officially a ugandan

I'm not THAT tan yet, although I'm working on it. I now have a piece of technology completely foreign to us in the U.S., but one every single Ugandan has - a dual sim phone. And multiple phone numbers. I now have to my name three phone numbers, two on one phone, a third on another - and a fourth sim card is in my 3G modem, so that makes four. And it's completely normal here. They even sell quad-sim phones, so you can have a line from each of the major carriers on one phone. How crazy is that?

That means I'm also carrying around two phones, which is another Ugandan thing to do. It's fitting that I've crossed this threshold into native living as the farm seems to (finally) be settling down. For the first time we're coming up on paying salaries and buying feeds, and I'm not scrambling to give the farm a loan. We're keeping records better than ever, we're being more efficient with our feeding program, and our workers are doing a great job. I'm also in the early stages of talks to link up with the largest university here, Makerere University, to have our farm act as an extension classroom, for groups of interns to learn hands on from our farm, with university instructors teaching. It's obviously a win win, because these students get practical, hands on training, but the farm gets free labor, oversight from the university, and funding to run the whole program. It lines up directly with our mission to not only run a business, but run one that has tangible impacts on the community - we'll be enabling farmers to run successful piggery businesses on their own.

It's amazing to see the Lord's hand in how all these things come together. All I had to do was sit down with the executive director of this program at Makerere and he wanted to partner with us - he sent me a draft MoU before I got home. I'm amazingly excited to push through to the end of my time here, and work so the farm can go from our current stability to true growth. Maybe it's all because I'm not officially a Ugandan, technologically speaking. Here's to that.