Christmas in Kampala

We have had a hard time "feeling" like Christmas is coming. One reason is that Kampala gets real quiet as Christmas approaches. Most people living in the city will travel "home" to the villages where their families live. We are used to church services around Christmas that are packed and seating that is limited because of the influx of people. UCF, however, has less and less people as Christmas approaches. This doesn't stop us from celebrating our Savor's birth. 

We are used to this season being the busiest time of year but now, since so many of the congregation have gone away, it is the opposite of busy. We are used to the great commercialization of Christmas, but here there are hardly any hints of that. We are used to a little chill in the air, hot drinks, and warm fire place.  But here, the weather is the same as it is all year round, maybe even a little hotter than normal. Now before you start feeling too bad for us for "missing out" on Christmas we had a wonderful day. 

We started with a bit of a Bibelheimer tradition with homemade cinnamon rolls. This is the first time I made these without a kitchen-aide mixer but Kyle and Trey stepped in to stir and the rolls turned out perfectly!

UCF had a Christmas day service so after service we came home and snapped some pictures for you. 

We had a big meal around 3pm and invited some friends who stayed in Kampala. I always forget to take pictures of the food but we had pot roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, carrots, bread and pineapple. After our meal we sat around and talked for a while before everyone went home and Kyle and watched a movie. 

We hope that you and your family had a wonderful day celebrating the birth of Christ. 

Merry Christmas!

Welcome Zion Mabry Allen!

This week our dear friends and housemates (Erin and Trey) welcomed their son into the world.  Zion was born on Dec. 18th at 10:08 pm weighing 7 lbs 4 oz. He is a cutie and this Aunt and Uncle already love him to pieces.

Check out Erin and Trey's blog for more pictures!

And he shall be called...

 I just reached the 20 week mark and we received another ultrasound of our little guy! It is so fun to see him and watch him move around. In the last few weeks I have also been feeling his movements and we were glad to know that all progress is healthy. Many have asked about how I am doing with nausea and we are both very glad that I have reached the nice part of pregnancy when the morning sickness is gone and I am not too huge yet. 

For most of the scan he was hiding his face from us but the tech managed to get a few good pictures. 

We also have decided on a name for this little man and we thought we would share it with you! He shall be called:

Obadiah

Robert

Fox

We chose Obadiah, well, because we like it and because it means "servant of Yahweh." Our prayer for our son is that he would indeed serve Yahweh. Robert is a family name for both of us but specifically Kyle's dad is Robert and we are giving him his middle name after his grandpa. 

If you think that Obadiah is too much of a mouthful, feel free to call him Obie as we already do often. 

Dubai

We jut got back from a very relaxing trip to Dubai for about 6 days. Since we were forced to leave the country we were very glad to make the most of our time away. Our time was spent walking around some of the world's largest malls, eating from several American chain restaurants and shopping for things for baby Fox that we can not easily get in Kampala. I was very glad that my nausea had finally subsided for the trip and we were able to eat lots and lots of yummy, familiar food!

 Papa John's Pizza, one of Kyle's favorites.

 Taking the metro and looking at the world's only "7 star" hotel. 

 Chili's chips and salsa, so yummy!

 One of the malls that we went to had an aquarium right in the middle of it. 

 A fountain display that we got to see several evenings. 

 The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. 

We went "to the top," not really to the top but to the observation deck they let the tourists go to.

We had a lot of fun and were very glad that we got the chance to take a "baby moon" that we would have never done given normal circumstances. One thing I noticed while looking at baby things is how many clothes and other items had foxes on them. I am not sure if I just notice it because of our name or if foxes are trendy now, whatever the case it made me feel like a bit out of touch. If you were wondering we did not buy one thing with a fox on it, I am not against putting our little guy in fox things at all as long as there is a limit. 

Before we left we asked that you would pray for three things and this is how the Lord answered them:

-Pray that we get the longest visitor visa available, which 3 months.

We received 3 months visitor's visa!
-The Allens received a longer long term visa than us so they are not in this situation, pray that their baby waits for us to get back to make an appearance, the due date is Dec. 12. 

We are still waiting with the Allens to meet their son, Zion. 
-Pray that all of our paperwork goes through for our 3 year visas that we are applying for. 

We are still waiting to hear what the status is on these long term visas but we are very hopeful that we will hear something soon. 

Thanks so much for praying with us!

Fixing a Leak

While we are in Dubai I thought I would share a cute story with you...
Being married to Kyle for almost four years I have stood back and watched him fix many household leaks, but this repair had its unique challenges.

Sometimes when you notice that your shower is leaking through the wall into a bedroom, it takes longer to fix than you think. 

This is one man's journey to fix such a leak in his house...

Upon locating the leak you will realize that it is incased in concrete and that it need to be entirely replaced. So you must begin busting out tile.  While busting, you discover the pipe is encased in concrete. 

 So you continue busting out concrete and tile to replace the bad pipe. 

 Sometimes when you are busting our concrete and tile from the wall you cut your hand on a jagged piece of tile (low and left in picture above) and have to go get stitches. 

 When you get stitches for the first time from someone other than your Uncle Keith who is an orthopedic surgeon, you worry if they will hold up. 

 After you get home, you finish busting out the tile and fixing the pipe, but you feel discouraged because your hand has to heal in order to lay tile properly. The injury caused immobilization of the very important "pointer" finger. 

Sometimes while you are waiting for your hand to heal you also bust open your knee on some tile steps while getting your pregnant wife an orange because thats all that sounds good to her... right before you have to go teach a bible study. 

 And sometimes you bleed all over the floor when you bust your knee open. 

Eventually the knee and the hand heal... in the mean time you are thankful for the concrete that was under the tile because you can still shower in your own bathroom, and you decide to grow a beard.

You can finally put back in the tile after wishing there was a Home Depot where you could pick up the right tile and mortar for the task. Sometimes you have to go to six different places and speak in two different languages and still not get the right stuff. 

But finally the tile goes in and it appears as if nothing ever happened, save for the two scars.

The End. 

Keeping it Legal

If you get our prayer emails, you already know the situation we are in but if you do not, we currently we find ourselves in an interesting predicament. Our long term visas are going to expire on the 29th of November and we are waiting on paperwork to renew these long term visas, but we were told that this paperwork is not going to be finished by the 29th. We need to get another temporary visa and the only way to get that is to get a visitors visa upon entry to the country. In order to remain legal, we will need to leave and re-enter Uganda to get a temporary visa. Much of this we just found out in the last two weeks and we have been advised by our organization to leave for about a week around the 29th. Since this is the case, we decided to make a little vacation out of it and tap into a bit of our savings to go to Dubai. The prices to Dubai are not much more to go to some of our neighboring countries. We are leaving on the 27th and will be gone for one week. Hopefully, we will get some photos to share from our impromptu vacation in the next week or so.
Pray that we get the longest visitor visa available, which 3 months.
The Allens received a longer long term visa than us so they are not in this situation, pray that their baby waits for us to get back to make an appearance, the due date is Dec. 12.
Pray that all of our paperwork goes through for our 3 year visas that we are applying for.

Thanksgiving

This year we got to celebrate Thanksgiving on Friday because it worked best for all of our schedules.  

Kyle and Trey went to pick up our live turkey from a guy on the side of the road on Tuesday and then we had a friend butcher it for us. On Thursday, Erin and I spent most of the day preparing for the meal and we kept thinking how much more work it would be if we were not together.  Since there is no pumpkin puree to be found here we had make our own and four pumpkins makes a bunch of puree!  

We ended up making three pumpkin pies and had enough puree to make three more. We also made two chocolate cream pies with Oreo crusts.  Because the two of us pregnant women wanted to lighten our load for cooking on Friday we attempted to do as much as we could the day before. We made dough for dinner rolls and corn bread for a stuffing recipe that called for that as well as french bread. The turkey was set in its brine and all was ready for the big day. Kyle and Trey even cleaned up all the dishes and mess we made. 

I think that in my zeal for beginning to feel better I may have overdone it and as a result, spent most of my day today near the restroom. Erin, Trey and Kyle did all of the cooking today even though I tried to help out with a few things. By the time our guests came I was well enough to join them, even though I wan't able to eat very much. 

We invited a few of our close friends over to celebrate the holiday with us. We served mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, stuffing, rolls, a green salad and of course, turkey.  I think they enjoyed the food as much as we did, even though some of the way we prepared thing was different than they are used to. 

I kinda dropped the ball in getting pictures of the amazing food we worked so hard on and in getting pictures of our guests...sorry about that! 

In our excitement we overlooked a small detail. Almost all of our guests still had to work that day so they took their "lunch breaks" with us to eat but leave after a bit to get back to work. It was one of the shortest Thanksgiving celebrations I have had. There is a great deal of pie left that we will be gladly enjoying of the next few days. 

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

Early Birthday!!!

Even though my birthday is in another three weeks I got to celebrate a little early when I received a package from my mom, grandma and brother. Normally packages from the states can take up to two months to arrive here but this one got here in just over three weeks!!! I could not wait and I did get permission from my mother, so I opened it.  It included notes from each of the senders, several dresses and shirts that will accommodate my growing belly, hair product, something for baby Fox and several of my favorite snacks, including Cheez-its! Thanks so much!!

End of Semester Party

This last week we had our final meeting for King's Daughters and Real Brothers for the semester. Students are spending most of their time studying and finishing papers for their classes and so the bible studies end a couple of weeks before classes do. To close out the semester, we had a party at our house for all the women. Erin took several pictures of the event which you can see here.

Dunkings

This past Sunday was a baptism service at UCF.  I have always loved baptism services, maybe that comes with growing up in a baptist church but in my adult years, I just can't help getting choked up when people get baptized.  It certainly doesn't help that I have some extra hormones pumping through my system that make me especially prone to some tears.  In the group getting baptized, we had 5 women from King's Daughters and 2 guys from Real Brothers, and that was really great to see. 

UCF is really intentional with the baptisms.  Each person has to go through six weeks of class to make sure they understand what they are doing.  With Anglicanism, Catholicism, and other "isms" a good understanding of Baptism is hard to find.  Most Ugandans have been sprinkled as infants by the Anglican or Catholic Church and therefore claim that they are "Christians" even though they may have no understanding or real relationship with Jesus.  In addition to the class, the sermon on Baptism Sunday always includes a biblical perspective of Baptism.  Elder Patrick (in green above) taught the classes and delivered the sermon.  It is exciting to see students and other members of UCF grasping this biblical understanding of baptism and following in obedience. 

 Our good friend Dorcus got baptized that day.

This is not an uncommon reaction after being submerged because many Ugandans are not so familiar with swimming or water, being that there aren't many swimming pools around.  I think this is a good picture of new life we receive that is being symbolized by coming out of the water.

We tried to get some pictures after the service with some friends, here I am with Rhona and Reba. 

Kyle and Edgar

DTP

On Saturday we will be having our last of six Discipleship Training Program meetings for this semester but we will be picking it back up when the new semester begins at the end of January. Kyle and Trey have done a great job teaching and we have been blessed to hear some encouraging feedback from those who have attend. Last Saturday, Kyle began teaching a survey of the New Testament and will be finishing that up this Saturday. We will take some time over the break to evaluate and search for ways that we can make DTP even better. 

Here Kyle was probably talking about how the Kingdom is already here but not fully, saying things like "Inaugurated Eschatology" and "Already but not yet." 

I think here he was explaining the Holy Spirit coming in Acts and how this fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies. 

Home Intruder

One day last week when Kyle headed downstairs to make coffee in the morning, he found that there was a breach in security. The covenant between man and beast had been broken by this frog. 

I was glad cause I had been craving frog legs lately, so we cooked him up for dinner! Just kidding he was way too little and ewww! We have just been watching too much Duck Dynasty and they are always talking about frog legs. 

Quarterly Newsletter

This is a few days late, but here is our quarterly newsletter.  

click to enlarge

Communal Living

Many people (mostly Americans) ask us how we can manage living in a house with another couple. Even though our house is plenty big for the four of us to live very comfortably, it is different from the way most Americans live. I have never considered myself someone who would be good at physically living in a house with others that were not my family. If you ask my husband and siblings, they will agree that I can be very particular about things, close friends and past roommates would probably say the same thing. There are many other opinions that claim that living "in community" is best, people will even argue from scripture that we should all physically live "in community." I will not give my reasons at this time for why I am not convinced by those arguments, I will jut say that I have never been convinced by them. To be clear; I am a huge advocate for sharing life with people and being in intentional relationships with a community, however we all do not need to move into communes to acquire such relationships.

In Uganda, living together with several others, is the norm and so we are never asked how we manage living with other people in the same house. In fact, a few weeks ago a friend was over at our house and asked if we got lonely with just the four of us. She suggested that we fill the house with more people, and she was aware that Erin and I are both pregnant! Believe it or not, it's not the first time we have heard that opinion form one of our Ugandan friends. Ugandans, and many East Africans, think far more communally than your average American. They possess a remarkable sense of belonging and watching out for one another. There is much that the body of Christ should emulate from good communal living like what we see here in Uganda. 

So how is it living in a house with the Allens? It is great. It doesn't come without challenges or differences but we are glad that this is where the Lord has us. Specifically, in the last few weeks Kyle and I have been especially thankful that we share a home with them. I haven't had morning sickness the entire time I have been pregnant but in the last month or so, the nausea and vomiting has been too frequent for my taste. Due to the sensitivity of my nose and non-existent appetite, the Allens have carried most of the responsibility for meal planning and cooking. This has been a huge gift to me and is one of the reasons I haven't lost more weight than I already have. Kyle is always such a help around the house but since I have not been doing well, he has hugely "upped" his game.  All that to say, we are thankful to have a deep relationship with the Allens.

Living with others is not for everyone, but in this current situation the Lord is sharpening us, growing us, helping us, and hopefully making us look more like him. 

Meet Baby Fox

This week we got to go for our second ultra sound. We were excited and had great expectations to see baby Fox, but by the time we left, we received way more than we expected. They told us this was a normal scan to rule out chromosomal abnormalities and so Alice (the ultrasound tech) was going to take certain measurements and that was that.  Alice could not get the baby to get into the right position to get the best measurements so she just said she would just look at other things while we waited for baby to move. 

When baby finally moved some, Alice casually asked us if we were going to find out the gender of the baby. We responded "Yes, we will come back at around 20 weeks to check." "Well," she said "I think I just saw something lets see if we can get a better look..." The way this baby had turned had given us a perfect view to see that baby Fox is... a boy!! We couldn't believe what we were seeing and hearing! Alice was kind of laughing at our disbelief and so she showed us a few different angles for assurance. We were under the impression that we had to wait a few more weeks to find out the gender, Alice told us that you can tell by 13 weeks but you do not usually get such a view.  It was an incredible surprise!

Then, right when I thought we were done, and Alice got all the measurements, she switched to show us the 3D picture. Again, we were surprised to see this. We paid less than $50 for this appointment and it will be fully reimbursed to us, and we got to see our son in 3D.  Bottom line: everything looked healthy and Alice gave us a great report. We hope you enjoy these pictures as we have been enjoying them! 

Yahweh's Timing

I can't help but think of the readers of yesterday's post and wonder in what state you may be reading our news. I know that there are many women in this world that long to post a blog post and a status update like the one that we did yesterday. There are women who are praying and hoping for months or years to see the two pink lines on the pee stick, there are women who remember the years that they had to wait to become pregnant, or the baby they did not announce because the child did not live long enough. There are women in this world who cannot make such announcements because they are, or were faced with a decision to abort or choose adoption. There are husbands who long to be fathers and see the joy in their wives' faces when they find out about a pregnancy. Maybe someone in one of those situations, or another that I am not thinking about, read our blog yesterday and felt pain. This pain may be caused by a longing to understand God's purposes behind why things happen the way they do.
As much as I want to know Yahweh's reasons for why things happen, or fully grasp what the will of God is, I am limited in my understanding. As much as I want to understand when God allows things to happen and when he plans things to happen, I can't. I am a finite being.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, declares Yahweh.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways 

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Is. 55:8-9 (ESV)

In my own life I have wrestled with Yahweh about his timing and unfortunately, I am sure I will wrestle with him again.  So far, the end result of my wrestling has always been the Lord asking me to trust him more. Yahweh is more than worthy of my trust, yet I can still withhold it. Scripture speaks to the trustworthiness of God over and over again. Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac after all that was promised to him through his decedents. Even though it went against all understanding, Yahweh asked Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham went for it, trusting Yahweh's plan (Gen. 22).

It is indeed sweet to trust the Lord but O how I need grace to trust him more!

Big News!

Thats right, I'm pregnant! 

We are so very excited to announce that we are expecting baby Fox sometime around May 1, 2013. Which means that I am 12 weeks pregnant. 

And if you are wondering, the plan is to deliver the baby here in Uganda.

For more news on baby Fox keep checking back here.