going to plant next season to see how well they have been stored and help them know how heavily/lightly they should plant those seeds.  The next time we met, people reported on the germination rate they got.

I also tested some of my seeds that had gotten infested with pests to see how bad they were, and they had a very low germination rate - only 30%!  Everyone else's seeds did much better, more like 70-90%.

Baking with Church of Uganda Women

 By Sara:

Earlier this year, I had the fun opportunity to teach some of the women's leaders from Church of Uganda Mother's Union about how to steam cakes.  The ladies were all in Soroti for a several-day meeting, but come from the whole region.  They were very enthusiastic about the cake baking and have taken what they learned back to the women in their communities.

I like how many of them have Mother's Union clothes - the blue and white, often printed with the Mother's Union logo.