EAT FASTER!!!!!!

Our first full day here in Busia was a Sunday, which means church! After a long night Pastor told us we could sleep in and miss prayer from 6am to 7am which we were all thankful for. After getting ready to go to church we found out that 2 of us had to stay behind at the home to watch our stuff. Kim and I were the ones to volunteer. We were initially disappointed to miss our first experience at our new church, but the first thing we did was pray together, we prayed for our team, and we also prayed for good attitudes and we got them! We had such an awesome day here at the home. We had tea with the neighbor, (who has a flat screen TV on the wall! Yeah). My team and I have heard lots of stories from missionaries who have been in Africa, about the food people will give you. Africans are extremely hospitable and no matter how poor they may be they will always give you something to eat or drink when they invite you in their home. Africans also will be insulted if you do not eat and drink every thing they give you. We have heard all of these stories and knew to expect it, but today we got the real thing. It started with the tea. I personally am not a fan of hot drinks, and Kim doesn’t drink anything but water. So to start our day off we had to chug some tea that we didn’t really love, but it was really not that bad. While we were in our neighbors house she asked us what kind of food we like to eat. Immediately me and Kim exchanged a look, because we knew what that meant. We told her we like all of the food that they eat (potatoes, rice, beans, meat), and we told her we were not very hungry yet. We asked her for soap to wash our clothes, and she gave us some, and decided that washing our clothes would work up a appetite haha. So we washed clothes, Kim taught me sign language, we read, relaxed, played cards, and had an awesome time! Our neighbor was right, we did work up an appetite, we looked at our watches, we had missed breakfast and lunch, no one came home to bring us food and water. That is what happens when your the first volunteer to stay home. Finally around 1 or 2, our leader David called and told us he would pick us up to get some lunch and water. We were excited, but David never showed. He must have been on African time because it was several hours before a car came for us. In the mean time our neighbor had finished cooking us a feast of goat, rice, potatoes, and beans. Me and Kim were so nauseous from dehydration because we didn’t have any bottle water (thanks a lot David) that the thought of eating all this hot food with no water was unbearable. We tried to get out of it, we told her our ride was on the way, we asked for a plate to go, but do you know what her answer to that was? EAT FASTER. Okay, so Kim and I started stuffing our faces, but the food wasn’t going anywhere. We ate and we ate and we barely made a dent in our plates. I tried pushing some of my food onto the children's plates when their mother was not looking, I tried reasoning with her, but all she kept saying was eat faster, eat faster. Man, I felt like I had eaten a whole goat in less than 10 minutes by the end of that. Finally the food was gone and our car showed up to take us to the church where the rest of our team was waiting with some lunch for us HAHA. Thankfully our second lunch was not homemade by a sweet african woman so me and Kim were off the hook and didn’t have to eat it. Praise God! Through all of this I honestly had the best day ever with Kim, we seriously bonded and now can speak sign language to each other across the room. We even laughed through all the stuffing of our faces. I could not have asked for a better first day in Busia, and I cannot wait for many more.