1/12/10 1:00 PM

Uganda; day 14

Another day, another new experience. One of our main purposes for being here as far as the Living Hope Children’s home goes, is to train the staff here how to budget. Today Kurt and I got a list of all the bills, and honestly I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. It appears they’ve been hanging on by a thread for a long time. Kurt and I were discussing how if we were at home in this predicament we would just go out and get another job, or cut back on some things we didn’t really need. Here it’s completely different, they already have the bare minimum. They don’t have many things we would consider necessity, so there’s no room to cut back. From what I’ve seen so far there isn’t much in the way of jobs here either. One of Eydie’s goals with Living Hope is that we will be able to help them learn different trades so they can support themselves more, and not have to depend so much on the States. I think it’s really important that we work towards that.

So we went to town today to pay a few bills and pick up some food. It was another new experience, we walked all over to save money on taxi’s. We went to the local market, where they have all kinds of foods, they have different meats just laying out on tables, lots of produce everywhere, as well as some piles of clothes and other household items. After seeing the meat laid out I’m considering becoming a vegetarian for the next 6 months. Once we were done with our errands we decided to take a “Uganda taxi” back to the home, which is just a van full of as many people as will fit, and in our case also a chicken. It’s much cheaper than having a car.

I think Kurt and I have both been frustrated over the past few days when trying to buy things. Because we don’t know what a fair price is for anything here yet we continue to have problems with people trying to rip us off. It’s gotten to the point where I’d rather just wait until one of the staff can go with us until we learn what is normal.

Prayer Focuses

-that opportunity’s will present themselves for the older children to learn trades

-continue to pray that we will receive the funds needed to keep the home running