Conversations with Gift

Blog posts may be infrequent because wifi is not always easily accessible. Right now we are at a hotel, so wifi is available :)

Right after I typed those first two lines, I was approached by a friend :) We met Lucy this morning when she waved at us from behind a doorway. She sat by dad for a little bit and we managed to figure out that she was two and enjoyed giving high fives and knuckles :) While she is probably learning English and knows a few words, she is most comfortable with her local language. She came over and sat by me and I assumed she didn't want to stare at a bunch of English words, so I put her on my lap and we went on google images to look up animals and flowers :) She knew a couple different farm animals and would sometimes repeat the animal names after I would say them. When we were looking at flowers, she could tell me the colors. Then, we went on snapchat to play around with the filters. She was SO cute. 

ANYWAYS. On our last flight, we met a guy who said that his final destination was Kilimanjaro. We asked him why, and he said he was going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro!! We wished him good luck, and his response was, "Well, I will either be happy or I will be humbled".

Once we landed on Thursday night in Entebbe, we went through customs and immigration and found our driver, Gift, who was standing with a big sign that said "CLAY". Dad almost got in on the wrong side of the car because everything is flipped in Uganda. The driver's seat is on the right side of the vehicle, and they drive on the left side of the road. We rode with Gift to our hotel and had some really cool conversations. Gift's full time job is being a driver for people. He grew up in a village 40km from Kampala (Uganda's capital) where he milked cows. He told us that when he was a kid, he and his four sisters (but mostly him) used a mixture of cow dung, ashes, and water to make the floor of their home. AND they used their hands 😳. So, if you didn't use your bare hands to coat the floor of your house with cow dung this morning, I hope you feel at least a little bit grateful :) 

Another story Gift told me was about his wife, Rebecca. He said that they didn't want a child until after at least one year of marriage, but they weren't using any form of birth control. They knelt down on their knees and prayed about it, and after 1 year and 3 months Rebecca became pregnant. Then, Gift prayed hard that their daughter would be born on his birthday, and she was born on July 17th which is Gift's birthday :) His daughter's name is Moriah. 

When I told Gift that it was my first time in Africa, he laughed and clapped and said, "Ahhh this is a whole new adventure". And I would have to agree. I have been to China, Jamaica, Mexico, now Canada, and all over the US, but nothing is quite like Africa. 

I asked Gift if there was a specific place that he has always wanted to travel to, and he said that the United States is his dream country. "I told God that even if I step only one foot in the United States, my life will be complete. Even if I have a connecting flight there and only get to see the airport, I will be so happy." He also said that the US visa is one of the hardest visas to obtain. A couple of his friends have gotten US visas and they say that it's the "new Jerusalem" and "the promised land". It's sometimes easy to lose perspective when we experience hardship or tension in the US, but we really have so many blessings. The fact that we can turn the faucet at home and clean, drinkable water pours out is just one of those blessings.

The main roads from the airport to the hotel were well paved, but once we turned off onto side roads, the path was super bumpy. It was about midnight when we made it to the hotel where we were greeted by a boy named Daniel. Our hotel was pretty fancy, but don't be fooled 😉, what looks like a canopy above my bed in the picture below is really a mosquito net! Since yellow fever and malaria are diseases contracted by mosquitos, most hotels here have these nets for protection at night. We went to bed pretty quickly after we arrived because we needed to be up by 6 am the next morning for our first full day in Uganda!!!