New knickers and sewing stockings

Well it has been a very busy but blessed February and March. With a visit from the Ewing parents, a Safari holiday,  Nutrition meetings continuing on Kome and planning for household sanitation work in April…

Visitors from afar…

My mum and dad visited for 3 weeks and it was a delight to show them the sights of Mwanza and Kome. It was so nice to see them after a whole year, and Tabitha and Reuben certainly got used to them being around! In their bags they managed to find space for (alongside tools, books and chocolate) new pants for the kids and a bag of black ladies stockings (keep reading to find out why!)

‘It’ll be just like camping’ is the advice we give when visiting the island, and yes, just like camping, it did rain! We had the privilege of having the last wet-weather church service at Nyakabanga chuch, which had been postponed due to a torrential downpour, and then started again during the service!

Praise God the church now has a roof, so my parents were the last ones to get sunburnt and wet simultaneously while worshipping in this church!

Nyakabanga Church, March 2018

Mama’s meetings…

The womens meetings at Nyakabanga church on Kome island have become regular, every week with Gertrude doing a fantastic job of coaching and translating.  The topics of conversation have been around the importance of exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, and the importance of appropriate food in the months after. Breastfeeding discussions are much easier with a model breast to hand, so this was a priority job for my mum who donated her old tights!

The work with the ladies group is in full swing , with all manner of topics being discussed, from positioning a feeding baby, to preparing foods for older babires and toddlers. Many of the women in the group assume it normal to introduce non-milk foods to an infant not even a month old, for example uji (watery maize porridge) and banana and they have some disbelief that milk alone is enough.

Safari so good!!

Its a special year for the Ewing Family, our 10th wedding anniversay in May, my parents 40th anniversary and a ?0th birthday for someone, so we were treated to a 5 day safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater. This really was a holiday of a lifetime and we saw so much its impossible to report. We were rewarded with numerous giraffe,  elephants protecting a dead relative from a pride of lions, a cheetah stalking some wildebeest,  and a leopard hiding a cub in a tree. The views in the crater were also phenomenal and impossible to capture the scale in a photo!

Starting Sanitation…

We’ll be starting the santiation work in the communities on Kome next month so I am busy organising the content of the household training. We aim to work with around 6 families in the church community, and it is hoped these families will become educators of the neighbouring  households. We are not attempting anything massive but suggesting simple technologies for improving handwashing, water treatment and safe storage of drinking water.  The approach is that everyone (including us!) can make small improvements at a household level on issues surrounding water and sanitation wherever they are on the “ladder”. By giving the families a biblical understanding of how and why they should be taking care of their households we hope the families will perservere with the suggestions we make, and in turn the community at large will benefit.

A family discussing what small changes they can make to their toilet facilities