Sunday, July 8, 2012

Sunday evening, no wait! Monday morning 12:30am. It is 5:30pm your time on Sunday, in Michigan. Take a good look at that picture of the team from the last blog. Some of us don't resemble that pictures much right now. We had an uneventful trip over until walking onto the Amsterdam-Entebbe flight (which stopped, by the way, in Kigali, Rwanda), the gate agent took Sydney and Katie's small carryon suitcases and said they needed to be checked. They both took the bag tag and we got on - little did we know the tag was marked to Kigali not Entebbe. So, missing those two bags when we arrived - ugh. We filled out all the paperwork and went on for the 40 minute ride to Entebbe. We got to bed about 1:30am last night with promises that those two bags would come on the morning flight this morning from Kigali and would be delivered to our hotel in Kampala. Pipe dream! Those of you who have been here are chuckling...

No bags this morning and when I called the luggage folks on the ticket they said they had nothing about the bags in their system. To end this story, we kept calling the airport all day and no one answered. We finally drove all the way back out there to stand in front of them. A very nice woman helped us and called Kigali airport and we at least learned the bags were there in front of them. They promised to send them tonight and voila!, we drove to entebbe for the third time in 24 hours and got them. Just returned.

Good news!!! Christopher arrived with the ProRide van. We were all very, very happy to have him as our driver. We went to Richard and Generous Turinawe's church this morning - St. Stephens Church of Uganda. They had a great service and we contributed by having Karen play her violin and we all sang Amazing Grace. Dr. Milton Mutto (doctorate in Epidemiology)  preached a simply incredible sermon on how the Uganda people play victim to their circumstances and they need to realize their blessings from God and work diligently to "prosper." Curt turned to me (Sue) and said, "This guy really has the pulse on Uganda." I thought the same thing and passed a note to Generous to ask her if we could take Dr. Mutto and his wife to dinner and talk with him. I'll come back to this.

We then met at Turinawe's for a wonderful lunch after church. Following that we left for near Entebbe to meet with the Minister of Agriculture at his home. He is a distant relative of Richard's. We learned some great information for the Agricultural team and we have his complete support in partnership with what the Government of Uganda is trying to do in Agriculture. Another man, Stephen B. joined us as well and he is a Rotarian who is very interested in partnering with our Rotary clubs to help us with some very specific projects. We plan to follow up.

We then met Mutto's for dinner and had, maybe the most meaningful conversation yet in six years, about our ministry. I was brought to tears. Next stop at 10:30pm was the airport to pick up the bags. Phew.

God is good. We have all the bags - all 22, 50-lb bags and all our carryons. We have Christopher as our driver. We get to meet another Minister of the Parliament tomorrow morning before we hit the long road for Kabale. Our Ugandan cell phones are in need of new sim cards so unusable until Monday when MTN opens - but they are charged up and ready to go. So ends our first 24 hours here. And this was our "rest" day...

We hope you are all well.

1 comment:

  1. Glad y'all are safe and well! Praying for safe car travels on the roads and big smiles to greet you in Muko :)

    ReplyDelete