Timing...

As my relationship with my Heavenly Father continues to grow I am finding myself in awe of how He works through me and around me.  It is neat to me to look back and see where He was working in my life and it is even cooler to me when He does something in the "right now".  Let me explain a bit further.  I went out to the village this morning with Colin and the crew.  I love going and we are currently drilling a well at the home of a lady whom I have really come to treasure.  Her name is Helen.  I didn't get to go yesterday so I was excited about making it out to her house today.  However I have had a head cold and today is the day where my ears are all stopped up, my nose is running, and I have started coughing.  I feel as though my head weighs more than it should and my eyes are about to pop out.  So when Colin needed to run back to the shop, I went too.  I needed to stay home, but so badly want to be out where they are drilling.  


Now onto the cool thing that only God can do.  When I got home and checked our email I found we only had one new message.  It was from a man that I have never heard of, and to be honest I didn't know if I should even open the email thinking it was going to be some sort of spam.  But I opened it and it was from a pastor of a church we have never attended in a town we have never been.  He read an article about us from the San Angelo Standard Times and felt led to challenge his church to begin praying about supporting us.  They knew from the article that we hope to purchase property and start a research farm here in Uganda some day.  He wanted us to be in prayer as is his church about how they can help make that dream a reality.


Now, to some this might not seem like too big a deal, but to me I see it as God's hand.  I am convinced that He is going to use this pastor and the church that he pastors to bring Himself glory, and if God wants to use us all together that is just awesome.  Never ever under my own power would I have been able to find this church and present them with what we do here in Uganda.  But lucky for me I serve a Big God who is very capable of working out all those details.  In fact its not even that big of a deal for Him to do so!  So we will pray that God will show us what it is that He wants us to do.

On another note.  When we were in Pingere last week, I was reading in Hebrews.  It was the end of the first day of drilling out there and I opened up to where I had left off the day before.  I picked up in chapter 11 verse 1.  This is what I read, "Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen."  How perfect!  Here we are drilling, hoping that we can make a well.  We have complete and total faith in what we can not see and that the Lord will bless the work we are doing.  I re-read that chapter when I woke up the next morning and I was reminded of all the people in the Bible that had absolute faith in God.  They had absolute faith in Him in some of the hardest times written about in the Bible.  I mean, I don't know if I were faced with a huge body of water in front of me, and a army of very angry Egyptians closing in fast from behind if I would have the faith to do what the Lord asked of Moses.  But I am thankful that the Lord has yet to ask me to part any bodies of water.  I struggle still with even the simplest of things.  Someday, however, He may ask me to do something big like that and I just pray that I am ready when He does!   

Just a few things to be praying for:

-The well at Helen's home, that it is a great producing well and they are able to get it drilled within a few days.

-My cold to go away...

-One of the girls that lives here, named Jennifer (about 10 years old), who was VERY sick the other night.  We had to take her to the hospital because she passed out at 5:00pm and never woke back up.  She was like a rag doll when we took her to get treatment and never even moved when they were trying to get an IV started, and they did that twice.  I am still not sure what was wrong with her, but I do know that she has HIV and TB.  Just pray for complete healing in her little body.  She is back at GC now.

-Colin's back and neck has been out of place and he has been in a large amount of pain and can barley turn his head to look, so please pray that he receives some relief from that pain.  
-Colin came in from drilling this evening and informed me that they lost a drill bit down the hole.  Pray they are able to recover it and continue drilling tomorrow. 

Thanks to everyone who is praying and for your support!  

Two weeks of drilling

We have had two great weeks of drilling and have two wells to show for it!  Colin and the crew have been working really hard these last few weeks to get some wells done before the rains start and we lose most of our help. They drilled the first well at the church in Obule and the second well in Pingere near Lake Kyoga.  The well at the church isn’t going to make a great dry season well just yet.  It may turn out to be a great well, but right now because it is so dry it has only one foot of water in the bottom of the casing.  However, once the rains start it should have more water and work fine.  We were really hoping that it was going to be a high producing well and that we could use it to do demonstration with irrigation and farming at the church during the dry season, but we may have to find another location for that.  It’s ok though.  This is why we are here, and we knew there was going to be a learning curve with drilling in this area. 

Colin and Moses getting the pilot hole started in Obule Okalis.

Odongo Sam, Immanuel, and Ojoke drilling through tough rock.

The second well in Pingere was completely different.  It took only one full day to get down into the sand and 11 meters in the ground.  It took six days to do that in Obule.  In Pingere we were able to case it the second day and found that the water came up 8 meters in the casing!  We have hit one road block and that is silt that has collected around the filter and that makes it hard for the water to enter the casing and fill the rising main.  But we do have a solution.  We are going to pump water with a trash pump back down the casing and try and force the silt away and out of the hole.  Then gravel and sand pack around the filter in hopes that the sand will help catch some of the finer silt.  Colin has been in contact with another driller in the area who uses a rotary rig and his advice to continue conditioning the well and backwashing the silt from the hole. 

While we were drilling in Pingere we stayed one night.  It was my first time sleeping in a round mud hut, and it was great!  I actually slept!  That never happens when we are out in the village for the first night.  Pingere is a neat place.  It is right on Lake Kyoga and that meant we got to eat great fresh fish!  Colin and all the guys went to the lake so they could bathe and he said that for most of them it was the first time they had ever been around a lake.  He said they were a bit fearful because they all thought that it was going to have a beach and slowly get deep, but that is not the case.  There is lots of grass that grows on the edge and you have to take a hollowed out tree boat to the open water.  Once the guys got out in the boats in the deep water, the lake became real!  But almost everyone LOVED it!  When Jimmy (the guy we drilled a well with) said that it was time to go back, Moses (one of our guys that works for us) stood up in the boat and told him that he didn’t want to go back!  Solomon (another one of our workers) could not believe that he stood up in a boat in a lake.  We had a good laugh while eating that evening as the two went back and forth over Moses standing up and being brave and Solomon being fearful and crawling around the bottom of the boat never letting go of the sides.  Not one of the 15 or so guys that helped with the drilling and went on the lake adventure can swim.

This is the truck we hired to haul all of our equipment from Obule to Pingere.  

We are so very thankful to be able to go and work with these wonderful people.  They always thank us for coming and that we are blessing them, but truth be told, we are being blessed more than they will ever know.  This truly is a wonderful place with wonderful people and we know that God has great plans for this area.  We are excited to be just a small part of it. 

Ojoke and Samuel drilling Pingere.

Thank you to everyone that continues to pray for us and sends us encouraging words.  We love hearing from our friends and family, so please continue to write!  We try and respond to everyone that sends us a message, but if we have failed to do so please forgive us and resend.  Our power and internet come and go here, so we may have read it and wanted to respond but due to a bad connection we may not have been able to.

We will start drilling again on Monday at my new friend Helen’s home.  So keep us in your prayers on Monday!        

Our diet here in Uganda

This blog is to give you an idea of what our everyday diet is like here in Uganda.  For Ugandans, the diet does not change much.  They pretty much eat the same thing day in and day out.  When we are out in the village drilling, we tend to eat the same thing for breakfast everyday – porridge and mukake.  For lunch we have beans and posho.  I have included some pictures to give you a visual.  Porridge is very similar to runny grits with sugar.  It is made from posho flour.  Mukake (don't know how it is spelled) is sliced and dried sweet potatoes that have been somewhat rehydrated in a saucepan with warm water.  It is served as a large browninsh-gray clump that you all eat by pulling pieces off.  It has turned out to be the only thing I am not very fond of.  I have gladly eaten everything that has been served, but the rehydrated sweet potato lump just didn’t do it for me.  I even ate fried termites one evening after our Land Rover hit a large termite mount which bent our sway bar and temporarily rendered our vehicle undrivable.  The termite mount accident drew a large crowd both because of the excitement and because we exposed the delicious termites.  Some man walked up to me and said, “my friend, have you ever had these (termites)?”  I had not, so I grabbed a few and ate them… then grabbed a few more.  They sort of tasted like sunflower seeds to me.

This is our normal breakfast when drilling.  This is a pretty typical Ugandan breakfast for this area.  The brown stuff is mukake (spelling?).  It's rehydrated sweet potatoes turned into a mash.

Termites are not part of our everyday diet though.   On a typical day we eat what the Ugandans eat.  Lunch almost always consists of beans and posho.  Beans are just dried pinto beans that have been cooked usually with a little tomato and onion.  Posho is sort of a really thick grits-like substance that has little flavor (possibly no nutritional value), but is super-filling.  After eating it you can feel the cement-like posho filling your stomach for hours.  This is also the reason the Ugandans seem to love it.  One thing I have learned about the Ugandan diet is that many of the foods they eat on a regular basis have been chosen because they are filling.  People here like to feel full.  It would seem that a balanced diet is less important than a feeling of fullness.  People here have known and will probably know again at some point hunger, and they eat the foods they do because they are inexpensive, and are filling.  The traditional Ugandan dishes are very good and we like it when we get the opportunity to eat these foods. 

 

This is a photo of our table when we are out in the village drilling.  These are beans and the white stuff in the middle is posho.

You cannot find canned goods here, so everything must be purchased fresh.  That is not a bad thing because we are able to go to the market often and buy fresh potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, greens, fruit, beans, and peppers.  With the abundance of fresh produce we always have a number of options.  From these fresh vegetable we make soups or cook a bunch of stuff together in a skillet.  Ronnie has taken to experimenting in her cooking and every single meal she has cooked here has been wonderful.  On a typical day, when we are home, we eat porridge or bananas for breakfast.  For lunch we usually eat beans and posho with the Global Care staff.  For supper we change things up quite a bit.  Rice, beans, and potatoes are pretty much our staples.  We live close enough to Lake Kyoga to get fresh fish, so sometimes we eat Nile perch either baked or fried.  We are very blessed to have fresh fish available daily if we choose to buy it.  Ronnie has made homemade spaghetti sauce from tomatoes a few times and we have had noodles with it.  Fruit is readily available so some of our meals consist of cut up pineapple and mango.  I like to include avocado with just about everything I eat.  One great food we found here is called a "rolex".  It is a chapati (greasy tortilla) with eggs and tomatoes and onions rolled up inside it.  Rolled eggs is where they get the name rolex.  These things are great!

We have supermarkets in town that carry many western food stuffs such a cereal, ground meat, juices, cracker and cookies, yogurt, milk eggs, noodles, sometimes cheese, etc.  It is nice that these things are available, but because they are imported and not easy to get, they are generally very expensive, even by U.S. standards.  A box of Kelloggs corn flakes can cost 20,000 ush which is approximately $8.50.  So we tend to pass up many of the foods we were used to eating in Texas, and have adjusted our diet.  I rarely if ever miss anything food-wise.  We do not eat meat very often, and being a huge carnivore I was afraid I would experience beef withdrawals, but it has been painless not having meat all the time.  I think this must be just one more area where God has so graciously blessed us.  We have not lacked for anything or been in want.  The food here is great.  We even have great quality coffee!  Having an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables has certainly made us healthier.  I am trying to counteract the healthy fruits and vegetables by eating as many greasy chapatis as I can.

This boy caught a bush rat for us to eat.  Bush rat is not currrently on our menu.  I declined his offer and  let him keep his catch.

2 Timothy 4:5

I am the type of person, and maybe you can relate, that has to always finish what I start. An example of this is when Colin and I were newly married and we started painting the rooms in our little home in Sonora. When we would stop to eat lunch I would gobble mine down and then need to get back to work, because I wasn’t finished cutting in the trim or left half a wall unpainted. Colin could just sit and relax and wanted me to do the same but soon found out that was not going to happen when there was painting to be done. I remember him asking me “You can’t relax until that room is finished can you?” To which I realized, nope, I can’t. I was reminded of this about myself today when I was reading in 2 Timothy. In chapter 4 verse 5 Paul writes, “But as for you, keep a clear head about everything, endure hardship, do the work of and evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” (HCSB) I grabbed my pen and boxed in the “fulfill your ministry” and let those words hit me with the impact God intended. “Fulfill your ministry” or finish what you start. Curious as to what another version had this verse translated to I picked up two more Bibles. The English Standard Version (ESV) is very similar, but the New Living Translation has it written just a bit different. The NLT says “But you should keep a clear mind in every situation. Don’t be afraid of suffering for the Lord. Work at telling others the Good News, and fully carry out the ministry God has given you.” I love the way that verse ends. It would be easy for me to view our mission as hard, or not easy, but if I keep my head and heart wrapped around the fact that it is a gift or has been given to me by God, how hard can it really get? If I truly believe every word that is written before me in my Bible then I have to know that “all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28 I am so very thankful for how God uses His word to reach me. Not only did He encourage me in my “need to finish everything” personality, but He also reminded me that my ministry here is a gift from Him. AWESOME! Just a few verses down in 2 Timothy 4:7 Paul writes “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” I pray that I continue to always fight for the Lord, always finish what I start and ALWAYS have faith in my Father in Heaven. ~Ronnie~

Update from Uganda

It has been about a month since we left Texas for Uganda.  Life here is really good and we are blessed to live where we do.  We have quickly fallen in love with the people, the area, the weather, the food, our village church, the local markets, and all our new friends. We are very blessed to have so many wonderful people lifting us up in prayer. We know that this move and all the life adjustments that come with a move like this would not be as smooth and peaceful as it has been if it were not for you and others like you praying for us, supporting us financially, and praying for the folks we encounter on a daily basis. It is obvious the Holy Spirit has gone before us every step of the way and prepared the way for us as we have taken this step to follow Him. 

Two beneficiaries of a borehole. These women were anxious for us to get the well repaired so they could start using the well again and could quit fetching water from the nearby swamp.

So far, Ronnie has had the opportunity to participate in a women's seminar on purity in a village nearby. God has given us clear direction as far as where we are to begin drilling and disciple-ing. Colin has been able to locate most of the materials needed to drill, for the borehole materials, and for the well head. Colin has also been able to build a number of drill bits from locally available material. It is our hope that by using locally available material, the cost of the wells can be managed and every rural farmer can own his/her own well. Ronnie has also been able to identify a number of ministry opportunities apart from helping with the water wells. We were able to repair three boreholes that were not functioning and now those villagers have access to clean water. God has been good!

Colin, Terry, and Bosco repairing a well as a thirsty villager looks on.

Thank you again for your prayers. We are doing great and loving life. However, these people and this place have seen so many terrible atrocities committed. There is still a lot of sadness and pain, and this area is in need of much healing. So please continue to pray for us and our well-being, but please also remember the wonderful Ugandans and the spiritual battle going on here.

Steering Wheels and Church Pews

Today was a big day for the little Rosser family.  We got to go to church for the first time and it was absolutely awesome!  We went out to the church in the village where we are going to be spending much time drilling.  All the songs were sung in either Ateso, Swahili, and one in English.  A few men in front played some drums and EVERYONE was clapping.  Our friend Josh gave the message and had Charles translate to Ateso.  Josh knows Ateso very well and is still learning it after five years of being here.  He said it is one of the hardest to learn and that is in part due to the fact that English is spoken all over and you can most of the time find some one that can translate or communicate with you.  But it was great to see so many believers come together and worship the Lord.  We were then fed after the service and it was great!  Pork, rice, and cooked cabbage.  Don't be fooled, it was pretty tasty!  We are told that the "bar" area just down the street from our house has some of the best pork joints in all of the town!  Colin is thinking that may be on the lunch menu at some point this week. 

The other really cool thing we did today was let the Yankee drive!  I got to drive to the hotel where we were meeting Josh and Mandy once we got Rover started.  (Rover is what I am calling our Land Rover...He didn't want to start this morning so I kept singing in my head, "Land Rover, Land Rover, oh won't you please turn over!"  But we had to push it and pop the clutch and away we went.)  We rode to church with Josh and Mandy and when we got back I braved the city streets!  We needed fruit and I needed to practice driving.  Needless to say, if you go slow and just watch for people, bikes, motorcycles, and other cars, its just like driving back home!  But on the other side of the road...
I think the only reason that I did so good was because I have been watching Colin drive for the last week or so and he is a great driver and everyone that sees him driving from the team is really impressed that he has done so well.  So I attribute my first day of successful driving to my wonderful and handsome teacher!

 

Settling in...

We are starting to settle in here in Uganda.  We love our little home and feel like we have been here for more than a week already.  Terry stayed with us for one week and went around with us to see the wells that Rick and the crew did last year.  There were 8 wells that were completed and are still working, two with minor problems that are easy to fix.  Colin will go back this coming week with Bosco, Moses and Solomon and fix the concrete work around the base of one well and fix a foot value and re-do the concrete around the base of the well head on another well.  We are really blessed to already have a crew of guys here that know what to do and have drilled enough to be invaluable to us.  Colin was also blessed with having a work shop already set up from when Rick was here.  Everything is there that he will need.  I think that just having the shop ready to go and all the drilling material there will save Colin months of work in finding what he needs.  Thanks Rick!!! 

We are also excited about the other group of missionaries that live here.  They have been so helpful in telling us where to get things in the market, showing us where to go, and having us over for meals!  We are going to be working with this team in a certain area just to the southwest of town where Rick had already drilled two wells.  We are part of the team that will be working with this area and our goal is to try and drill as many wells as we can so that when we are done, every family has their own well.  Both of us are thrilled about working with this other group and love what they are doing here in Uganda.  I am sure to expand on our team later.

Today was the first day where we had nothing to do but whatever we wanted.  It was so nice!  We got to sleep in late, well late for us, and then spent some time reading God's word while eating breakfast, then I washed our clothes and hung them out to dry.  I do think the one thing I will miss will be a washing machine.  We will be re-wearing clothes if we can.  Once the clothes were all on the line, Colin and I went to the market.  He had a few things he needed to get and we still needed a few items for the house.  While we were driving down one of the streets, we ran into Bosco and he went with Colin to find what pump parts he was looking for.  Then on their way back to the Land Rover, where I was waiting, they stopped and got a "Rolex."  A Rolex is a chapati with eggs and tomotoe and onion wrapped up like a breakfast burrito.  A chapati is very similar to a flour tortilla  By far the best thing I have had to eat since being in Uganda.  And the best part is that they are only about $0.50 (or $1200.00 schillings).

Needless to say, so far we are just loving our new life.  We know that our instant love for Uganda and the seamless transition has everything to do with our great God and with everyone back home praying for us as we set out.  Thank you Lord for being just awesome!  And thank you again to everyone that is praying or has prayed for us.  We know that God is going to do great things here and we are so excited to just be a small part of His work. 

Blessing to you all!
Ronnie