Today I spent the afternoon at Jambo Café with all three
ladies (Eliza, Alice and Moreen). I had
been called in to help with the gigantic order of a three-tiered ‘Give-Away’
cake with six smaller cakes as part of a nine-cake set selling for £75, a
phenomenal sale for Jambo. (A give-away is just that: the woman’s family gives
the daughter to the man’s family and it is a precursor to a wedding, which may
happen any time in the future). The
first thing to note is that I had a wonderful time with the three ladies
chatting and laughing and working like clockwork together. The reason that this was so wonderful was
that, for those of you who remember, not too long ago the atmosphere in Jambo
was particularly icy as two of the women were not speaking to each other. Praise the Lord, those relationships have been
healed and Jambo is now a friendly and warm place to be!
While we were working on the cake icing, a man phoned
Alice’s phone and she handed it to me saying “You talk to him, it’s Tony!” I
cringed. I hate talking to Ugandans on
the phone as I struggle to grasp what is being said, and I don’t know a Tony! Alice shoved the phone in my face and I
started to find out who Tony was and what he wanted. It turns out that Tony runs a tour company
called Speke Ugandan Holidays (www.SpekeUgandanholidays.com)
and is trying to organise a coffee-farm tour that he can put on his itinerary
to take his tourists to a coffee farm, talk with a coffee farmer and find out
about the whole coffee business. Tony
said he had read my blog and seen that there is a wonderful café with a good
testimony (he’s also a Christian) and that he would like to bring his tourists
to Jambo for lunch after the coffee tour!
This is an answer to prayer because business has not been so good
recently as a lot of ex-pats who have been living here for the last year or two
have now gone. And if one tour company
is getting Jambo on its radar then we hope that others will follow. This was our aim for Jambo’s business side:
that tour companies would bring their clients to Jambo as they travel through
the country visiting Uganda’s beautiful National Parks.
After this good news we continued with the cake, which came
on nicely with the chosen colours of blue and yellow (we can only get garish
food colours here, and bold colours are very popular so this is perfectly
normal!). I used this opportunity to
teach the women some new icing piping techniques. I am by no means a professional cake
decorator but I’ve iced a few cakes in my time, including our wedding cake, so
I have a few creative tips to share. The
only downer was when the person who had ordered the cake came to see it and,
despite liking what we were doing, reminded Alice that she had also ordered red
to be on the cake! So we started to pipe
red flowers dotted around the side but Deb Benn, our colleague who was looking
after my boys, called me to say that Jonah needed me to come back as he is not
feeling well and was having a melt-down!
However, it was so lovely to spend a joyful few hours working and
laughing with the Jambo ladies and I am grateful for your prayers for the
ladies’ healed relationships.
Finally, I am trying to organise lunchtime ‘life-seminars’
at Jambo every week in October with a different speaker each week. Subjects to be discussed are: family planning
(a hot topic in Uganda!), financial planning (which many people don’t manage),
sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV and AIDS) and women’s health. Each seminar will end with a short discussion
of God’s view on each subject and how to put advice into practice. Please pray for this endeavour as it takes
some organising and we really want Ugandans to come and learn things that
aren’t taught in schools, are rarely talked about in churches and are generally
not even discussed in families.
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