Christmas Carol Ugandan style

First I have to note that this was written after 8 hours in the car on Christmas Eve (their traffic is just as bad here and you also have to add the element of BEAT UP roads). It brought us much laughter as we put into the song some of the festive way Ugandans celebrate Christmas that we had been observing.

Notes to try to explain what in the world this song is talking about are red.

Sung to Nat King Coles famous song " Merry Christmas to You"

Tilapia fish roasting on each Corolas grill Taken to relatives in areas with no lakes(litterally strapped to the grill of thier cars most of which are Corolas.
Sunshine burning up yous nose
Christmas hair being worn everywhere I've never seen so many colors or so much poof
and folks dressed up like who knows How about Neon orange and Lime green

Everybody knows Matokee and some gnut sauce Masked bananaish food and peanutish sauce
Help to make the season bright
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
will find it hard to sleep tonight

They know uncle Godfrees coming ova I think we know a hounred Godfees
he's loaded lot of goats and chickens on his boda Note Chickens still alive, Boda=Motor bike
and every mothers child is going to spy
to see if the chicken will break loose and fly

And so I'm overing this simple phrase
for kids from 1 to 92
although its been said many times many ways
Merry Xmas too you I've never seen it written CHRISTmas here
it is always written Xmas.


Hope everyone had a great Christmas!!!!!!

Moments

SO I can't get the picture to work here at the internet cafe. So sad!!! Hopefully I painted a good picture with my words. Kels

Where has time gone??? It has been forever since I have written ANYTHING. Since the last time I wrote Travis and I have celebrated our six month marriage and living in Uganda anniversaries. I am just going to write a bit about a few things that have happened in the last month so it isn’t like it was completely lost. h

Thanksgiving. I thought it would be terrible. Thanksgiving is my fav and it is just not the same without family, fall leaves and cooler weather. It is hot hot hot here and it just didn’t seem like Thanksgiving at all. However, the Lord truly blessed us and surrounded us with great brothers and sisters in Christ that we were able to celebrate with and to my delight it actually did feel like Thanksgiving day. So all in all I was very thankful for so very many things that it would have been silly to dwell on the not so perfect things. I also tried my hand at baking Thanksgiving style. I managed to successfully make, carrot cake, apple pie, a chicken, Pumpkin cream cheese cake (it was a box so it doesn’t really count), and my family’s FAVORITE rolls (they were actually the one disappointment because they didn’t raise). Here is a picture of my works of art. I even made a ridiculous boat for the chicken to float in on and named it the cauliflower after my adorable nephew Canaan.

Christmas cookies. Hip hip hurray for girls my age (well close anyways). One thing that I miss more that anything is of course my sisters and girl friends. There are great ladies whom I love and learn a lot from but most of them are twice my age. Anyways, one of the missionaries daughters came home for the holidays and so I have been able to have girl time which has been sooo refreshing. We made beautiful Christmas sugar cookies together the other day and had way to much fun just being girls and laughing about silly things like girls are suppose to. I loved it because I wasn’t sure if they would think my Binkley way of artistically decorating each cookie as a unique individual was insane or not and miraculously they were just as precise. Here are the masterpieces.

Grasshoppers. We have enjoyed wonderful North American delicacies the last few weeks so it was only natural that we should try some of the Ugandan ones and yes I am talking about crunchy grasshoppers J. I need to you realize that Entebbe is a quite modern town with many wealthy and middle class people. The UN has a large base here and the international airport is right outside of town and so there are constantly people from all over the world filtering through. Sometimes I feel like I am hardly in what I have always thought of as AFRICA. Then there are times when strange and not so normal things happen like when all the workers in the Air Serv office were practically dancing because they are so excited to have found some grasshoppers at the market. Well I tried then and they really weren’t that bad after all, you’ve just got to look them straight in the eye and tell yourself “it’s ok, this is all quite normal”. They were even sautéed in a nice oil and onion mix.

AIM Air. Travis and I are going to be finishing up at Air Serv December 15th and through the Lord opening miraculous doors we will be serving with AIM Air from January through March. AIM (African Inland Mission) is a mission organization that has an aviation programme which we are going to be volunteering with for three months. We will be staying here in Entebbe and stepping into the shoes of a few of their missionaries while they are back in the States. I am going to be doing admin work in the office and Travis will be flying so we have been super busy learning all that we need to know to take over this thing while the permanent guys are gone. We will be moving into one of the missionary’s houses who is going to be in the US.

Steps Of Faith Uganda Christmas Praise Concert. Last Saturday SOF Uganda (the group of girls that that I have been teaching dance to) put on a little (ended up having around 60 people show up) Christmas concert where we went through the story of Christ’s birth through the girls reciting scripture, everyone singing carols and of course DANCING. The girls did a great job for their first time performing! I was really excited to be able to do a dance as well. I hadn’t really planned on it because with the computers and Ipod gone we have no music and it would be really difficult to get any here. But God did His thing and, surprise!!!! provided a Christian bookstore with Christmas music, CD with Breath of Heaven (a song I have danced to in the Nativity SOF before) and the coolest part was that is was actually a recording that had been redone by Sarah Groves who is an AMAZING artist (I sang one of her songs to Travis at our wedding). God is so cool!!!!!!!! It made me cry to see how He just patches up everything. Then He and I got together and shared beautiful moments of Him teaching me a dance in which I could worship Him and share the Joy of Praising Him at the Concert.

These are just a few moments that we have had in the last few weeks. I’m glad I got the drive to sit down and share them with you. Till next time. Kels