Sights, Sounds & Smells: An Afternoon Adventure

I've written about Sundays before. They're quiet, peaceful, relaxing...nothing but birds and the breeze. A perfect time to go exploring, which is exactly what Paul and I did this afternoon. There's a road that runs behind the Timothy Centre which we'd never been down before, so we took a walk and were pleasantly surprised by what we found!

A eucalyptus forest - the sound of the wind in these trees is amazing! Makes me want to set up a hammock and take a nap.

Rows of coffee plants, with the most fragrant flowers blooming on their branches - they smell delicious! Sort of like jasmine.

Raw coffee bean, straight off the tree!

On our way back, we passed by a house and were greeted by a neighbour we've never met before, Juliet, who came running out to us with two huge bundles of bananas that were so heavy we could barely carry them home! I think it's safe to say these will last us awhile. (Banana bread anyone?)

I love the beautiful discoveries we made right in our own neighbourhood!

Teeny Tiny

A 1.5 cm frog!

Training Centre

One of the exciting aspects of the Timothy Centre is the community development program that will be in place. There are many ideas for the future in terms of ways to support the local community, but the two areas we have started with are bee keeping and farming. Over the past couple weeks a team of builders have been working on our training centre, which is where the bee keeping and farming training will be taking place. We want the Timothy Centre to be a resource for our community so that people can learn ways of generating income and getting maximum yield from their crops. We're excited about the physical building and the things that will be going on inside it!

World Cup...at TC

World Cup excitement is definitely in the air over here, particularly because the event is being held on the African continent this time around! Paul has made his way into town to watch a few games (Argentina, particularly) at Ten Tables, and every other TV in town is always surrounded by eager Ugandans no matter which teams are playing.

But aside from the excitement of the real World Cup, the workers here at TC are quite excited about their own version of the event: the TC Cup. A couple days ago the workers drew names and picked teams (6 in total), and they will be playing against each other every lunch hour for the next couple weeks until the teams are narrowed down to one final winner!

In setting up for the games, they all agreed they had to make the field official game size, even though it meant drawing the white line through a ditch and out onto the dirt road.

Paul has joined in on the fun and is on "Team A," who have now won 2 games! You've really never seen excitement at a sporting event until you've seen these guys when they score - they go absolutely mental! Seriously. They're playing right now and I can hear them from my house. (Yes, I did go out and cheer on my husband for a bit). From what I can tell there have been 4 goals scored so far...and wow, they are excited!

It's fun to see them all so excited about the TC Cup - stayed tuned for the winners (of a prize yet to be determined by Paul)!

A Glimpse of the Progress

The following pictures probably won't mean much to most of you - they're just a bunch of unfinished buildings. But if you imagine that not very long ago our entire property was tall grass and bushes on the side of a steep hill, I'm sure you can appreciate that it has taken a lot of hard work to get to the point where things are today! Paul is feeling optimistic about how quickly things are progressing - even in his absence last week the workers surprised him with how much they were able to get done! It's getting easier to imagine what the finished product will look like when the school opens in February. And although there is still a lot of work to be done before then, it's nice to see that things are continuing to move quickly - and the result is looking good!

Dormitory

Both of these buildings are dorms - each one is divided in half, and each room will house approximately 24 girls.

Administration

Classroom Block

Half of the building will contain 4 classrooms, and the other half will contain 2 labs.

Dining Hall

The dining hall (which includes the kitchen) will be a large building with open walls where the students will eat all their meals. There will also be a stage so that the building can be used for a variety of other purposes.

Mombasa

One of the many great things about living in East Africa is the chance to visit so many places that we would never get to see from home. This past week, Mombasa was one of those places for us! A short 1.5 hour flight brought us straight to the Kenyan coast where we spent 4 days doing nothing - which might SOUND boring, but it wasn't. It was a perfect, relaxing combination of swimming, suntanning, eating good food, and enjoying being together without the distraction of work or people knocking on our door at any hour of the day! And even though it rained for one full day, we still enjoyed every moment of our time away. Yay for affordable vacations that don't require a 12 hour flight and a layover in Timbaktu. Although, one day I hope I have a layover in Timbaktu because I would like to be able to say I've been there.

Kilimanjaro from the plane

I usually think it's weird when people post pictures of their hotel room. But ours was pretty nice wouldn't you say?!

Evening poolside

The beach reminded us a lot of Zanzibar, which makes sense considering it's the same coastline of the same ocean. Beautiful!

There was this handsome guy there that I hung out with the whole time. He was pretty cool.

So was she.

Monkeys GALORE. Stealing food from everywhere. Sugar from the coffee bar...oranges from the fruit baskets...and a TWIX from our patio table right beside me while I was reading a book! I wasn't too happy about that one.

We had dinner one night at a seafood restaurant on the beach - with live music and a whole lot of wind and rain billowing through the window!

We got up at 6 one morning to watch the sunrise but were disappointed to find that the whole horizon was covered in clouds so we couldn't see anything. Above is the sunset which was almost as nice as what we imagine the sunrise would have looked like!

Beautiful Faces