An Exciting First Day!

We had a wonderful flight and arrived safely in Jinja around 1:30 a.m. Friday morning. Everyone was very excited and had a hard time settling down to sleep. We took our time getting ready when we woke up this morning and had some time visiting and sharing around the breakfast table, before going to Bukeeka to see the progress that had been made. We weren't sure how much work was going to be accomplished, because by the time we were ready to leave it was pouring rain, but when we got to Bukeeka, we soon discovered that it had not rained there. There was only light sprinkles.

The tower had been set in concrete and we got to observe the locals figure out a way to get the huge water tank on top of the tower. It was a very interesting sight and took several men to complete the task. In our culture we would have just hired a crane. Not here! They rolled it on it's side until they situated it in front of the pump surrounded by the wood frame. They then hoisted it up onto the wood frame and rolled it up to the tower. Then with a lot of yelling at each other and some interesting ingenuity they stood it up and and got it up and over the rail of the tower. This process, I would guess, took about 2 hours. After a time of visiting with some of the workers at the school, we went back to Jinja, and tried to find Patrick, the welder we used last time we were here. We struck out, but we dropped the men off and let them continue looking for him and get some parts they needed to continue work tomorrow.

We are all very tired, so I think we will make it a short night and try to catch up on sleep more tonight so we can get to work tomorrow. We will try to be a little more detailed tomorrow. We just wanted everyone to know we are safe and already enjoying our time here.