One Goodbye and three Arrivals.

We start with the arrival of two very cute puppies. I am planning to start building my own house, it is a bit outside Soroti. So I asked around if anyone knew someone with big dogs, which might get puppies in the future. And there was somebody who had puppies, German Shepherd puppies!!! I could not let this chance go, so I bought them, they will be big and strong by the time our house will be finished (we haven't even started yet!) The children are very happy with them, it is still vacation, so the dogs get a lot of attention. The dogs have been named Rafiki, in honor of the old dog we had to let go and the other one is named Lassie,(we have a DVD about that dog). You can see on the second picture how dry it is in Soroti. All the grass is gone. It is very dry and hot now, we hope the rain will come in March, and when it starts raining, it is amazing how the green comes everywhere up. I love that view. It gives hope, even it all looks dead and dry, underneath there is life, we have to be patient in dry times, the rain will come!!

The puppies were introduced by the children to the big dogs. We are a bit careful, in the evening, when the big dogs come out to guard our compound, we put the little puppies in their doghouse and in the

morning we switch again. I don't think there will be a lot of problems in the future when they will be all together.

Then we had to say goodbye on Sunday to Mirjam. She had been with us for almost 5 months!! She came to do her practise for her study Music therapy. We really enjoyed having her around and we miss her! On the picture we are praying for her and if you take a good look, you see Mirjam somewhere in the middle! Don't worry, she survived our prayers!!!

This is our third arrival and he came today. His name is Bernard and he is a premature baby, weighing only 1.1 kg. he is very small and fragile. His mother passed away a week after giving birth.

He is too weak to drink from the bottle, so we gave him a NG tube, on this way we can feed him while he is resting and he can spare his energy. We put him in the incubator, which you see also on the picture. We hope and pray that Bernard will live. He was born in Kampala and had there problems with breathing in the beginning, they have given treatment to him and we pray he will pull through. We also gave a NG tube to Patrick, the baby I wrote about in my previous blog. He was struggling to drink and it cost him so much energy, his weight is double the weight of Bernard, but also 2 kg. is not that much. So we gave him also a tube and feed him easier that way. As soon as he is a bit stronger, we will remove the tube again.