-By Jared & Kimberly Morrison

Happy holidays! We hope you all enjoyed spending some quality time with family and friends over the Thanksgiving break. We sure did miss our family and, being totally honest, the food!

Since Uganda doesn’t celebrate the American Thanksgiving holiday, we spent the day knocking out one of our most important tasks since we arrived. Check out what we were up to that day and the other things we’ve been up to the last month…

We bought a van

Thanks to YOU, our generous partners, we were able to buy one of the best models of family vehicles for Ugandan roads. It’s in great shape, very clean, very tough, and it has AC! Because of the intense heat, dust and vehicle fumes here, a lack of AC limits the children being able to get out of the house as much. Having AC allows us to keep the windows up and the kiddos’ lungs safe. We hope you’ll come visit and take a ride with us soon!

We got our long-term visas

After many hours of work getting documents, submitting paperwork and visiting immigration, we have Jared’s work permit, 3 dependent passes and 3 student passes. Look out Uganda, we’re going to be here a while!

We started Luganda language classes

English is the official language of Uganda. However, many Ugandans still speak Luganda at home and in the villages. We want to be able to communicate with our family here at home, in our village, and to the children we serve as best we can, so we decided to go back to school! Being able to speak their language shows Ugandans that we value their culture, want to learn as much as we can about it, and that we’re going to be here for a while.

The boys started homeschool

Levi, Gideon and Judah now spend every morning working on their schoolwork. It’s not easy teaching 3 boys, all in different grades, all while refereeing 4-year-old twins and training a puppy that’s already the size of a medium adult dog, but Kimberly does it with grace.

Kimberly attended Farming God’s Way training

Farming God’s Way is a tool for equipping and empowering the poor to help themselves. They teach that God is the master farmer who has been farming this way since the beginning, and by simply following His ways, amazing solutions to the food security and poverty crisis can be revealed. Kimberly was excited to attend this half-day training along with Joan (Patrick’s wife) and Claire. They came back excited and full of ideas to help better our garden here at home and to also help our neighbors and the families we serve get a greater yield from their crops to provide more food for themselves and others.

Claire came home for holiday

We met Claire 7.5 years ago and have considered her family ever since. After many years of long-distance communication and Jared only being able to visit her for a few hours once a year, she’s finally home with her family! She just turned 16 and starts her junior year of high school at the end of January, so we have over two months to love on her before she heads back to school. As you can see, she’s loving being the big sister.

In addition to all the accomplishments above, we’ve also managed to get a Ugandan tax ID for making large purchases and business deals, opened a Ugandan bank account to access and send money more easily, house trained our guard dog, prayer walked in our village several times, networked with other ministries, looked at land for the Forgotten Children Worldwide girl empowerment project, and we could go on and on…

Life in Uganda never stops, and we love every minute of it. It’s so much easier to love the heat, chaos, traffic, amount of time it takes to do simple tasks, and everything else different here because we know we’re right where God wants us.

“In the center of a hurricane there is absolute peace and quiet. There is no safer place than in the center of the will of God.” -Corrie ten Boom

We hope and pray that you all have a blessed Christmas season as together we celebrate the birth and life of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. We truly love and appreciate you all!