This past Thursday was The Day! The Day we would finish the playground. I awoke before my alarm had time to go off with a feeling of excitement. A project we have been working on for a month now. We were all wishing our Hillcrest friends were here to join us for this day! Kendall, Chloe, Trayton, Kidist, Patrick, and I left Jinja in the early morning hours. Our newly discovered short cut route would take us to Naigobya in an hour and 20 minutes. Down dusty, red dirt, pot hole filled, roads; dodging chickens, goats, and cows; taking in the beauty of the lush. green fields and gardens against the blue sky; little children running at us with toothy big smiles while calling out mazungo, windows down, fresh cool air, and worship music filling the car. I love these drives. 
We pull into the school. The playground is covered with 300 purple uniforms, laughter filling the air. It was an awesome sight! The Tower. This is what we would complete today. The first task is filling our jerry cans at the bore hole in order to wash the tower down before painting. Lots of kids and mud= a very dirty tower. After letting the tower dry, we gather our paint cans from an old classroom. The place we believe is the reason for our last few visits at Sole Hope to remove several jiggers. We pry open the cans with our keys and find a nearby stick to stir the paint..... or rather what should have been paint and was now more like a rubbery sort of goo. We open three more cans and find the same rubbery goo. Purple. Purple didn't have hardener mixed with it yet and it was still OK. Praise God for purple . Patrick went high to paint the tower top and we began painting the few things that also would be purple. An eager, quite possibly first time painter joined us then. He quickly climbed a not so sturdy ladder, paint and brush in hand. Seconds later he was falling and so was the purple paint all over him and Kendall. I am giggling as I write this because it was quite a sight:) At the time, it was maybe not such a funny thing after just discovering our sticky goo paint and now seeing all the purple splatters that covered the orange, blue, lime green already dry paint.
So, we left a little earlier than usual that day. We visited with our friend Gloria who recently delivered a new little boy named Duncan. After arriving back in Jinja, we found a local paint store that would mix us more paint for our next trip, picked up some syrup for our pancakes that night and headed home. We have three new friends. They always find us on main street in Jinja. Today they found us parked at the supermarket picking our syrup. These three boys, average age of 11 live on the streets. We took them home with us to play for a while. They washed their clothes with buckets and a brush by hand, played soccer, and ate some pancakes with us. We gave them the last 3 blankets Fellowship Church VBS children made. Bellies full, sun setting, we let them go out the gate with their fresh smelling clothes and blankets in black plastic bags. Who loves you we ask. They reply, "Jesus." Now we were tired and exhausted. It would have been easy to do nothing today for these boys we have been getting to know more and more. However, I know we all experienced His joy that comes along with being His hands and feet and sharing His love with them today:) Please pray for wisdom in this situation as we look into their family situations and the possibility of getting them into school as all three desire to attend.
A week later......The above was a blog that took a while to get out.......today we really did finish the playground! Chris (I am sooooo glad he is back:) ) , Kendall, Chloe, TJ, Kidist, Atlanta, and myself made the drive to the village and put a coat of paint on the whole tower!! We will need to put one more coat on the floor of the tower...but thats minor:) Final pics coming soon:)
Thank you to the Hillcrest Worship Center children, Hillcrest church, the team from Hillcrest that came all the way from Michigan, to put this playground in the ground, the Afayo team, the community of Naigobya, our supporters who covered this project in prayer, and most of all; we thank our Heavenly Father who really is the one who made this possible!
Prayer: We are missing our son Christian who is in the US for school right now. Please pray for Chris and I as we 'finish' our time here in Uganda and greatly look forward to being reunited as a family with Christian at the end of this year. There is a definate void without him here.
Praise: We are so thankful for the recent help with the purchase of computers for Esther and Betty who are enrolled at Uganda Christian University! Thank you! They were so excited! Please pray for them as they continue to adjust to life in college.
Love,
The Fisher Family
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