Finally here!!

It’s Sunday evening here, so things are pretty slow moving right now. But that’s good because I can take some time to write out a new post!
Wow. Okay. We arrived in the Bweyale village around 5 or 6 pm yesterday, where most of the kids lined the road to greet us! They welcomed us back with a few traditional dances (which are awesome, you really need to check out Acholi dances sometime) and a lot of singing. Everything is just as I remember it from last year, except for the absence of a lot more mzungu’s coming along with me. I spent some time unpacking, and I even got to FaceTime with my family a little bit, which was awesome and really needed on my part. I slept okay after that, and then got up this morning in time to go to church (which is held a couple hundred feet from my hut so that’s nice). They introduced me in the service, there was more dancing and singing, and we also heard from the pastor about God’s protection over the righteous and the faithful. Afterwards, I tagged along with a few of the girls who live in the house called Love and they showed me around the girls’ houses. We visited the vocational classrooms and eventually settled by the field to talk and play a little bit of basketball (I know, me and sports??? what???). Basically, I got to spend most of the day with these girls, who were so kind and inviting. Since the two villages are now separated between primary school and secondary school/vocational school, most of the kids I’ve met are around 16-18. The rest are a few kindergarten age kids that look at me every once in a while and wonder why my face is so white and weird. They’re adorable, but their limited English makes them a little confused as to how to treat me. A few of them I remember from last year when I time with them in their nursery school, but they were all too young to remember that. I might ask to help out in the nursery again just to get familiar with them again, and also because they’re so dang cute and funny 🙂
The day itself has been pretty chill, but my mind has really been on a rollercoaster for a while. My mind has definitely been put at ease now that I’m here. Some of my fears I had while in the city are gone, but I’m still going back and forth from completely content/grateful to worried I can’t handle the distance. By distance, I mean the physical distance from everyone I know well and miss so very much, as well as the mental distance from everyone here. I know that if after one day, I’ve made this much progress with getting to know the kids, that mental distance will shrink after a while. But for now, I’m still getting acclimated to the culture and the lifestyle. God is really showing me His hand in all of this, though. What I love so much about Him is that He continually teaches me the same lesson until it’s engrained in me. For the past three summers, all of my overseas trips have challenged me in completely unexpected ways. Each time, God has laid out in front of me exactly what I’ve been doing to subconsciously push Him out of certain areas of my life. Every time I get comfortable in my cushy American lifestyle, He reminds me how much I take for granted and how I’m extremely blessed with everything I have. On trips like these, I see that my life is made for more than I would plan for myself. How could I ever go back to living the way I did after experiencing something like this? Well, it’s happened multiple times now over the past few years, but each of these trips has gotten increasingly more challenging, like God is making me aware He’s conditioning me for more and more extreme situations. I am definitely grateful that He is leading me through this, because it’ll keep me accountable in my spiritual walk throughout the whole thing. Prayers for my willingness to follow wherever He leads, be it familiar or foreign territory, would be most beneficial now.
Thanks for reading this, I know it’s not super short or anything. 🙂 But it’s really nice to know that there are people back home that can take this journey along with me and know what I’m up to.
{Haley}