Where did August go?

Greetings to all, unbelievably another month has passed since we last wrote, so you are overdue for an update. The children have had 4, yes 4, weeks holiday and have just gone back to school this week so we have been involved in : monitoring the 'helping' roster,( we used to call it 'chores' but felt that 'helping' gave a more positive spin on it, but it is still chores) where children are rostered to help for an hour, 3 mornings a week in different departments so that they get to realise the work that the Aunties and Uncles do to keep the place running. Our job is to monitor that they turn up, the young ones are very good but some of the older ones can be a bit casual.
We have also run some extra study classes for our P7 students for an hour and a half each morning. Our P7's sit an exam at the beginning of November called the Primary Leaving Exam (PLE) which determines whether they can progress to further education or not. We had up to 22 of the 27 students turn up each morning for some extra coaching which we were pleased about. Our Friday nights have been taken up with Video/games nights for the family units, we have also carried out appraisals and goal-setting for the Nursery and Primary teachers as well as replacing much of the children's clothing from the containers. All in all we have been a tad busy so this week we have been at Holland Park in Jinja for some much needed R & R. We brought Katie (a young 25 yr old from America who is here long term and who organised the holiday programme for the children) with us for a couple of days as she too needed a break. This morning we leave to return to NACMU to look after Piet & Pita's family as they have left for Mombasa early this morning for two weeks for some time away too.
We have also farewelled Reny and Suzannah as they have returned to the Netherlands for good. Reny had been here for over 6 yrs so it was sad to see her go, but we know there is to be a wedding soon and we are delighted with that. It took sooooo long to get Suzannah's adoption finalised and they have been sooo patient but as the cheese ad says 'good things take time'.
Christian also had some time back home during this time but we are glad he is back and able to take over the keyboard playing in church once again. Marilyn had to step back to do it while he was away but Owen stepped up for two weeks which was good.
Over the last 3 weeks we have been back to cold showers and boiling water for dishes etc as a massive thunderstorm took out the main power cable and it has cost a bomb to fix it. But yeah!!!! It is now fixed, praise God. Another trial has been the fixing up of our home back in NZ so that we could relet it. We are very grateful to Sherrilyn who has overseen all the repairs and to Ruth and Jan and Heugh who have attacked the garden and to Pete and Robbie for all the cleaning and painting.
Well that's about all the news except we have had a steady flow of new babies, four recently, Colin & Katie, Enoch & Ethan  but no Marilyn or Warwick yet. Please pray for Piet & Pita for their time away and for us as we look after their family. There are no photos this time as our hard drive crashed on the computer and our friendly computer technician Alfred is trying to retrieve what he can but we fear we may have lost our pictures so we will have to start again!!
Till next time
God Bless