Gettin' Jiggy with the Jiggers!

Last week was a busy week! We started off the week by heading out to the village of Niagobya on Monday. We are SO close to being finished with the playground. Just today we went and finished priming the watch tower and put on a first coat over most of it. Tomorrow we are heading out early to put on a second coat and do some touch ups. Then the playground will finally be complete! A project which we thought would only take a week, ended up taking us about a month now. The kids are so anxious to play on all the toys. On Saturday I had the opportunity to push many of them on the swings. The laughs were contagious, and the smiles were bright! It is so great to see the children play and have fun!

All the children playing and waving when we drove up this morning 

Kidist, Michelle, and I painting the watch tower

 

The children loving the swings

This past week we also dropped off our friends Betty and Esther at Uganda Christian University (UCU). It felt a lot like a college campus feels in America. There were many people walking around. They had different tents set up and music playing in the fields. UCU is one of the top universities in Uganda. I am so excited to hear how classes are. Betty and Esther are going to school to be teachers so of course that makes them even cooler in my book ;)

So I bet many of you are wondering where the title of this post came in...well here it is:
This week Kidist and I had the opportunity of experiencing our first jiggers, and Chloe had her second. For those of you who don't know, a jigger is a sand flea found in Sub Saharan climates. We got the jiggers out in the village while we were painting. The building that we keep most of our supplies in is said to be jigger infested, so the teachers at the school moved all of our things for us to a different room. I guess we were a little too late though.
Here is a nice diagram I found on Sole Hope's website. It explains very nicely what a jigger does.

We are so blessed to have Sole Hope right down the road from us. They are an awesome organization that helps remove jiggers from peoples feet, but that's not all they do! They also educate, give hope, and supply people with shoes to become healthy again. Jiggers can enter all over the body, and there can be many at a time. I had the pleasure of having 6 total jiggers. Kidist had 3 removed and another one was found alive, crawling on her foot [Eeek!], and Chloe had 1 removed. Thanks to our friend Moses, from Sole Hope, he removed them (almost) pain free.

Kidist getting a jigger removed by Moses. I'm holding her hand just in case it hurt :)

I'm going to try to explain this the best I can without getting too graphic. When the jigger crawls under the skin, it lays an egg. Then as you can see in the diagram, the egg turns into many eggs and egg sacks. So, Moses sterilized our feet, and then took a safety pin and began opening the dead skin around where the eggs were. Then he removed the dead jigger and egg sacks, and we were jigger free! As for my experience, it wasn't too bad. Before removal, it was a little tender to touch the spot where I had the jigger, and it was also quite itchy. The removal wasn't too bad either, Moses did a great job! Sole Hope does some amazing things. From now on, when we head out to the village again this week, I will be wearing my closed toe tennis shoes. Although I said getting a jigger wasn't too bad, it's not something that I wish to experience again if I don't have to. I think it's more of a mind thing for me, knowing that I have a bug in me that laid eggs is a little unsettling.  

Click here to check out Sole Hope's website. Read more about all the great things they do!

A huge thanks to all of you for your continued prayers and support!

Grace & Peace

Kendall