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as this weekend’s trip to murchison falls shows, there are definitely some benefits to living here in uganda. one afternoon i can be working in the garden, wondering if maybe i should go to a movie in the evening. 15 hours later i’m getting in a car for a spur-of-the-moment weekend getaway that for most people would be the trip of a lifetime. yup, it’s rough. but there are plenty of good reasons to be here.

i’ve been keeping up with “housing woes” in the US. got me thinking about what if. paige and i got married nearly two years ago and if we hadn’t moved here a couple weeks later i bet chances are we would have bought a house around then. i doubt we would be in foreclosure now and i think we have the sense to stay away from mortgages that look too good to be true, but it was near the top of the market and we wouldn’t have had a lot of money to put down. so i imagine there’s a good possibility that we could currently have a house worth less than our mortgage right now if we’d stayed in the US.

we’ll be returning to uganda from MN in october, some eight weeks after the bean shows up in august. people are asking how long we’re going be here (our original intent was to stay for 3 years, so that would put us at mid-2009). however, it makes a ton of financial sense to stay here once we have a kid. one, paige works at home so she can always be around to nurse, etc. two, we can have a full-time nanny for seven to eight dollars a day. now, i’m no expert, but i think that’s more less than you pay for child care in the states.

as paige pointed out in this epic post we don’t pay tax on income. we’d need to be here for a full year to get our tax-free status back, though. so that would be october 2009. we’ll see. there’s pros and cons to everything. we miss our family and friends and mexican food. not necessarily in that order.