Looking behind and looking forward…

Firstly, we would like to wish you all a happy new year! Can you believe that we saw in the new year at a ceilidh (Aussie friends: that means ‘barn dancing’) hosted by our British missionary friends serving here with BMS. We spent the next day with an Acholi family feasting on local delights. We were also extremely blessed to have two sets of visitors in December, and one of those who stayed to share Christmas and New Year with us (they did bring out some English cheddar which would have to be one of the biggest highlights of 2015!)

• Training teachers from 30 nursery and primary schools across the country, particularly in Gulu, in methods for teaching reading
• Mentoring two local teachers and training them as teacher-trainers and model reading teachers
• Building a demonstration piggery from scratch and establishing the agriculture training school
• Training 40 students in horticulture and piggery
• Being involved in the construction of a dam/pond
• Partnering with numerous other charities, in both education and agriculture
• We have got to mention some bangers here… Making our own debut pork sausages in Gulu! (Much to the delight of our mzungu friends). The special bit for Dan here was that he was able to oversee the process from beginning to end as in he raised the very pigs that ended up in the sausage skins.
• Writing and recording a set of local phonics songs for teaching reading
• Forming friendships with numerous other volunteer workers in the area
• Finding a church with some lovely and genuine people.
• Jody rewriting her phonics manual and getting it to the printer in Kampala
• Developing a close relationship with a Canadian university and working with one of their incredible interns for three months
• Dan led a team to paint our church
• Having some interesting conversations with locals about… well… why are we here on earth and what’s the meaning of life!
• And owning the best fed (and best looking) dog in Gulu (often eating the neighbour’s dog’s food). Ned is awesome!

• Jody is in the process of registering as an NGO to formalise the work with teacher training and to seek further funding opportunities
• Employing a local primary teacher part-time to assist with the follow-up of schools
• A shop in town has approached Daniel to retail his sausages (all proceeds go to help support The Recreation Project)
• Hopefully building another pig pen (a bigger one 🙂 and having more intense training on pig husbandry
• Jody is going to start her Masters in International Education (part-time, via correspondence) from Sydney University
• We are planning to run a short workshop on preaching at our local church (will certainly be doing some research for that!) And have slowly been collecting some commentary books from visitors to help create a preaching resource library for the church.
• Plans to work closely with a local primary teacher’s college to teach early reading skills and run demonstration lessons with the primary school next door.
• There’s a few other things in the pipeline, but that’s enough for now 🙂