Sunday the 26th

Hi,
I know you are probably wondering how my Christmas was. Well I will spare you the gorry details, but lets just say I woke up sick and stayed close to my bed and bathroom all day. Kind of a bummer. I guess I just was not supposed to eat holiday food this year. That is okay though, for it gave me many hours in bed to read and rest.

Today however has been great. I woke up feeling much better and well rested. Then I was granted the privelage of taking my young neighbor girl to chuch once again. She is 15 and a muslim and has been showing great intrest in knowing more about Jesus. This was her third time at church with me. We had a great time. I also had the joy of giving her an English Bible that she had requested. A friend help me to find one that was just perfect for a 15 year old girl. It is pink and black and small enough to fit in a very small bag. Please join me in prayer that the words in that book will bring forth truth and light in her life. And the lives of her family. It could very well be that she alone is the reason that the Lord has brought me to Africa for this time. I dont even pretend to know, but I am thrilled to get to be part of her getting to know about Jesus.

The afternoon was quiet. Most of the babies here were napping and we have several gone visiting home for the holiday. Once the babies were up we played on the veranda and just spent time hanging out with the kids. Now we are waiting for supper to be ready, then it will be bath time and bedtime. The days pass so quickly here. It is amazing how fast time goes. One minute it is 8 in the morning and you are trying to finish breakfast and the next minute it is bedtime and you are hanging mosquito nets over the cribs and saying prayers with all the babies.

I hope you had a wonderful white Christmas. I am guessing from the church notices I got that you in fact did. Stay warm and keep in touch.

Feeling good,
Jennifer

December 18 - Grace

Hi there,
It has been difficult for me to imagine or even wrap my brain around the fact that this is the week before Christmas. Thanks to many of you I actually know it is winter and that snow is in fact falling somewhere in the world. I regret to inform you ( well not really) that it is still right around 80 degrees here and the rain left and the sun has once again become our friend. Life is good. :)
Okay, enough gloating. I do want to wish all of you the best Christmas possible. I pray it is filled with family and friends and all of you are focused on the coming of Christ and why he came. Praise God for His Son!!!!

It has been a challenging week for me indeed. I have treated 5 cases of Malaria, all which presented looking just a bit different than another. 4 were babies and one was our night guard Joseph. Please pray for there continued recovery. All are doing much better now and I thank you for your prayers so far. Most I treated here at the house but spent one very interesting night at a local hospital with one of the babies. I must admit I hope to never do that again. Hospitals here are VERY different than America. (that is a huge understatement). It is usually but not always a nurse making the diagnosis and then once a treatment plan is made things get wild. I went to a private, you pay for hospital rather than a public your get seen for free government hospital. Dont be confused though, you get seen for free but still must pay for bed sheets, medications, and anything else you need. So anyway, I went with the private hospital. So I called a driver at 1am and had him come pick me and the baby up. Meanwhile I am praying hard because it is my first adventure out that late, by myself in, well you know...Africa! So the driver comes and drives FAST to the hospital because he knows I have a very sick baby, her fever was around 103 or 104.  We get there and she is seen pretty quickly. Malaria! Oh how I am learning to hate that word! So we make the decision to admit her and I ask for a private room rather than the general ward where we would have to share a room with anywhere from 2 to six people who could be ill with just about anything. The first room we are given has no light bulb so the nurse can not see anything so we are moved to a different room. It is a small concrete room about 10x12 with two twin beds and an IV pole. It also had, much to my joy and thanks to God, a mosquito net. We get an IV started on the baby and then i am told, when it gets to this mark you come get us. It should take about 4 hours. Then the nurse went back to bed. Good thing I have some idea of what to do with an IV and what to watch for. So there I was on the bed next to my baby, her name is Grace by the way, watching her IV drip ever so slowly. The room was lit by a single bare light bulb, which did allow for me to see the shadow of an occasional mosquito buzzing about the room. I dropped the net over us and we snuggled up together on the one sheet we had to cover the bed. Fortunately I had brought an extra fairly large baby blanket which I used to cover the bottom half of me and had a sweatshirt for the top half. Grace was snuggled up in the blanket and sheet I carried her in. So anyway for the next 4 hours we listened to various sounds of Jinja town coming through the small window at the top of the wall. Various gangs of dogs barking and fighting in the street outside. People walking about in the night. And of course at 4am the call to worship from the Mosque which I can only assume was located just outside my window based on the volume of the speaker. WOW! So we tried to sleep some and I had my cell phone ring ever 30 minutes to make sure her drip was running right and had not gone past the intended mark. Needless to say it was a long night. In the end it was well worth it however. Grace is over her Malaria and cuter than ever. She was reunited with her mom and twin brother by 3 the next afternoon. And by the time you get this I will have fully recovered from my lack of sleep. It sure takes longer now than when I was twenty! That is for sure! ( the picture attached is Grace)

Today I realized that I am nearly half way through my time here and I just cant really believe it. Time is passing so quickly and then at times it seems very slow. I am trying hard to savor every moment for all that it has and learn all that God is wanting to teach me while I am here. I try not to dwell on missing my family and friends but it happens more frequently than I care to admit. I think of my Mimi and how I am missing holidays with her and my close friends back in the burg. I think of talking on the phone with my Mom nearly everyday, and the freedom of jumping in my car and going to town for whatever I want whenever i want it. I cant really do those things right now. I count it all the cost to follow. I heard a great sermon this week on my i pod about how my life should be spent following Jesus and if I am doing in right then i should be covered in his dust. That is my prayer this week. That I would follow him so closely that I would be covered in His dust. I pray that for each of you as well. After all, in the end that is all that really matters.

Counting it all loss,
Jennifer

Rainy Days in Masese

Today has been a really good day. We have four 20 somethings here for three days. They are wonderful and love the Lord. The have been working in the North in the villages near the refugee camps and Sudan border. They are really amazing kids. So that gave me the chance to go to town and get some shopping done. I also finally found a bank that accepts my ATM card so once again I have money. I did well stretching what I brought with me so I have not been broke, but it was getting close. Leave it to the Lord to help me find it when I really needed it. The market was fun, I bought mostly produce. It is kind of like a giant swap meet. I got 2 kg of cow peas, which are some kind of green hard bean, 2 kg of green beans, 1 kg onions, and 1 kg of carrots. I also bought a plastic pitcher, some steel wool for cleaning pots, and a loaf of bread. I got all that for 22,500 shillings which is a little less than 10 dollars. Not too bad for a white girl in the market! :)

All my babies are doing well. Most of them are getting really fat and just about ready to go home. Renee has been in the states for 6 weeks so we have not sent any of the kids home. She will be back on Wednesday and then we will likely do some discharges. One of the girls has Malaria. I diagnosed her last night and started her on medication and she is doing much better today. Another is recovering from Meningitis and was really sick. She is 7 and got down to 11kg. Which is roughly 25 pounds. She has a long road ahead of her. She could use your prayers. I am doing pretty well. I was sick for about 4 weeks with a nagging cold that just would not go away but I am doing much better now.

I would love to hear from you. You can send me email here or you can try and send it regular mail. I got one letter from my landlord here. It only took about a week to get here. I was really surprised. My address is
Jennifer Ward
C/O Serving His Children
PO BOX 552
Jinja, Uganda
East Africa

I would love to hear how everyone is doing. What is happening in everyday life there. Are you healthy. How is work. How is church. What is new? It is nice to jump on here from time to time and have news from home. It actually helps me not be homesick to much. Especially when I hear about the weather. ;) Wednesday the rains came and boy did they come. It rained hard for most of the afternoon and all of the night. It did not stop until about 10am on Thursday. Talk about a muddy mess. There was mud everywhere. Not so much here at the house although there was some, but in the village and everywhere between here and town was just one giant mud hole. I had to take one of the kids to the clinic on that morning so I really got to see what it was like. Fortunately  I was able to hire a car to take me and not have to ride a motorcycle in that mess. I am very thankful for that. I say many people who were not that lucky. The good news is despite the fact that the rain put out the fire for most of the night, somehow by God's grace the ladies were able to finish cooking the beans and rice ( which they usually do overnight) and feeding program went on as scheduled. The kids were not about to let a little mud stop them from getting a hot meal. When I got home from the clinic they were all lined up in the yard in strategic lines around the mud puddles getting there beans, rice and bananas.

Well I better go. I am kind of being anti-social and taking advantage of the fact there are others here to watch the babies. I took a shower and did email for a bit. Dinner is almost ready. They are having meat and rice. No I am still clinging to the vegetarian thing. I gotta go figure out what I am going to eat. Know I am missing you and love you very much.

Jennifer

what is that smell?

So a funny thing happened yesterday. Our day guard Charles comes to me and says.."Auntie, I have a problem". Turns out the problem is his 5 year old son. He says he has a bean in his nose. So I calmly have him sit on out kitchen table which puts him a little more than waist high for me and I grab a penlight. I look in his nostril but dont see anything. So I tell Charles that. He talks to his son a bit and then says, it is there, just higher. So again I take my handy dandy penlight and look in his nose. This time pushing the end of his nose up a bit tword his forehead. BEHOLD THE BEAN. Just beyond the small opening at the top of his nostril I can see the bottom of a red and white kidney bean just sitting there hanging out. A few minutes and a few giggles later I was able to painlessly extract the bean using my tweezers. I must say he was a very good patient who did not move when told to be still and not one tear was shed. I wish everyday could be so easy! Thank the Lord I brought my tweezers!
Love and miss you
Jennifer