A photo tour of our house

I tried uploading a video tour of our house, but the internet here couldn't handle it. So, use your imagination to piece these pictures together and you'll get a bit of an idea of what our home is like here!


Welcome to our house! The view as you step into our front door - the kids love running up and down our awesome hallway! Huge windows line the wall to the right, and three doors are on the left...


Door #1 - our bathroom. Do you love our toilet handlebars? The people who lived here before us had their elderly mother living with them, so we have all kinds of fun features like this.

Door #2 - master bedroom. I sewed the curtains and bedspread from local material.

Door #3 - the kids room. Jonathan feels super cool sleeping on the top bunk. Since this picture was taken, Phil made an extension railing that spans the whole length - now I sleep better at night! The kids and Phil cozy up on the wicker love-seat every night for Bible stories before bed.

Kitchen and Dining Room area.

Living room/porch - to the right there is no wall...just screen. To the left is the door to the guest room...

Living room...view from guest room door.

Guest room and bathroom. We'd love to have you come stay with us!

View of the main house looking from the living room toward the front door. The door next to the fridge leads to the pantry (where a fat rat has been getting into everything lately!). In the evenings Phil and I usually sit in those wicker chairs and read or watch a dvd on our laptop together.

Here's the view from our dining room window...lovely!

A photo tour of our yard

Here is the outside of our place...I stood in the middle of the upper part of our property and took pictures turning a bit to the right with each one until I made a full circle, Phil tried to stitch them together for a panorama, but it didn't work...

The house. There are stairs leading down to the lower part of the yard right there.

You can't see it from here, but our little garden is way down there in the bottom left corner of our property.

In this picture you can see one of our lemon and one of our mango trees. You can also see Evelyn and Jessy racing to the swing!

There's another set of stairs leading down to the yard just there.

Our gate.

The "boy's quarters". Jen and Jessy live in the far right room (with the pretty door covering), and Otim lives in the far left one.

And we have come full circle. That's our garage that is packed to the gills with wood - 12x1 planks. You can't buy cured wood here, so you have to buy your wood (for construction) months in advance and dry it yourself. This is all for the youth center Phil is building.

We also have a nice area behind our house with a clothes line. We don't have a washer or drier...all the clothes are done by hand and then have to be ironed (even our socks!) to kill mango fly eggs. Jen is an amazing example to me of a diligent, cheerful worker. She is becoming a fast friend, and has also recently started giving me language lessons! She was thrilled tonight when she left and I said "goodnight" to her in Luganda..."Sula bulungi!"

Peek-a-boo!

Care Packages!

They took four months to reach us, but it was worth the wait! Big thank yous to our church in San Luis Obispo, the Hendersons, and Mom and Dad! A group of EMI interns brought out the boxes you all sent to the Colorado office, and it was like having Christmas in September! What fun! We feel so blessed, loved, and supported... THANK YOU!!

What's in the box?!?

Fun new toys!

"Yay for bubbles!"

"Yay for razors!"


Enjoying new coloring books and crayons!

She loves her new baby owl and "Owl Babies" book!

Date Night

Friday we had our first date night since coming to Uganda! Jen stayed with the kids and made them her famous meatballs (the smell of them cooking tempted us to stay home!), and put them to bed for us. We drove out to a place called The Haven for dinner. It was lovely - the restaurant overlooked the Nile, it was beautiful, peaceful, and the food was really great! We were a little nervous driving home in the pitch dark on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (ok, I was nervous)...but Phil found our way home like he'd done it a million times.


Our waiter took this picture - he was hilarious...I don't think he's had much practice taking pictures because it took him a good half a minute moving the camera all around an up and down to get us framed just right.

Phil liked the roof shape which was an inverted cone for rain water catchment.

Our table and view...we were the only ones at the restaurant.

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Phil voluntarily ate a banana for the first time in his LIFE!! The menu was fixed, and they served us fried bananas for dessert.

Cuteness

"See my baby?"

SPIDERS!!

Can anyone help us identify this spider? We have about 20 of them living in the rafters above our porch. Fortunately we haven't spotted any inside the house...yet! They range from about 1-3 inches long - yeah, pretty scary! I mainly want to be sure they aren't dangerous...

The Swing that Phil Built

When we first moved to our "Nile-view" house, one of Phil's first projects was building this hammock-swing. He built it out of eucalyptus poles, rope, and twine from the market. He actually wove the bed of the swing with twine. I'm so impressed with the creative and wonderful things he comes up with. He also built some great mosquito net hanger frames for our beds and a fence around our compost pit (among other things!).

The kids play on the swing for hours everyday. Whenever Evelyn disappears I can always find her down at the hammock - swinging and singing to herself.

Greene Garden

Check out these pictures of our garden!

This is the first time I have ever planted a garden. I found a lot of comedy in having no idea what I was doing – tilling the soil, pushing earth around, sowing seed – but I can't wait to see something come up from under the earth! We planted squash, lettuce, tomatoes, watermelon, leeks, beetsJonathan was a big help, raking out the weeds and sticks, pushing seeds into the soil, and generating endless interesting and hilarious questions about gardening.


Actually, that reminds me of a funny thing Jonathan said the other day. We looked together at a photo of some missionary friends of ours in Egypt. I told him that they had just moved to Egypt and he gasped, “Egypt! But that's a baaaad place.” “Why is it bad?” I asked. “Because the King of Egypt is killing all the babies there.” (Last week we read together about the “boy who survived”, Moses, whom God protected from the King of Egypt's killing spree).