Cold...

Over the past couple of weeks, as rainy season has well and truly set in, I have decided that I miss the hot season, when temperatures daily topped 40C and rarely dropped below 30C. Last night the temperature dropped to a lowly 21C. Not sure how I'm going to cope with a return to Scotland.

There are many reasons why I miss the hot season, but two stand head and shoulders above the rest. Firstly, because of the complete lack of paved surfaces, and the routine heavyness of monsoon downpours, when it rains the whole place turns to mud, making moving around by almost any kind of vehicle completely impossible. Today in an ill-judged, hurried trip to the market I came the closest I have come yet (and I can tell you, it's up against some pretty stiff competition) to falling off my motorbike due to the mud.

Secondly, the lack of sunshine means that there is a lack of hot water for showers. Now much as I dislike not being clean, I dislike being cold even more and the number of days in between showers, at times, verges on the outrageous. It's beginning to make the women on our compound (of which there are many) ask questions about my personal hygiene.

Today, things took an immeasurable turn for the better with the arrival back in Sudan of my much loved Kenyan sidekicks, John & Peter. In their absence it was left to me to manage our Sudanese labourers on the building site, a feat which I managed with varying degrees of success. It was an invaluable, enjoyable, frustrating and baffling experience, at the peak of which I employed 14 guys at one time to help me finish building a new fence for our compound. In the pouring rain (this is the point where I would have had a great photo to share with you, had I not been to lazy, cold and wet to go back to my house to get my camera). It was the first time I had been properly freezing cold since I left Scotland.

Another real blessing over the past week or so, has been having the chance to hear in more detail some of my good friends life stories, and they never cease to throw up surprises. At the weekend, one of my closest friends here was telling me how the war came to Mabaan County (where I am) in 1996 (when he was 10)whilst he had gone to visit his grandmother in another village. Everyone literally took to the hills and he was seperated from his parents for 12 years (most of which was spent in a refugee camp in Ethiopia). I've no idea what kind of effect that kind of thing, and all that he has seen, would have on somebody growing up, and this kind of story is very typical.

The good news (and sometimes here you really need a bit of good news) is that during his journey to Ethiopia he heard the Word of God from some old guy in a random village and he saw the wisdom in it. I'm grateful for stories like this, although I'm at a bit of a loss as to how best to encourage him (and others) to keep on following Jesus.

Just as well it isn't all down to me...