5Crawfords

We've been having a lot of fun these past couple weeks with Mom and Dad Berry and Danielle, hosting Alish a's brother's team for a night in Kampala, and sadly saying goodbye to our dear intern friends. So I thought pictures would be the best way to share it all. (top) This past Sun day we took a drive South to the equator. It was about 80 km and took about an hour and a half. It's more of a rest stop on the side of the road, but it was cool to finally make it there after being so close this whole time (our house is 32 km (20 miles) from the equator, as a crow flies). Oh, the water really does swirl in the opposite direction on the south ern hemisphere, and drop straight down at the equator! (next) There were some local children nearby, and they had a homemade soccer ball they were playing with, so Brodie jumped all over that. So while Grandma and Grandpa shopped for souvenirs, the boys played a full-court soccer match with the local kids. (next) Alisha and Dani sat and...

If you'd like to see some cool pictures of Uganda and read about a short-term mission trip Alisha's brother is leading here right now, check out: http://briancberry.blogspot.com/ . He's a much better photographer than I am, and plus it's interesting to hear a newcomer's perspective every now and then. Already, it's easy for us to look past certain things that used to stand out. We definitely fight against it, but it's somewhat inevitable.

Mom and Dad Berry arrived safe and sound, only 2 days late! For those of you who don't know the story, on the morning they were set to depart, after having checked-in online and printed out their boarding passes, they awoke to an email in their inbox from British Airways informing them that their flight had been cancelled! No alternative plan for them or other path forward, just a cordial apology for 'any inconvenience it may cause'. Well, to make a long story short, after 4 1/2 hours of tense phone conversations, they were finally able to catch the last 2 seats on a flight leaving 2 days later. (At one point, the best BA was offering was a flight leaving on July 21st!) Since those last 2 seats were in business class, they were forced to pay $900 extra to make the flight. What terrible customer service! Anyway, they spoke with the people at the airport and were assured that if they wrote a letter of complaint that they almost certainly would be refunded this extra amount. ...

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...