Rattins living Coram Deo

Every tribe in Uganda has different food preferences, but they tend to revolve around these basics.  Boarding school students (i.e. the vast majority of secondary school students) generally eat posho and beans daily except for a Sunday portion of meat.  Imagine eating the same food for every meal! "Food" is the starch while everything else is the "soup" that goes with the food.  Generally a large quantity of the starch is portioned out with a smaller quantity of the soup. "Foods" include: White sweet potato (peeled and boiled) Cassava/manioc (as chips) Irish potatoes (peeled and boiled) White maize ( posho  - as a loaf of sticky "bread") Millet ( atapa or kalo - as a loaf of sticky "bread") Matoke /green plantain (best when steamed in banana leaves) Rice The "soup" includes a wide variety of ingredients in these categories: Greens Beans Cabbage Peanuts - ground into flour or paste depending on the tribe M...

Uganda facts Kampala is the capital of Uganda. The Ugandan shilling is the currency used here (currently 3800 UGX to 1 USD). The official languages include English and Swahili, but people also speak Luganda and various other languages (like Acholi). The life expectancy in Uganda is 50.4 years. Uganda is a landlocked country bordered by Kenya in the east, Sudan in the north, Democratic Republic of the Congo in the west, Rwanda in the southwest and Tanzania in the south. Uganda’s total land area is 241,559 sq km. About 37,000 sq km of this area is occupied by open water while the rest is land. The southern part of the country includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, which it shares with Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda is located on the East African plateau, averaging about 1,100 meters (3,609 ft) above sea level. The plateau generally slopes downwards towards Sudan explaining the northerly tendency of most river flows in the country. Although generally equatorial, the clim...

Please read this post as a means of introduction to this series . What is an orphan? In the west, an orphan is generally viewed as a child who has neither mother nor father.  In fact, dictionaries define an orphan as a child without parents or a child deprived of parental care.  Therefore, sponsors, prospective adoptive families, philanthropists, churches, short term volunteers, even many mission boards are convinced that when they are supporting or adopting "an orphan" the child must surely be a true orphan.  It has been shown that the majority of the world's orphans have families and the majority of children in orphanages have families. The word orphan has morphed in much of Africa to include a much broader category of child. When a child is "an orphan" here, his mother might be bringing him to the office as an orphan to see about getting assistance with his school fees. An "orphan" might be brought to an orphanage by an "uncle" (w...