3 Items Gone

Wow! It’s the Monday before Christmas! It hardly seems like it since it is so low key here.

Well, not much exciting happened here today except the gas ran out in the cylinder for our stove while Mama Fifi was in the middle of making lunch so we had spaghetti sauce without the tomatoes and we ate it on bread instead of pasta. It worked. We had sandwiches and salad for supper. (No microwave or electric appliances!) Mark will go out and get a replacement tomorrow morning.

Our third Kinyarwanda lesson was today. Wow. Lots of interesting words and difficult pronunciations. Joyce, our teacher, said that her 9 month old baby got sick Friday so she took her to the clinic and got some medicine for her. On the way home, around 7 PM, a man snatched her purse! He got her money, cell phone, passport and the baby’s medicine she had just bought. She said she went back to the clinic where they gave her more medicine with the understanding that she will pay next week. She is asking for prayer for a way to get a new cell phone and for her baby to get well. We asked her if purse snatching was a common problem and she said yes. I don’t carry one if I don’t have to.

The excitement in the neighborhood the past few days has been connected with a dump truck. When we arrived here there was a big green dump truck parked across the road from our yard making it difficult for us to get out of our driveway. It was missing the rear wheels and looked like it had been there awhile. We’ve noticed the neighborhood kids have had fun playing in it and on it, climbing all over it and pretending to be driving it. It has been quite the attraction. They also figured out that if they climbed up on top it, they could see into our yard. Hmm. Well, Friday, there was some commotion out in the street and later when we went outside, we saw that some men had arrived to work on the truck. It seems they had needed a new axle (Mark could tell you better) and they had to have it imported from Uganda. They spent quite awhile on Friday and Saturday working on it. Sunday morning on our way to church, they were working on the steering wheel – we wonder if the kids had broken it. Sunday afternoon they spent a little while working on starting it up. They got it going but only a few feet. Eventually they got it going and turned it around to go out to the main road but for some reason, it quit again, this time in front of the neighbor’s house. Late this afternoon there was a lot more commotion and laughter - finally the green dump truck went on its way! I’m sure the neighborhood kids are disappointed to see their playground gone. .. Mark was hoping they’d leave the old axle behind. He had plans to use it as a stand for a bench grinder in his new shop…