2017 so far. Building a house, visa complications, sheltering women and more sickness.

2017 has been eventful so far, and to be honest I have been a bit tired and even looking forward to going back to Australia for a bit (in April)

I did start off the new year in a positive way! I spent the night under the stars around a fire capturing a timelapse with my new camera.
You can check out the timelapse here ...  https://vimeo.com/197738799

We have continued to run our wise choices for life training with the VOH youth, which has been very positive and we have had lots of good feedback from the young people.
We also had a team from Australia come and visit us, and our dancing boys put on a great performance for them. They even spent quite a bit of time contributing towards the building at the property.

The team also brought some 'days for life' packs for our tailoring girls, which consist of washable sanitary packs for poorer women in the villages.

The progression of the building at the property has been great as well! We are now almost at roof hieght.
It has also been a great oppurtunity for some of our young YSU boys to do some labour and make some money so they can help their families during the school holidays.
The boys also feel very proud in contributing towards building the youth center as well.

Every night I pick them and bring them home around 7 pm. And when I drive over the rail way track I always get this scene. So I had to get my camera and take a shot!

I have finally got Ethan's passport back with a visa in it after about 5 months of waiting.

But it didn't come back without a cost!
It turns out the agent/lawyer I was using to acquire Ethan's visa ended up being a complete conman.

For five months I have been dealing with someone who constantly gives excuses and makes up stories and never calls me when promised and never answers his phone.

He kept telling me that the passport was at immigration being processed.

I finally caught onto his 'shady' character when I had been trying to call him for 2 days, yet he never answered my calls.

After another unsuccessful attempt, Agnes told me to quickly try calling from her phone ... since he would not know the number.
Of course he answered straight away and in a surprised voice tried to make some excuse about his phone being lost in his sofa and only just finding it.

I knew I had to go on a rescue mission to his office in Kampala and get all my documents back. Even if I had to finalize the process of the visa myself.

So with my friend Richard, I went to Kampala and to his office. You would not think the place was so dodgy, because they have a very professional looking office with many workers.
When I got there and demanded all my documents the truth came out. Ethan's visa was actually accepted way back at the start of November, and immigration was just waiting for the $100 US fee to be paid.
This was money that I had paid to the agency back in September. But this agent I was dealing with had obviously took the money for himself and didn't have anything to replace it with.
He kept apologizing and asked if I could give him more time while he waits for another job he was doing to pay him .. then he would pay at immigration.
I knew the man's words were dishonest at this stage ... so I told him just to give me all my documents related to my file and I will go to immigration myself.
He then proceeded to pull out my passport which was in his office desk drawer the whole time.

I grabbed all my documents and walked out.
Long story short, I got in contact with one of his former workers who I was dealing with at the start, and who had been very helpful.
This person was very apologetic and helped me out a lot. They explained to me they also had lots of money stolen from them, from this man ... and it seems there are lots of customers who are disgruntled and unhappy with this particular lawyer and his agency.

This former worker linked me up with someone at immigration who was able to help me get the visa in Ethan's passport (of course for a fee).

Two disappointing things I ran into though. Because the visa was approved long ago, but no payment was being made to immigration, immigration had decided that Ethan had overstayed his entry visa, and I would be subject to a fine. I had to pay a decent amount of money to clear this up.

The other disappointing news was that immigration refused to allow us to apply for a Ugandan visa for Ethan, through his mother being a Ugandan citizen.

Instead they said we could only get Ethan a dependent visa through myself as the father.

This means that immigration has said that Ethan could only have a visa to stay in Uganda, as long as his father had one.

This also means that Ethan's visa expires when my visa expires, which is this July. Now this will involve more running around and trying to renew two visa's for Ethan and myself in July.

Their reasoning to this was that they believed a child belonged solely to the man, and so Agnes as a women has no rights to obtain Ethan's visa under her Ugandan citizenship.

Sometimes arguing with their logic is just not worth the time and energy .... sigh.

But Agnes keeps reminding me that I should be grateful and not disappointed. You never know what trouble we could of got into with this conman. And we have Ethan's passport back with a visa in it (no matter if it doesn't last that long)

We have also ran into a very complicated situation with one of our tailoring girls.

One of our girls has been very badly abused by her partner for a long period of time. She has run away from the man, and is sheltering with us.

Without going into the details, we will keep her while she finishes her course, and we have been in contact with the man, and also the local counselors to address the situation.
It is a very sensitive issue that involves many complex cultural understandings and gender imbalances, while we also have the desire to stay true to doing what is right, and to support the victim here.

Please pray for us as we shelter this girl, and deal calmly, sensitively but also firmly with the local community and local men in the community here.

Although gossiping has already started about us (we are stealing people's wives, we are allowing and empowering women to run away from men  etc)

We feel that we don't want to look back on our lives and see that we were always worried about being gossiped about or wrongly spoken badly about, but rather that we did what was right, stood for justice and loved the oppressed.

We also have to be calm in our 'stand for justice', and not fall into 'hating' the oppressor.

All in all a sensitive situation that we would appreciate your prayers for.

Ethan also got very sick the other week. He started burning up in the night, and by the time we took him to the hospital the next morning, his temperature was dangerously high.

They checked him for Malaria and Typhoid, but it seemed that Ethan had another bacterial infection.
This is the fourth time he has had this strong infection since he was born, and so the fourth course of strong antibiotics ... which is worrying.
We pray that Ethan's immune system will be able to recover.

We spent four restless nights with him, as he barely slept and was obviously distressed. He was also burning up for the first two days.

He is now doing much better and has finished his course of medicine.

We got to celebrate his first birthday the other day as well. We invited many children from the community, and their parents, who we are friends with. And it was a fun day for all.