Nyahuka and Kampala

Crazy how fast the last 9 days have flown by... and now only ten more days in Africa!

We spent the last 3 days in the Rwenzori Mountains in western Kenya right along the Congo border (in fact we were able to see the Congo from the Mountain Pass road!) in a town called Nyahuka.  The town has a very small team of missionaries living there as it is pretty isolated and relatively unaccessible.  The only way to get there besides flying in a small airplane is by taking a very bad road which scales about the outskirts of the mountain range. Its quite bumpy but the scenery was beautiful.  One positive fact for the people of Nyahuka in being so isolated is that whereas in other parts of Uganda the HIV infection rate is almost 60% of the population, in Nyahuka it is only about 6%.  It is also quite encouraging that the Bible is currently being translated into their tribal language: Laboise (not sure exactly if that is spelled right!) and should be completed soon! 

Its amazing when you go to places like this where there are very few 'mzungus'... its like you are in a parade... we literally stopped an entire soccer team with hundreds of people in the crowd just by driving by... the little kids at the beginning of the crowd screamed MZUNGUS!! and then the rest of the crowd including a lot of the soccer players turned and stared and waved at us as we drove by.... where else in the world would something like that happen??  I also got some fun pictures of the little kids who chased after our car.  They love to wave and look at us from a distance but some of them get quite scared if we come too close. Apparentely somewhere along the line, the older ones thought it would be a fun joke to tell the little kids that white people will sometimes eat them... we didn't know this at first and Jeannie made the comment "You are just soo cute I could eat you right up." She meant it as a figure of speech of course but learning about their jokes it probably very much scared the kids !!

Now we are in Kampala (the capital of Uganda). This morning we visited a state of the art mission hospital that specializes in orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation as well as plastic surgery to treat things like cleft lips and burns. Patients come from all over Uganda and northern Tanzania to get treatment here. Surgeries are done for free and all the patient needs to come up with is money for their stay in the hospital and their food... in desperate circumstances it is possible for them to get assistance in this too. It was really encouraging to see the clean hospital well stocked with medicines and medical materials and they even had an xray machine which is not always common to see in hospitals in more remote areas. When they have the money this is the kind of thing they are working to create, its pretty cool and obvious that they do make a difference in the community for those they serve. 

We will be in Kampala for 2 more days and then back to Kenya for the final week.  Please pray for safe travels through this busy city and for safety  in general (several of us had money stolen from our purses yesterday). Please pray that God would expand our hearts with love and give us wisdom towards what he wants us to do here in Africa.