On Saturday the Aberdeen team, Jacob, and myself piled into a van at an unearthly hour of the morning (6:45am) for the 2 hour drive up to Jinga, for a spot of white water rafting! We tackled up to grade 5 rapids as we rafted down the River Nile for a few hours, stopping for lunch on an island before the drive back to Kampala. Most of you know that I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie anyway, as well as loving being in, near or on the water in any capacity, so I thoroughly enjoyed myself!!

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, I was taken completely by surprise in the evening when the Aberdeen team took me out for dinner to celebrate my birthday! They had all these lovely hand-made items sitting on my bed when I got out of the shower, informing me that I was being taken to Cafe Roma’s for a spot of birthday banter. I was so surprised, and taken aback to be honest… really wasn’t expecting it and was just blown away by how they were thinking about me and wanting to treat me. Dinner was lovely, as were the very touching toasts that everyone made. I am continually amazed at how close you can grow to a group of people in such a short space of time, and saying goodbye to the girls on Sunday night was hard. It’s pretty incredible how God takes you to the other side of the world to develop friendships with people who live 3 hours away from you!

The staff at Shalom brought out a big cake after we got back from dinner, as the girls sang happy birthday… the cake is slowly disappearing!

Seriously, a massive thank you to all you folks who have made my birthday so special: to the Aberdeen girls, to Jacob, to my Aussie mates who left me a lovely card and a great song on my camcorder!

Just got back from a week in Kiwoko with the Aberdeen team, working in a primary school there. It’s been an amazing week, and a difficult week, on many levels. Looking forward to a little R&R this weekend. Proper updates soon.

Julie never ceases to inspire me… take this, for example…

The song ended up being about how love is slow.

Most of the circles I’ve ever run in have been ones where there is tremendous pressure to find love. And marry it. Asap.

…

We’re all the same. No one wants to be alone. We’re better together.

We are better together. But not when we push it.

I’m tired of being told to feel anxious about it. I’m tired of feeling pressure and I’m tired of people having to make decisions that will cause them pain.

Read the rest of it here.

Yesterday I headed out to a street kids project called “Jesus Cares For All” with the Australian team. The project comprises of a orphanage, a nursery & primary school, and a church, and is run by a woman called Mamma Flavia (hope I spelt that right!).

Mamma Flavia & Rachel

She was a successful business woman before she met Jesus, and he gave her a vision of looking after his orphaned children. It was beautiful to listen to her story, hearing how she started with one, and now has 180 kids at the school. Unfortunately I didn’t catch how many are living with her currently. They have 50 acres of land, purchased with FOL help, which Mamma Flavia dreams of developing so there is space for 300 children, and for a secondary school.

It was heartbreaking at times to hear of how she longs to care for more abandoned and orphaned kids, and has the space for them… but not enough resources to feed them all. Can you imagine turning your kids away because you couldn’t feed them? You can help with this! Visit the FOL website for information on sponsoring a child through FOL.

For the past few days, some of the Aussie team have stayed behind at the guesthouse to paint a few banners for the school they’re working in…

Check out the blogs from some of the other teams here with FOL at the minute:

Hamilton Road Baptist team
Aberdeen Uni CU team

While you’re at it, you should check out Jess Fairchild Conrads blog too. She’s working up in Gulu with Invisible Children as a photographer, and her work is incredible. I’m hoping to get up for a few days to meet up with her!

I’ve had a pretty lazy weekend, and it’s been welcomed! The past week of traveling all over the show with teams was incredible but pretty tiring, so I was ready for a nice slow weekend. Kicked off on Friday evening by heading down to Entebbe to pick up the Aberdeen team, who are lead by my good friend Susie. Susie is the person who put me in contact with FOL initially, so it was cool to get to spend a bit of time with her at the weekend. I’ll be heading up to Kiwoko with them next Sunday for the week, so will have plenty of time to get to know the girls!

We spent a few hours chilling out at Garden City on Saturday afternoon, including introducing the girls to the food court - quite the experience! There are about 8 different restaurants, they all come at you from different directions with menus, pointing things out, hovering over you like flies until you choose their menu! I also managed to bump into a friend from Glasgow who’s out in Kampala for a month, which was good fun.

This morning we went along to the International Church here in Kampala, and man, I loved it! They aren’t particularly high-tech in the way some churches would be, but they made so much use of such a wide variety of creative and artistic worship, it was incredible to watch/participate in. I was trying to find some of the liturgy they used in communion this morning, because it just blew me away by its power - can’t seem to find it right now, but if I do I’ll post it up.

How’s your weekend been?

Over the last few days I’ve been out and about with different teams every day - Love For Life, Emmanuel, and Hamilton Road Baptist, took a trip into Kampala city centre to buy some fabrics for a team, went to Entebbe to meet a team at the airport, hung out with the Aussie team here at Shalom, took a trip to visit Rapha medical clinic, and such like… it’s been a busy but excellent few days!

I’ll try post a little more about the teams and what they’re up to later, along with some more photos, but for now here’s one of my favourite shots so far. It was taken on Monday when I headed out with the Love For Life team.

On Saturday I went to Grace’s “introduction”, a kind of Ugandan pre-wedding wedding. It was the longest I’ve ever sat still in my whole life… we must have sat for about 5 hours before we left, and it still wasn’t over then! There are a lot of speeches, and role-play type things, the bride finding the groom, giving gifts, the fathers agreeing upon a gift for the daughter, lots of traditional music and dance. It was definitely a very cultural experience, although not one I plan to repeat anytime soon!

A few snaps:

Thought I’d give you guys a wee glimpse of one of the FOL guesthouses, Emmaus. I’m currently staying in their other guesthouse, Shalom, but Emmaus is just up the road a short walk, and it has stunning views out over the countryside & the city…

Not bad, eh?! Check out the Fields Of Life website to see more of what the charity does. There isn’t much information on the guesthouse online (in fact, there’s pretty much none!), but I’m working on that! I’m designing a brochure for the guesthouses which will either be put online as a PDF or reworked into the site to include online booking.