Rain, glorious rain.

Today was a special Saturday for the mission. As I mentioned before each month the children in the surrounding 3 districts with HIV report to the David and Lois Rees Hospital. It is a lot of fun to see so many smiling kids. With the 5 puppies around the front offices…it made for cute photos. But I am out of my time line.

This morning I awoke at 4:30am. So we are getting better with jet lag. I think Kathryn would write more on this blog if she wasn’t suffering so much with her jet lag this trip. I think she is taking it enough for both of us. Regularly in the states Kathryn can sleep from 10pm to 12pm the next day on Saturdays. Impressive, I wish I could do that! Please pray for her transition as the time is basically 10 hours different… so it tosses our bodies around. She slept for 8 hours off and on today and I just carried her to our bed now at 10pm.

After catching up on my two blog entrees… I went running again this morning. It was very humid today. I could tell. After 20 minutes of working out Kathryn said, “Did you just pour water on your shirt, or is that all sweat?” Yah, no water.

After an enjoyable cold water shower I discovered that I would be leading the devotions for the hospital staff at 9am. Thanks to my revival of Galatians over at saintjoshua.blogspot.com I was able to print off the introduction stuff and use that as a rough layout to speak on. Vincent translated for me. He is a good man. Always translating, so I gave him some heavy duty throat lozenges.

I worked with Kathryn more on the ‘logo” progression for the hospital (“branding” for the community), and kept up with my book outlines just in time to spend 11-12:30 with all the kids that were here with parents. I would guess that there were around 70-80 students today.

Each month parents bring their kids to get money for food, travel, medicine and extra nutrition supplements in a program that runs due to the Clinton Foundation. Due to conflicts with the gov’t administration, the Clinton Foundation will be pulling their money. So it would seem that we have our work cut out for us right away when we return—find funding for HIV+ children. I have to break it down per/child. But I think kids are an easy heart string…especially when you see the HUGE benefit a child can obtain with medicine, nutrition and education in the future. A HIV+ student can live to see 50 years (and all around that is great!).

Around 1pm the RAIN came. It was beautiful, a real monsoon rain in the middle of April (generally these rains don’t come after March). 30-40 mph gusts, cool rain falling, I was in paradise, if only for a moment. The whole countryside has been cool ever since today. About a 15 degree difference.

Kathryn and I slept from 2:30-5pm this afternoon. I was directed to open my eyes from my peaceful slumber by our resident director of the family (Santhosh). So we played around for a while, with Dusty and the other dogs also. The power is usually off here from 5:30-7:30am, 1:30-3:00pm, and 5:00-6;30pm. Today it was off till 7:45pm. So you really can’t do much except sit around and sweat. So I sat out at the table in the garden, with the cool breeze…and enjoyed some quiet time.

A meal with the family and an hour discussion with my father-n-law and here I am fighting the urge to lay down on the hard office floor. I am bushed, I need to just upload this… and sleep!

Tomorrow is church, down in Yerpedu. Looking forward to this very much. And a day to finally get all of our technical stuff in gear.

Thanks again for reading!
JOSH
Ps – Hey Matthew, just saw you became a follower.