Lately

School has been in full effect around here lately. I have been working everyday with both Trayton and Kidist on all of their subjects. If you ask me, I'd say we're having fun, but an adults fun-o-meter might rank a little differently than a 9 year olds. Chloe has been doing great with her schooling as well. She has it a little harder than the other 2 kids. Since she is in 6th grade, all of her work is done online, so I am here to tutor her and help when needed. Since we started a week and a half behind, she has had to play catch up. Instead of doing 6 lessons a day, she's had to do many more in order to catch up. I told her that when she is all caught up, I'll take her on a date for dinner and milkshakes. We are almost there! Pray that this last little bit of catching up can come with ease and little stress.

Trayton, Kidist, Chloe, and I on our first day of school :) 

Since school has started, we've been spending most of our days in the compound. We do school from 8:30 to about 2 or 3. When we're done we usually run around the compound. We play basketball, soccer, eat jackfruit or sugar cane, or maybe even a game of nukem if we have enough people. This past Saturday we had the opportunity to get out of the compound and travel to Tororo. Tororo is the home of our friend Patrick. He took us to his village and we spent the afternoon there. His village is beautiful! It sits back, near a stream, with fields all around. There is even a spot, where if you stand in the right place, you can see the hills of Kenya! We spent the afternoon hanging out with his family and friends. We took a walk down to the stream, toured huts, and spent some time in the kitchen. While Trayton played soccer with some of the boys, the girls played jumprope. The little girls there sang a song while we swung the rope. Although language is a barrier, everyone shares the joys of laughter. A quote I came across the other day says it best, 'Laughter is the shortest distance between two people' - Victor Borge. 

Here are some pictures from Tororo:

Cross on top of a hill in Tororo

Apuki Ida Michelle (Patrick & Kate's new baby girl) and I 

Apuki Ida Michelle 

Trayton playing soccer with some of the boys.

Kidist and I playing jumprope with Brenda.

While we were playing with the kids, Kate (Patrick's wife) and Sara (Patrick's sister-in-law) were cooking away. We had pork, chicken, rice, pasta, and atop. It was all great! Everyone was so welcoming, and we had fun learning more about their village and visiting. I think we'll have to make another trip there sometime in the future. 

Besides school, things have been going pretty well. Everyday brings something new, whether it's somebody knocking at our gate or giant monitor lizard roaming our yard - yup, that happened. This not-so-cute thing was found in our yard the other day.

It is the second one we found in the past couple weeks. We are not sure how they keep getting in our compound, but we're lucky to have Patrick here to take care of them for us. After the lizard nearly made our dog Charlie go blind, by smacking him with it's tail, we decided to have a little fun with it. We put it outside of our gate right by the road to scare people when they pass. We took videos through a crack in our gate to get people's reactions. We decided that if we were in America, we would get better reactions. The people here were a little shocked, but we didn't see anything worth sending into Africa's Funniest Home Videos (if there is such a thing).

So, that about sums up everything that has been going on here in Jinja, Uganda. Thank you all for your love and support. I'll leave you all with a few prayer requests:

- Adoption for Josephine and Noah. Chris and Michelle have finally received their written ruling from the court, but it's missing the judges signature. He is apparently on leave through the end of October, so we're praying he decided to make a pit stop at the courthouse very soon!

- We have had recent news that Christian (the oldest of the Fisher kids, who is back in America) has injured his knee while playing football. It might be a meniscus tear, but we're hoping it's just a sprain so it will heal itself instead of having to get surgery - we'll know more in the coming weeks.

- School. Always a need for prayer when it comes to education :) Pray that we can stay focused in our nice outside classroom, and that Chloe can get caught up soon so she doesn't feel so weighed down by so many 'overdue' assignments.

That is all the requests I have for now. Hope you're all doing well in the U.S.! Sending lots of love from Uganda. ♥

Grace & Peace

Kendall