Preparing to leave...

Well…we had our visas extended this morning which was lucky because today was day 90 of our 90 day visa! But, it also means that we leave in 9 days which feels extremely soon…and the emotions towards it are definitely mixed. On the one hand, there are friendships to be rekindled, a dog to see and it will be nice not to be shouted at on the street the whole time…but on the other hand, we’ve definitely now (even Theo, I think!) made it through the novelty and frustration phases of a new culture and are now pretty settled. So much so, in fact, that when I (just me on my own) came back to the UK last week for some end of term events, I was pretty taken aback by how different everything felt. This was helpful because it’s prompted me to try and prepare the kids for ‘reverse culture shock’ which I think they are going to feel in bucketloads. A number of things struck me, but the main one was just how much ‘stuff’ we have in the UK. A standard dining room here when we’ve been invited out for dinner is a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a table and chairs and nothing else! Sometimes, but not always, some cutlery as well! In the UK, I walked into our house and felt (I kid you not) almost nauseous at how much stuff we had! I’m still trying to process what I make of it all…and how we’ll deal with this when we get back to the UK, but it’s been a very helpful lesson to me, and hopefully will be to us in a fortnight’s time. The key take-away at the moment is that this amount of stuff doesn’t seem to lead to any great increase in joy or contentment…in fact, quite the opposite. It seems to me that people here, and particularly the people we have met with the least stuff, are amongst the most contented I’ve ever met. Stuff brings complications…and maintenance…and mess…but, as we’ve been discussing as a family, you can’t really just go back to the UK and ditch all your stuff, can you? And it isn’t like our stuff is expensive stuff…it’s just accumulated, often for free…

So…I don’t quite know how we’re going to deal with it all. 1 Timothy 6:6 – 8 has been helpful to us in trying to prepare for UK life. We have 9 more days, one more trip out of Kampala, a party organised to celebrate winning the euros (!!), a day to fix all the bits of the house that we’ve broken and then a 3am flight out of Kampala, through Istanbul to Heathrow, a dog, a car that hopefully doesn’t pump black diesel smoke everywhere…and normality(?)