June 12, 2012

June 12, 2012      Hello everybody!  I'm so sorry it's been a little while since I've updated, we've been pretty busy with traveling, safari, and the team leaving over the past couple days.  I hope everyone is doing well as we are here.  The team concluded their crusade on Wednesday evening and we left for safari very early thursday morning.  I don't want to complain over and over about the actual bus and trip there and back, so I'll leave it at this- we were promised a new van with air conditioning and the van the driver brought was very old with NO air conditioning.  We traveled 8 hours there (first 3 hours on unpaved, pot hole covered road) and 6 hours to Kampala after the safari (first 2.5 hours on unpaved BUMPY road).  In case some of you were unaware, I get super car sick, so I was a little uncomfortable.  For about 40 min of the drive to kampala on the napped road there were swarms of tse tse flies, so we had to drive with windows up in the scorching heat with no air conditioning! All we can do is laugh about it now, but it sucked!        As far as the safari goes we definitely had an adventure!  We got there thursday afternoon and quickly had lunch and went out on our first game drive.  It was the perfect weather and we were out until dark, so it was just beautiful.  We were greeted at the park by elephants and around sunset of our night game drive we came n contact with a herd of about 50 giraffes that were about 50 feet away from us.  We were able to get out and walk towards them, which was amazing.  Giraffes are my favorite animal and it as such a "wow moment" to be up close and personal with that many giraffes in their natural habitat.  The next day we went out very early at 6 am for a morning game drive that ended up turning into a half day game drive haha.  Game drives in general normally go about 4 hours give or take a few, but we ended up being gone for 6.5 hours on ours.  About 4 hours into our drive our van got stuck in the sand in the middle of the tall grass region.  All I could do was laugh the whole time because the guys were literally using sticks they found around us to try and dig the sand out from under the car, and then all 9 of us would try pushing it out to no avail.  It really was pretty funny and definitely an adventure.  The guide didn't have service on his phone so we waited 45 minutes until another truck came driving down the path-I'm sure you can imagine our excitement!  Again, small world because the people that saved us were from Colorado and have been living in Kampala.  So after that we made our trek back to the entrance of the park.  Before we got stuck we actually got to see a 3 legged lion that lived in the park.  It was so neat because I rode on top of the van the whole time and we literally got 10 feet away from it and it just sat there and stared at us for a little bit.   The rest of the safari was good and we got to stay the night in Kampala which was a lot of fun because I haven't had an opportunity to spend a lot of time there.        Yesterday (Monday) was our much needed off day, which allowed us to catch up on sleep and get ready to get back into a routine.  I'm so happy to start the routine back up today and have a sense of normalcy back, but I really enjoyed our time with the team!  Today at school I found out Eva wasn't feeling well again, so she walked back to the clinic with Amanda and me and we found out she has a very high temperature and has to get treated for malaria.  Poor girl screamed and cried when they went to put the needle in for an IV, but luckily I managed to sit there and hold and comfort her again.  I took a little pb&j picnic in to eat with her and we watched Rio on a laptop while she had her treatment in the clinic.  I love that child so much it scares me to think about leaving her :/.  Please continue to pray for that precious girl.   I miss and love all of you and really really appreciate your prayers.  Sleep has been troubling again a little bit so please pray for peaceful nights as well! Thank you all!