Crunch Time! (Thursday, Jan 08)

Just a random picture of a guy, his boda, and his morning delivery of eggs... haha, this is Africa!

Back at ACTS, January’s going to be a hectic month as we struggle to complete all of our work before our time here ends. It really is crazy to realize that we have just over a month left out of our nearly six month work term in Uganda. January is essentially our last month of work; although we are not officially finished until the middle of February, all but three of those days are allocated for either travel or debriefings. I can say that for everyone on our team, crunch time has arrived, and will likely continue until our very last working day.

For the roving team, our mandate from the higher-ups was to find and submit six project proposals during our time here. And while we knew from the start that it was a lofty, if not impossible, goal to aim for, we were still hoping to get as close that number as we could. Well, we’ve got two completed thus far with another identified and to be designed. However, even with that last one, it is still only three, half of the magic number that we’re aiming for. But we’ve been able to hit the ground running in our two days back thus far. We somehow managed to meet with the extremely-busy-and-difficult-to-track-down water engineers for three different districts yesterday, and yet another different one today. From these meetings, we’ve already seen several promising sources. Now, it’s still a lot of work before each of these sources becomes a full blown project design and proposal; however, it’s definitely an encouraging and promising beginning to this last month of work. So, a prayer request would definitely that everyone on our team would be able to finish strong and really make a good push to the end, that we’d have the energy and motivation to make that extra effort. And with that, I hope, for all of us, that we would be able to see some tangible results for our efforts.

Finally, in my reflections in the new year, I was again reminded of all the support that I continue to receive from many of you. So A SINCERE THANKS TO YOU for the prayers, the emails, and the letters (I received three all at once today!). It really is a great encouragement to know that I can always share my work, my experiences, my prayers and concerns to receptive ears and open hearts, thank you.