GPS (no that does not mean Gregory Philip Selinger)

We are starting to feel like our days are becoming very routine and it is hard to know what to tell you about. We leave our apartment between 6:30 and 6:45 am to try to avoid the morning traffic. We try to get out of work at the end of the day before the jam starts at 5:00. If we are successful, we get back to the apartment between 5:30 and 6:00. If we get caught in the jam, we usually get back by 6:30 to 7:00, but sometimes the jam is really bad and you just sit until whenever!
Lorenda has started leaving the babies’ home at 3:30 and walking to Watoto Central to meet Greg. The walk is only uphill for the first part, then downhill and finally flat (hooray- something familiar, flat land). That helps us to be able to get out of the busiest traffic area sooner. Today we decided to take a new route home- sometimes things work out and other times, well… We were literally driving in circles (and not in a traffic circle) at one point! The GPS would tell us one thing and we would do something else so it would take us back there for another try at it.
Have we talked about the GPS yet? Before leaving home, Greg purchased a map for Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, maybe Ethiopia, as well. Lorenda thought it was a ridiculous purchase that would be of no help. Turns out, she needed to eat some humble pie and tell Greg how it was the best purchase he has ever made. That little Garmin GPS from Costco knows every back alley and dirt trail in Kampala! It frequently says, “Driving on unpaved road” because there are a lot of those here. Shocking how well the thing works- it certainly has made driving a lot less stressful than it would have been.
Speaking of driving, Lorenda has not got up the courage to try driving in this city yet. Our cell (small group) meets about 600 meters from our apartment (400 if we walked and cut across the field) so the plan is that she will drive there tomorrow night. Some of you probably think that we are very lazy that we can’t walk to our cell. No- we are not that lazy, we actually do a lot of walking, but it is not safe for Mzungu to be out walking at night, even in a neighbourhood like ours that is relatively safe. We are just not prepared to take any unnecessary chances so it will be a driver training lesson instead!
We’ll let you know how the driving goes!