In case of any illusions . . .

 . . . this is, still, and desperately so, enemy territory.  After about a month of a string of irritating minor infections, the bone-rattling teeth-clattering muscle-aching chills of a major fever hit last night, and I barely even opened my eyes until it was 2 pm and the rest of the family was home from church, having abandoned all responsibility to Scott (who is praying that he will somehow, miraculously, for the sake of the rest of us, be spared).  I did open my eyes once though, in the early morning, when piercing shrieks and rising wails erupted next door, the highly effective all-come-running distress call of the bereaved.  Scott rolled out of bed and went over to find out that a son of our late neighbor John Mukiddi had died overnight in Bundibugyo Hospital, and they had just brought the body, a young man whom we did not personally know, not sure of what causes. The inevitable tinny-amplified music of the all-night prep for burial gathering is just starting up now, at dusk, to blare outside our screened bedroom window  And last night, our houseworker called in a somewhat disinhibited state, to report the success of his attempt to retrieve his wife.  She had been understandably miffed when his brother attacked her with a machete a few days ago, saved by her teenage sun, in a brawl in which our friend suffered a big bruising shiner of an eye.  Sickness, death of the young, alcoholism, violence, marriage strain . . sometimes the very holding together of this place seems so tenuous.  Lord, have mercy.

Week-in-Review . . .

Saturday, the friendly American-suburb buzz of the Clark's lawn mower, glad to have our neighbors back from their trip to the USA, the thud of a football as Jack and a friend kick around outside, the hum of insects, bright sun, a slight breeze.  End of the week of coming home, and finally all unpacked.  Earlier today we helped haul a truck-load of Pierce give-away items to various mission homes (not ours, we have PLENTY, though I did snag a box of precious ziplock bags).  Annelise has now opened, organized, and closed two homes here, which is no small feat in three-plus years.  We are thankful for their willingness to sift and sort through a decade or more of accumulated junk they inherited (or more accurately bought sight unseen), a process I dread.  They look tired, and I feel both their good-bye weariness and the anticipation of our own.  Between the lawnmower and the yard-sale aspect of the clear-out, and Scott working on financial aid documents for college due soon, it feels peculiarly un-Africa today.

A few memories of the last few days . . 

The eclipse Friday was rather a let-down for us in Bundi.  We were in the path of the spectacular annular eclipse, where the moon blocks the center of the sun and leaves a ring of fire, a once-in-a-millenium event, and I'm sure it did happen right on our early morning mountain-fringed horizon.  But the sky was so occluded by oppressive grey clouds that I sat out in the yard with the kids peering at the theoretical dawn and sipping coffee, waiting, as it passed by nearly unnoticed.  Friends later said they knew the moon was fighting with the sun (the local phraseology for such an event) but I highly suspected them of hearing it on the radio.  The dim morning perhaps deepened slightly dimmer, and a flock of six horn-bills did land rather apocalyptically in our tree, but that was about it.  Luke and Caleb had better views in Kenya.

More exciting, the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament in Angola.  Friday evening I let the word out that we'd be watching Ghana-Ivory Coast, and sure enough most of our sponsored student - friends, about 7 boys, showed up for a pleasant dinner, conversation, and viewing.  Mostly I liked the atmosphere, watching Africans play in Africa with African boys who are avid fans and players themselves, particularly the inspiring advertisements on our South African Supersport cable channel, creative and proud, touting the glories of African football.  It is not often that we see positive images of Africa in the media.  I was pulling for Ghana, recognizing some of the brave young men who took the under-20 World Cup trophy earlier this year, but alas they lost to the heavily professional Ivory Coast team.  All in all, though, very fun.

The ward, as always, a mix of tragedy and triumph.  Greeted by little Bhitigale, whom I never expected to see live, now round-faced and smiley with his cantankerous grandmother.  Picked up a chart on a new patient and saw my handwriting going back to 2005, when we diagnosed sickle cell, and now this baby was a thriving ready-for-nursery-school age girl.  But the same morning another infant died within a few hours of arrival, too little too late as the parents had been trying various treatments at home.  The pile-up of kids whom I've not seen for the last two weeks plus Christmas, the inevitable struggles, phone calls, advocacy.  News of a nation-wide blood shortage as malarial levels increase in the unseasonable dampness and the usual donor source (schools) is closed for holidays.

Thankful for our younger two, who sang praise songs all the way home, waving, content, happy to be back.  Thankful for our cows, our dog . . . and today the gift of a rooster, a rather impressive fellow, who will become dinner sometime this week.  

Battling roaches, Julia and I vigorously clean out two shelves of tupperware and find one of their hiding places in dark, nested lids.  Yuck.  Welcome home.

Jack and Julia are having a blast at Rwenzori Adventure Training School, i.e. RATS, the January-term for RMS.  I worried about over-taxing Miss Anna, but she has been delightfully creative and energetic.  They learned about cocoa processing locally, went to the river, caught fruit flies on a ripe papaya, and are keeping nature journals.  Sort of science and entertainment wrapped into one.  

Long walk with Heidi, reconnecting, friendship, team.  And particularly an evening with Scott Will and one of our med students Baluku Morris.  I declared the dinner conversation topic to be memories of family, so that Scott could talk about a dear aunt who died last week in the US, a heavy loss for him, here with no one to share it.  Baluku talked about his hard-working grandfather who managed to send his kids to good schools by raising CABBAGES, which must have been a lot of cabbage, because they are cheap.  And I got to share stories about my Dad, in a good and thankful way.  It was a holy evening to share food and acknowledge the many ancestors who have brought us to this point, made us who we are.

The Tension of Home

As we are progressing through the Gospel of John as a team, this week we came to chapter 14 . . . and as we are about to say goodbye to the Pierces, the latest in a 16-year-string of goodbyes, and dialoguing with the packing Johnsons who will leave America and join us this month after their own trial of goodbyes, it was a good chapter to come to.  Because in this chapter Jesus is saying goodbye to His closest friends, too, and He deals with some very key missionary themes of home and help and connection to God.  First we get a concrete glimpse of our true home, the many mansions, diverse and spacious and prepared just for us.  Since we find our Bundibugyo homes crawling with roaches or smelling of mold after even two weeks away . . the idea of someone going ahead and getting things ready is very appealing.  Whenever we study the topic of home, however, a tension arises for me.  There is such a strong theme through the Bible of pilgrimage, that we are strangers, sojourners, travelers, moving through this world where we don't quite belong.  When we are reminded of this, there is a two-fold encouragement, to give us patience with all the things that are less than ideal, and giving us a vision of a final destination.  On a journey we don't expect everything to be just like home, and we look forward to getting back.  We can put up with a lot.

But though we are pilgrims and strangers, we also make homes wherever we go, and in their best moments those homes are a foretaste of Heaven.  When we sense belonging, when we connect in community, when we surround ourselves with beauty and peace, when we sit down to good food, laughter, and music, these are all glimpses of the true home to which we journey.  And so it is legitimate, even honorable, a high-calling this homemaking, to rest our souls and bodies in the early realities of eternity.

And that always leaves us with a tension:  accepting our foreignness, not just to Uganda but to Earth, while simultaneously entering into the community and creativity of carving out a home.  Another paradox, being settled travelers, home-body sojourners.  Ready to leave, content to stay.  Always weighing how much energy to put into homemaking, and how much to reserve for the inevitable moving, be that across continents or into eternity.

We live in transition, all of us, caught between the paradise of Eden and the paradise-to-come of a New Heavens and New Earth.  That truth helps my heart obey the command in John 14:  let not your hearts be troubled.  Transition is not surprising.  It is the atmosphere in which we dwell, and we will never completely get past it in this life.  Jesus knew that, and He gave us a short picture of the goal, and then lots of promises.  God is not just waiting for us to reach Heaven, He has come into time and space, so that there is a constant back and forth as we pray, and the Spirit comes, we believe, and He acts, a shuttling growing connection that sustains us and draws us homeward.  And the glories of the chapter are bookended by two sober realities:  we are sinners, limited people, who will blow it a lot of the time, even when it is really crucial that we have faith (see end of chapter 13, Jesus is saying all these great things to people who are about to desert him) . . . and the Ruler of this World fights us tooth and nail (end of chapter 14).  I like that the promises of home and love and Spirit-led-power fall right smack in the middle of the reality of sin and Satan.

I wish I could put my arms around my team mates, my kids, my mother, my friends, protect all of us from the pain of transition. . .instead I can only share it, and go to John 14 together, to our choice of not-troubled and to God's gift of peace.

Echos of Job

Job amazes me anew every time I read the book, a character whose brutal honesty, poetic lyricism, stubborn faith, and determination to pursue relationship with a God whom he does not understand, inspire.  While his friends insist on a zero-sum universe, an explanation of all that happens in an anthropocentric matrix of good-deserves-good bad-deserves-bad reward and punishment, Job relentlessly speaks the truth:  life does not always appear to work that neatly.  In chapters 9 and 13, after numerous rounds of debate, sometimes speaking to his friends but more often to God, he sums up his prayer in two points:  withdraw Your hand far from me (Let Him take his rod away from me) . . . Let not the dread of You make me afraid (do not let dread of Him terrify me).  Reflecting on this two-fold prayer, it seems to mirror the Gethsemane prayer of Jesus: take the cup away, but your will be done.  In other words, pray first for relief, deliverance, rescue, because that's the child-like cry of the heart in a difficult place, the place of loss, grief, scabbing skin or impending execution.  Even though we know intellectually that God works through difficulty, it is OK to be like Job and Jesus and say, please, stop, I've had enough.  But that prayer is balanced by the second half, the prayer that relationship trumps getting my way.  The prayer that we would not be separated, afraid.  The prayer that we would not choose relief at the expense of choosing God's presence.  After asking for what we want (help!), the request is couched in the deeper desire that God's will prevail, that His ways are preferable to easy ways when a choice has to be made.

Wednesday we awoke to our own home in Bundibugyo for the first time in just over two weeks, after a full journey of everything from baptisms to bungee, reunions and goodbyes, three countries and 9 different places to stay from  tents, to homes, to African bandas, to a hotel.  As good as it is to be home, it is hard, too, to re-enter the reality of this place. Bundibugyo is sort of a Job nursery-school,  the small abc's of suffering, not the crux of the entire God-Satan conflict, but an outpost where minor players can find plenty of testing.  We're not dying of anything wildly tropical on the disease front, but fighting off draggy infections and minor injuries that discourage with their persistence.  We have four live-and-well kids, but two of them are far, far away and the year holds more separation than time together.  We're not outcast from our community, but every step forward requires effort and push.  We have not been devastated by economic disaster, but life is not all smooth and comfortable.  So it was good for the timing of return to fall on a weekly early morning prayer meeting, and we prayed like Job, pouring out our sorrows over things we wish God would change (deaths on the Paeds ward, illness on the team, crises at school, demanding dependent acquaintances who knock early and late for help, people we miss, looming transitions, countdowns to goodbyes, uncertainty).  But then we turned to the second part of the prayer, asking God to be present no matter what the answer to all our petitions, to draw us close, to give us faith to walk without terror in His paths.

To Sudan and Back

We visited WHM's Mundri, South Sudan team this week, catching a ride on a MAF shuttle on Thursday that took us first through Arua and then Yei, and a ride back on an AIM-AIR charter whose pilot turned out to be a father of classmates of both Caleb and Luke. Though the time was short the visit was rich, so it will be hard to encapsulate in a blog post.

Sudan = vast, bright, dry winds, crackling teak leaves, ebony skin, tall thin Africans, heat, space. You can practically see the Uganda/Sudan border from the air, because once you fly over it the population density plummets. For most of the way from Yei to Mundri there is no sign of human touch at all. No roads, no huts or villages, no paths or tracks, no electric lines, not even a goat or cow, just endless plains and a winding, slow marshy river twisting northward. Then near Mundri the world comes to life again with swept dust compounds dotted with four or five neat square thatch tukuls, a radius of farm, and then more space, a spindly line of tan path creating a web between the scattered homesteads.

Mundri = stifled bustle, a growing town, much changed in the two plus years since my first visit or even the one plus years since Scott's. Shimmering afternoon heat, a growing line of shops, more boreholes, pumps, jerry cans, vehicles, trucks, women selling cabbages and corn and lentils, flies buzzing around mounds of cassava, cooking oil doled out in one-cup increments in recycled plastic water bottles. A completed bridge spanning the river we had first crossed by boat. Enclaves of plastic chairs along the main road as hotels/restaurants proliferate, even though most are little more than a simple wooden counter, a tea kettle on coals, a tray of cups. Soldiers in camouflage, striding, sitting, manning check points. As dusk falls generators rumble to life all over the town, glowing lights under the huge expanse of stars.

WHM Community = creative carving out of a loving life in a hard place. They are renting a small but serviceable "modern" cement house right in the thick of the warrens of town compounds, a family of five in the cramped oven of the house with four single women living in two satellite structures, a large safari tent and a typical Sudanese mud/thatch tukul. The perimeter of the yard is fenced (as many others are too), so the effect is one of privacy and space in spite of having other huts abutting all sides. We were thankful to be assigned a small camping tent where the four of us could all stretch out our mattresses by putting one side-ways. It is dry season, and the evening breeze brings cool relief until the night turns pleasantly chilly. We slept well outdoors while the Massos baked in their house. MUCH QUIETER than our town Nyahuka!

1. 

WHM Community to Come, soon = building site, biking in a pod of onjodek ya kanisa (or something like that meaning foreign non-manual laborers who are connected to the church . . called out by happy waving kids all along the way) the 2 1/2 km west of town to view the new WHM compound where Michael is building housing for the team in cooperation with the Episcopal Church of Sudan. This mutual project already has an impressive office-block completed, and the bishop's house and the Masso's are up to the ring beams, neighbors, while the community eating/dining area and one of the single women's small homes are under roof. Creative designs, culturally appropriate, a central larger round house for the group to cook and dine in, surrounded by separate sleeping quarters. All requiring tremendous inputs of labor and perseverance and funds, cement and supplies trucked days away from Uganda, the future slowly emerging from the construction-site rubble, a home and ministry center created out of partnership.

Schools = emerging. Several of the team teach in the slowly resurrecting Bishop Ngalamu Bible college, a post-war post-apocalyptic compound which was once a fine college-level center of learning and is now a nearly deserted shell where a dozen or more lay pastors are embarking upon English and Bible and Community Development. A hopeful expectation is in the air, that an Australian branch of the Anglican communion will rehabilitate the entire campus. Other team-mates teach, and teach teachers, at the church's primary school. While our team prayed for money to rehab this crumbling hardly-a-school-at-all . . . Oxfam arrived and built three spiff classroom blocks. Still with over 700 kids and 16 teachers, even 9 rooms is grossly inadequate. Overflow pours into the old ruins, and under the trees. And lastly the local government secondary school, where one team member braves her way through high school physics instruction. Only three classrooms are inhabitable. The theme: opportunity, rebuilding, eagerness for education, but need in every direction far greater than can be quickly met.

Boreholes = water, life, lines of waiting jerry cans at every tap, never at rest, always pumping and flowing, drawing the life-sustaining moisture from the ground for a growing population as people return to their newly peaceful homeland. We tour, this one fixed by Michael and Christine, this one with a new solar pump. This is why God sent the Massos, and why the Moru were so grateful that they came.

Church = indigenous, wisdom, competence, we spend the evening with the Bishop and his family, highly educated and dedicated people who have left the cities of Nairobi and Kampala to serve their people. Bright-blue clad women in a huge circle, the Mothers Union. New huts being constructed voluntarily for a huge revival conference at the end of the month. An experienced counselor meeting with Bethany to map out their hopes to bring Biblical truth and comfort into war-traumatized lives. Ideas, hope. Resilience, the work of a past century enabling this people-group to re-group and thrive after massive displacement and loss.

Life = relationships, words, tastes. We bike through the villages, greeting, smiling. Bethany and Karen and I sit with a young lady who teaches them Moru, thankful for sticky sweet lemonade in the afternoon's oppressive sunshine. The day ends at Omar's cafe, a semi-circle of plastic chairs, fading orange light, evening chatter, a pile of fluffly pita bread dipped in flavorful pools of lentil, fulful (beans), fried egg or meat, sprinkled with strong onions and salt, as the team practices their recently acquired Arabic. South Sudan, an amalgam of languages. The Bishops's daughter cheerfully explains that she prefers Lugbara, the Ugandan language near her secondary school in Arua, though her family speaks Arabic at home, Moru in town, English in class and with us, and previously Swahili in their Kenya-refugee days.

Peace = fragile. Today marked five years since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South, a tenuous truce, with rumors of new conflict hovering just below the surface of calm progress and new development. We met an activist for non-violence, who had traveled to India to study Ghandi's principles and wants to bring Christians and Muslims, North and South, Arabic and African cultures, together. Elections loom uneasily on the horizon, slated for March or April, but no one seems convinced they can be pulled off. Uncertainty. Most of the country's wealth lies in oil, deposited inconveniently right along the North-South border, disputed.

Meanwhile a brave little team faithfully lives day to day, learning to talk to people and trying to hear their bruised hearts, stumbling into speech and responsibility. Sweating over bricks and mortar and pipes and power, carving out a survivable space for raising children and hosting friends, aware that the whole country may implode again in a year. Laughing together, singing around a fire under the cool relief of the night sky, dreaming, asking God which of the thousand needs and opportunities are their calling. The flickering light that we pray will grow and push back forces of greed and vengeance and fear. This is where God's people should be, rebuilding the broken civilization and bringing witness to the world. Grateful for our glimpse of it all.

Kampala News

Back to the bustle of the city after two days' drive through flooding Kenya, where drought has been drenched in too-much rain.  The newspapers, the talk, is of corruption, scandals, arresting negligent parents and thieves, mob justice, new districts, political rallies or the lack thereof, Kingdoms, border disputes, property rights, road construction, police conduct, donor-dependence, and football.  Nary a word about the anti-gay bill that is all the REST of the world is focused on about Uganda.  That topic flared and fizzled locally.  The degree of interest abroad is completely disproportionate to the degree of concern here.

Since we read both sides of the story, we've been trying to understand the deeper cultural currents that drive such different responses.  One comes to mind quickly: individual rights versus community integrity.  In the West we are appalled at any attempt to limit individual rights and freedom, for Americans in particular the right to sexual self-expression has few limits, the pursuit of happiness few detractors.  And that goal is realized in an immediate, personal way.  Here, and possibly in many parts of Africa, however, the cohesion of the community trumps any individual's needs or desires.  Lasting good comes in the creation of descendants, who will honor the ancestors, keep the values, strengthen the tribe, hold their place in the world.  Historically, anything perceived as a threat to this was quickly pruned by ostracism, or worse punishment.  Africans treat gay-rights-activists the way Americans treat far-right tele-evangelists, with suspicion and scorn and assurance that their views are marginal and harmful to the society as a whole.  Another issue:  the shifting locus of control.  In the last century cultural power was eroded by the creation of nations and states, and so now it seems the government tries to legislate what used to happen on a clan or tribal level.  So, for instance, the prohibition on exploitation of young girls becomes a law and violators are handed to the court rather than the elders; or parents are liable to be arrested for neglect if their child is malnourished.  Since the western assumptions about what is private and what is public do not always translate, the state becomes the arbitrator of the non-compartmentalized African life.  And a third observation:  after decades and decades of having western values imposed by rulers and then insinuated by the power and money that seeps in and undermines, Africans are wary of yet another attempt to tell them what is right and wrong, what they should think and do.  When the British football premier league coaches complained yesterday that the Africa Cup of Nations should not interrupt their season by calling back African players in January, the papers here today railed against their neo-colonialist imperialistic hubris. And when European countries threaten to cut aid because of a harsh and misguided new law, a substantial portion of the population reacts by saying take-your-money-then-and-leave-us-to-our-values.  I do admire their boldness to be so politically "incorrect".

So a casual view from the ground would be that there are major rifts in cultural understanding here, as international opinion condemns Uganda, and Uganda seems mostly to have moved on to more pressing concerns like whether there will be enough food to eat, and whether districts will embezzle money for health, and whether elections will be free and fair.  And that leaves a vacuum for religious leaders to fill, to  come to grips with an African Christian view which refuses to condone extramarital sexual arrangements, while loving, welcoming, and forgiving the humans who are involved in them.  Perhaps only God can fully do that.

Contentment

A little in this world will content a Christian for his passage, but all the world, and ten thousand times more, will not content a Christian for his portion.

This is one "pearl" of wisdom from a little book published in 1648 by Jeremiah Burroughs, and passed on in 2009 by Barb Ryan.  It is so packed with wise and rich truth I'm only taking a few pages at a time.  The quote above is contained in Burrough's paradox that we should be simultaneously satisfied with little and yet not satisfied with much, that we need next to nothing as pilgrims passing through this world, but we hunger for more than the entire world can offer as the home towards which we press, for we will be content with nothing less than God Himself.

And in this morning's Bible reading, God's word to Abram, before he had the land or the heir which he had been promised:  Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield, you exceedingly great reward.  Abram had noted the lack of offspring in his life, and in spite of his wandering by faith, he wondered. A settled home, a full family, these were things he must have longed for, even expected.  But God wanted him to grasp the reality of the greater reward, so in Genesis 15 He comes in darkness and horror, fire and smoke, words and presence.  To Abram, He declares, "I am" what you really need, not real estate or babies.

Day two post-family-split-again . . . not as hard as the first, or second, or third (Luke), or fourth (both Luke and Caleb) time.  But each hug goodbye and yearning memory of wholeness feels like a small death.  And the weeks, days left for us as a family of six tick down, too fast, the unsettled sense that home and vision and hope will slip soon as the pilgrimage takes an unseen bend.  So we pray for Presence, and we turn to the lessons of Burroghs, to be content with this season on the journey and its losses, and yet to not let ourselves ever be content with less than the Goal.

I'd rather be scared to death . . .

. . than bored to death, reads Caleb and Luke's new T-shirt. As their mom, I'd rather that death not be part of the sentence at all . . . but I understand the drive for boys at that age in particular to feel the thrill of pushing the limits. Grandparents send generous Christmas-money, and we encourage spending it on an activity or trip rather then an object. A couple of weeks before Christmas we had a little family meeting: what in Uganda have you never done that you'd really like to do? I was thinking in terms of hikes or camping .. . But Caleb had no hesitation: bungee jump the Nile. And of course if Caleb was going to do it, Luke would too. We checked the age limits: over 13. That meant both could qualify. So after leaving Julius Monday and family behind, we stopped off for the night in Kampala and then headed east again the next morning, to Jinja, where the Nile river begins its cross-continental northward journey, a riot of rapids in a gorge with steep banks. An Australian rafting company called Adrift has set up a bungee-jump from a platform 44 meters (about 125 feet) over the surface of the river.

A very confidence-inspiring burly young Australian man named Jack then took them to the top of this massive steel tower, and with assistance of a Ugandan whose name I did not catch, took a turn wrapping towels and a seat-belt-strapping-sort of tie around their ankles. No harness. Nervous mom was told how secure this binding system is . . but as I watched Caleb I felt like he was the sacrificial lamb being bound for the slaughter. Each boy then hopped with their tied feet to the edge of the platform, and dove off.

Soaring, endlessly, down, into the gorge. It was terrifying to watch. Luke was heavy enough to dunk in the river at the bottom (his choice) but Caleb only touched the water with his finger tips, which meant that when the elastic cord pulled him back up he flew, arms out, to almost half the height again. Both said it was an adrenaline rush but totally awesome, a free fall and a flight, completely worth it.

Sitting high above the Nile, with my feet dangling over the platform, watching them jump and disappear, their choice, trusting the skill of someone else, the stretching cord that would allow them to fall but not die . . . a parable of parenthood. Letting go, trusting the cord formed over a decade and a half of love and nurture to hold them safely, respecting their courage to jump into the abyss. Sorrow and pride and loss and hope all in one intense moment of goodbye. Better scared than bored.

2009, out with a bang

From Sipi Falls we took a well-worth-it detour north into Karamoja, the savannah of NE Uganda where cattle-herding, nomadic, historically-violent tribes make their home, as well as a group of OPC missionaries.  One family was our pastor in Virginia before we left for Uganda, and the other family, couple, and assorted singles we have come to know and respect over our years here.  This is a brave and dedicated group, content with small inroads into an ancient culture so different from the rest of Uganda let alone from us, a culture with strength and beauty but marked too often by alcoholism, rape, suspicion, envy, war with raiding rivals from Kenya, and resistance to outsiders.  They have labored to organize agriculture in a way that provides jobs in the chronic poverty, built a clinic that offers high quality and compassionate medical care, preached and taught.  They are writing booklets in the Karamojong language, which helps preserve and dignify the local dialect.  They are good people and faithful servants of God .. but mostly we went just because we really like the missionary team and wanted to spend our New Years' Eve with them.  Between our three families we have 14 kids between the ages of 10 and 20 . . . a pretty fun group.  There was lots of hearty food and drink, a very long game of coming up with songs containing certain obscure words or phrases, and at midnight a showering of confetti from a chinese-made party tube under a full moon while we toasted the New Year.  And after everyone went to bed, we spent the first hour of 2010 with our good friends talking and praying for each other.  A blessed way to end a tough year, and see in one that will stretch us with its transitions and challenges.  God is good.

More thrills

From the bungee jump (see below) we continued eastward to Mt. Elgon National Park, on the Kenya border, a massive spreading extinct volcano with countless ridges, crevices, acres and acres of dripping rainforest and flowing streams. Through providence and persistence we ended up booking cabins in the park for two nights, bargain prices and so hard to find out about that no one else was staying there in spite of making the reservation very late. The road was barely marked, a narrow slithering mud track that climbed the lower mountainside, past huts and cows and cabbage-gardens, until it ended in a wall of dense forest at the park gate. Four mud-huts huddled in a line in the narrow strip between the road and a stream, we had been in the car most of the day, light was fading, everyone was hungry, and we were resigned that this was to be our cheap accommodation, AT the park but not IN it, watched by the ubiquitous handful of curious kids. But the park ranger opened the gate and instructed us to proceed up the track another two hundred meters. And we found ourselves in lovely rustic pine cabins, surrounded by forest, quiet and peaceful. My original plan (prior to the family meeting in which my kids voted on thrill-adventures rather than endurance-adventures) had been to camp and hike in the park, but we didn't have enough days to reach the peak, so we settled on the cabins and a day hike. We were VERY GLAD as unseasonable el-Nino rain has drenched East Africa, and we were snuggled beneath warm blankets in an actual bed, reading books while rain pounded on the tin roof. It was a perfect total get-away, nothing but birds and mist and shy monkeys, rustling trees. The staff cooked us hot Ugandan food, and we played games and read aloud our annual Christmas kids-book.

We did venture out on a day-hike to a waterfall, just as the sun finally made an appearance, we climbed over slick rocks to stand behind the sheet of falling foam, getting drenched by the spray. The trail took us later to a high ridge, where we could glimpse the peaks of Mt. Elgon as the clouds miraculously parted, leaving us under a shockingly blue sky. Fantastic wild flowers, some bamboo, a troop of blue monkeys and black-and-white colobus. Our guide took us to a cave which I was not so eager to enter, given the whole Marburg-bat-cave connection. He did not buy into that science, and when I expressed relief that no bats were hanging around in sight, he promptly knocked his walking stick echoing into the recesses and a huge fruit bat swooped over our heads.

The real reason we came to Elgon, however, was that our kids' second request after bungee-jumping was to rappel down Sipi Falls. This is a 100-meter (300-ish-foot) water fall nearby, a free-fall of water that spills over a rock lip into a canyon of deep green ferns and flowers. An Italian mountaineer trained some local residents and helped them put in a few rock screws and get harnesses and ropes, and now tourists can rappel over the edge, right beside the falls. The first twenty or so meters one's feet bounce off the crevices of rock, but most of the way you are hanging in the air, with views out into the plains far below, watching the torrent of water rush down beside you and crash into the distant pool at the bottom. More terror mixed with beauty. This time all four kids and I did the descent. The owner of the equipment later said they'd never had someone as young as Jack and Julia go before . . . guess I'm glad I didn't know that before-hand, but they all did great, I'm sure I was the most scared. Scott graciously allowed us to do it and took pictures from a view-point on the side.

Then a strenuous hike back up to the level of the top of the falls. I hope everyone's thrill-deficit has been filled for a while, and we can stick with the really dangerous activities of surviving on road trips . . .