The Nile River

Today began the relaxing part of our trip!

We were unable to attend a local church this morning because of confusion of service times, so we had church together in the front yard of the hotel. We sang a song together, Don preached, and John Kraft prayed. It was interesting that we came to build a building for a church that was worshiping under a tree and today we were the ones worshiping under a tree!

After Church we loaded up our vehicles and headed to Murchison Falls Park. It is a large game reserve on the Nile river. It is the largest game reserve in Uganda. It took us two hours to drive on the bumpy dirt roads roads! But once we arrived they greeted us in the lobby with cold towls to wash the dust from the roads off of our faces, and a cold glass of passion fruit juice!

The hotel is amazing! The name of the hotel is the Paraa Safari Lodge. If you google it they have a web site. Apparently The Queen stayed here before as well as Ernest Hemingway. All of the wood in our room is Mahogany. The whole place has an Africa explorer feel to it. We have a balcony in our room that overlooks the Nile river. I just had tea on the roof and you can hear the hippopotoms in the river below! It is amazing! There are more stars in the sky than I have ever seen before.

We took a 3 hour boat ride up the Nile today to Murchison Falls. It is a 100 foot waterfall near the start of the Nile. We traveled along the shore the whole way up and encountered all sorts of animals. We saw hippos everywhere! We also saw several Elephants and their babies, Crocs, warthogs, a Giant King Fish and some gazzel and plenaty of baboons! I couldn't describe to you how amazing it is to be that close to a giant animal like an Elephant or Hippo.

We could not get very close to the falls but even at the distance we were at you could feel the power of them! The entire Nile river has to pass through a very tiny gap and it comes crashing down!

Tomorrow we have brekafast at 6:30 and then we will head out into the park for a Safari of our own! I will be riding on the top of one of our vans for most of the day!

As I wrap up tonight I want to put a few sections from a journal I have been keeping.

I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this so if you are post some comments!

Love, Joy & Peace



"I had a lot of fun with the kids today. None of them could speak English but we still communicated and we still had lots of fun! I taught the kids some very cool things today, like how to make glasses with their hands and that thing where you twist your hands around your middle fingers. They couldn't do the finger thing but they had the glasses down. A whole village of kids was walking around with their hands flipped on their faces like glasses!"

"There is one boy I played with most of the day but I don't know his name. He has a huge smile and is really cute. He wears the same shirt everyday and it has all sorts of different animals. We can't talk to eachother so we just hang out together and smile and laugh!"

"The women went to the Pastors house today to see his wifes garden. While they were there several of the woman asked about me. They wanted to know how many wives I had!"

"Kathy and I went and walked all around the town of Masindi toady. It was amazing! As we walked past all of the shops we dodged cars, trucks, bikes, and motorcycles all while walking on the left sid of the road with people laughing and point everywhere! Everywhere we went little kids would get very excited and yell "Wazungu!" which is a white person. We must have been a site to see, two white Americans in a sea of Ugandans."

Thats all for now! I'm off to sit by the river Nile. It hard work serving Jesus!