We arrived in Kampala, Uganda on the 7th at 10:30AM ish.
Two hours later, our contact shows up.
An hour later we leave for his home town.
Lwamata is 2 hours away from Kampala (on a good day), and we are the first group of Muzungoos (or white people) to ever come. Well, besides Brian and Jan.
Who are Brian and Jan?
A wonderful Australian couple who are building an orphanage for some of the local children. They were literally the first white people to come to this town in over 10 years. So, if they stir a crowd, you can imagine what a group of seven foreigners would do.
But anyways, Brian and Jan have been here for a while, so they know a lot of locals. There is one widow who lives up in the jungle whose house is literally straw. So, they asked us if we wanted to help them build an African house in seven days. Seven days!?
Of course we agreed.
But that blog is coming after this one.
Because we only finished day four today, I figured I would let you know how day one went. Or, at least the highlights.
1. We buy two loaves of bread, tomatoes, mangoes and bananas for lunch.
2. We head out into the bush, knocking down trees with their 4×4 as we go.
3. We reach the school they are helping to fund, and see the foundation of their small house.
So far so good…
4. We help Brian cut up and load large bamboo like timber logs on top of his jeep.
5. We bring the timber up the mountain, sometimes at a 45 degree angle (Depending on which side we were tilting, we leaned the opposite way to not flip over).
6. We arrive at the neighbor’s hut, and then two by two bring the timber back through the grasses and trees to the woman’s grass hut.
Goin’ great!
7. We rip apart her garden, level it out, and start putting the structure together by digging holes, putting the timber in them, and then packing the dirt back down as hard as we can.
8. Clouds move in, we go back down the mountain to have worship with the kids and eat lunch, and we go back up.
9. Within 30 minutes of us re-starting the structure, a huge rain storm halts all work for about 30 minutes.
Surprise…
Anyways, long story short Josh, Brian and I decided to go back into the rain and keep working, and we were soon joined by Matt and Bri and some of the local guys.
By the time we were done with the timber for the day, the path back down the mountain was a glorified slip-n-slide.
We barely made it 20 feet down before we were sliding sideways through the jungle.
We hit two trees, and got stuck.
Well, because there was so much rain so quickly, the dirt was like ice.
So, one of the local young men starts hacking away at the trees with a machete.
An hour later, we got the jeep to grip and it finally moved…about two feet.
Now the jeep had two tree stumps keeping it in place.
So Josh, Brian and a bunch of African men got down under the jeep (in the mud) and sawed down the stumps and the surrounding trees for another hour.
