Feeling hot hot hot...

After my remarks about how the rainy reason seemed to be progressing indefinitely, I guess it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise when the dry season arrived on Thursday heralded by four days without rain and temperatures making their way toward the mid-thirties. Now that repairmen are confident that the dirt they use to “fix” potholes won’t be washed away immediately, there’s been a brief flurry of throwing mud into holes. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to simply dump all the dirt in the middle of the road that another team will come to spread out the next day. As such, some roads have ended up being less passable.

It's like the answer to a riddle...

In the absence of rain, there have been several more exciting things that have appeared over the last week. On Wednesday I went into town to collect a mysterious parcel and discovered that I’d been sent an advent calendar by Phil, Sammi, Josh and Charis (brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece). This made quick work of laying a solid and chocolately foundation for Christmas sentiment. The calendar is now in the office at work so I’m embarking on a varied form of cultural education; staff involved so far seem very appreciative.

Ideal

As if this hadn’t been enough for the week (not sure if that implies huge excitement or minimal expectations), I got told on Wednesday evening that I had ANOTHER parcel! After I’d found a suitable excuse to head to the Post Office again, I discovered a Christmassy compilation of contributions from some wonderful friends in Oxford that included food for the stomach, brain and heart and elicited several “Oh, guys!”.

Also ideal

Work over the week went pretty well, made some decent progress with some of the things that are on my ‘Will be summoned back if this is not finished before February’ list. That said, I also spent Thursday morning putting up Christmas decorations at home so I guess it was a bit of a mixed bag. I also got to spend some of the week with Dan’s parents who were over visiting him. Thankfully, Dad liked Settlers so this cut short discussions over what we might get around to. In fact, in a moment of exceptional coolness, we spent some of Saturday afternoon playing poolside Settlers, that’s right!

A final very exciting arrival of the week came in the form of Steve Thomas and Glen who’d been speaking at a Deliverance Church Convention in Kampala, but had then been able to come and see the medical work in Mbale and the village. It was brilliant having them around and was really encouraging to be able to discuss the future of the projects with someone who has been involved from the very beginning. It just so happened that their visit coincided with the Rev Dr’s tea-party to celebrate her ordination to Steve ended up becoming guest-of-honour for the evening. The party was really nice, lots of nice speeches and food. One strange side-show of the evening came from the Dr’s turkey falling rather ill and needing to be killed before it died which people thought would be in the night. So, mid-preparing food for about thirty people, Aunt Grace also got to kill and pluck the Christmas turkey. I did complain about being overlooked, but Aunt Grace said she hadn’t thought I was that keen to murder animals; this struck me as both flattering and untrue. All this party excitement kept me from blogging yesterday which I’m sure has thrown several of you out of your weekly rhythm, so sorry but there was mass-washing-up to do instead (plus ‘tidying-up’ leftover pineapple and cake).

Vis-ta's!

The only down-side of having lots of visitors at once (Ken and Heather also came up) was that I ended up sleeping in the study. After waking up on Monday morning and discovering that my mid-sleep attempts at batting away mosquitoes hadn’t been very successful, I went to bed with Doom (an insect-killing-spray) beside me. I remember wielding this weapon at least twice in the night, but still ended up with about the same number of bites this morning. Good thing I’m on prophylaxis!