5Crawfords

The boys are on Summer break now, so we signed Brodie up for sports camp at the school. The first week was Soccer camp, the next was Baseball camp, and the last week was Basketball camp. Jonah also went to Basketball camp and I helped out for 3 days. Otherwise, we've had a quiet couple of weeks, which is good. It doesn't make for exciting blogging, but it does make for a little calm and normalcy, which is the good part. We've had some typical life stuff happen:Our car got broken into downtown but they only made off with a cloth bag of Alisha's that had a couple of snacks in it and the boys 3 drinking cups.I had a little spot frozen off my nose that I'd had for about a year that the doctor thought was a little basal cell carcinoma (skin cancer). He might have to freeze it a few times or eventually cut it out, but it's not the serious kind of skin cancer and doesn't spread. Honestly, I'm not even convinced that it's actually skin cancer - without test...

For Father's Day, we drove to Entebbe (45 minutes away) to visit the Botanical Gardens. Set next to Lake Victoria, it was the site of filming for the original Tarzan movie back in the 1930's. It's really a beautiful and interesting place, where monkeys roam free, safari ants march by the hundred thousands across the dirt road in 2" wide, solid-looking bands, and vines grow down from the trees making it obvious why Tarzan was filmed there. It was a really fun day walking through the rainforest, s winging from vines and was capped off at the end when we got to feed the monkeys right out of our hand for about 15 minutes. We were led on a guided, walking tour by one of the local guides named Rafiki (I'm not making that up). All in all, a pretty cool day. I won't bore you with any more text - the pictures are better. Pictures: (top) the rainforest where Tarzan was filmed nearly 70 years ago. (next) our guide Rafiki with Graysen. (next) Alisha and Graysen feeding a ...

Since I've had some longer text-posts lately, I thought I would do more of a photo entry. These are some great pictures one of our long-term volunteers Christoph took while he was here and passed on to me. He caught some great stuff - some funny, some interesting, some amazing, but all enjoyable! Thanks for your great picture-taking Christoph! (top) A picture of me, at work in my office. I share it with architect Liz (background) and Intern Coordinator Megan (not shown). Intern Zach was in our office for this picture - a great guy who I've been mentoring during his t ime here. (next) a picture of Kampala at dusk. (next) It's small, but can you see the 'Hotel' hand-painted sign on the outside of this shack? I'm thinking at most it's maybe a 1/8-star joint. I bet it comes with a continental breakfast though. ;) (next) A couple of local kids and their pretty impressive creation - a small car made out of wire and bottle lids, complete with a go-cart sized stee...

Wednesday – Today, finally the project had developed enough to the point where intern Heather and I could begi n on the structural design. So, for the first time all week, I stayed at the house and worked! Since Heather hasn’t had much structural experience, we talked a little about how to approach designing a building and then I had her start laying out the drawings. She is pretty fast at Autocad so we made good progress on the drawings. It was the first day that I didn’t go to the site, and I was kind of glad since we had a couple of pretty good thunderstorms roll through. Our ‘final’ presentation is tomorrow afternoon since the Howie’s are leaving to head back to Ireland, so time is a little short. The Howie’s offered to drive us all to Jinja (an hour away) to take us to dinner, but because our time is short 7 out of the 9 of us decided to stay here to work. Janet and I stayed up until 1am mostly for moral support for the architects Gary and intern Jill, who powered through until 4...

Well, I apologize for the blog drought but I have been out of town for 8 days on my first project trip since joining staff - designing a Christian secondary school in Iganga, Uganda for Abundant Life Ministries. I had no access to the internet during that time, so instead I kept a journal of the days events. Though I missed Alisha and the boys terribly, it was a great trip with a lot of amazing and interesting things happening. I hope you enjoy reading a very close-up view of a week in the life of a small, rural town in East Uganda for a team of 9 American design professionals. I'm home safely now after spending a night in Jinja with the team as well as Alisha and the boys, who drove over Saturday morning to join us. Thanks for you prayers for safe travels and for safety for Alisha and the boys while I was gone. Saturday – We were picked up in the morning and driven to Iganga (about 3 hours Northeast of Kampala) in a Matatu the ministry had hired. I got the ‘lucky’seat, which was...

Alisha had a good observation a few days ago that bears repeating. We’re starting to realize something that's different here: when someone asks us how we’re doing, back home we would generally think about the last few weeks of life and convey our thoughts based on that time period. Here, our response is pretty much based on the last 24 hours! This week is a good example of that. Last Sunday, on the way to church, Graysen threw up on the side of the road. So we returned home without going to church. An hour and a half later, our next-door neighbor returned home from church to find that her house had been broken into - they lost around $3000 worth of stuff and money. Meanwhile, Graysen continued to throw up, and eventually a little blood started appearing in his vomit, so we took him to the doctor late Sunday night. After initially thinking he was much worse than he was (and scaring Alisha half to death), they finally said the blood was just broken blood vessels from throwing up so ...