A few random updates...

In case you’ve detected a pattern, I’m trying to update my blog every Tue and Fri….I have a busy day at work today because we had a meeting at the Canadian Consulate and I have a major report due next week that I’m trying to finish before my sister comes….so for today I’ll just post a few random updates….

The most exciting thing is that my sister Kelly is coming to visit!!!  She moved to Switzerland just six weeks after we moved to Uganda to work at an international school in Zug.  Natalie is SO excited to see Auntie Kelly, and Nathan would be too if he could remember Kelly :)  She arrives late Sat night and will be staying for a week. 

Last week we finally started taking Luganda classes.  MCC usually has their workers take intensive language classes at the beginning of their assignments, but there is no overarching language in Uganda that is widely spoken, and English is the language of education and business.  Our partners are from many different ethnic groups so we would need to learn about 7 or 8 different languages to cover all the groups we work with! (But they all know English in addition to their mother tongues so all our work and communication is done in English)  The common language in the central part of Uganda where we are living in Luganda, so we’d like to learn that.  I’m a little disappointed I can’t use Swahili here since I invested so much time and effort in learning it, but it’s encouraging that Luganda is in the same language group (Bantu) so there are a LOT of similarities – the structure is very similar and I’m finding that there are a lot of Luganda words that resemble their Swahili words. 

Our MCC Uganda team is growing!  One part of our job is to lead and supervise the MCC Uganda team.  When we arrived, there were three Ugandan program staff and one international service worker.  A month after we arrived, we welcomed two more international service workers, and earlier this week we welcomed our fourth service worker.  We also have three one year service positions available beginning in Aug, and one of them has been filled by a Cambodian woman, another by a Colombian man, and the third is still open.  More about all these workers in a future post….

And just for fun, here are two recent pics of the kids:

Natalie playing the guitar and making up songs to sing to her baby, just like Muigai does with her and Nathan!

I love Nathan's hair!  But a lot of people here think he's a girl....Ugandans generally don't dress their kids in only "boy and girl" colors like we do, so even if he's dressed head to toe in "boy" colors people still think he's a girl.