In the States!

Hello everyone! I am now back in the States (arrived late Thursday evening), and this will be my last blog post here. Since arriving, things have not been too eventful; I am adjusting back to the American culture. Last night I was able to go to my cousin’s graduation party, which was fun. My Mom, brother and I also went to see Toy Story 3, great movie! Everything here is much different than what I had become udapted to in Uganda.

I won’t write too much for this blog post, but just mention a few things from Uganda that took place shortly before I left. Last week in our neighborhood we had a girl accept Jesus. She brought back a friend when we met again and then several other English-speaking girls joined us. By the end of the day we had five girls pray to accept Jesus, it was really exciting!

Some things might have been lost in translation, but we will have several people meeting with them more to do some discipleship. Another girl from the neighborhood even came up to ask if she could talk to us as well, that was really neat, I’m excited to hear about what the follow-up has been like (I really have no idea where in the world all of the English speaking children came from).

Also: we had a crazy number of baptisms on Sunday at the new church; the deaf girl in our neighborhood learned a new word (airplane); we had a great dinner with the staff before I left; I was bit by a super ant; a woman asked us to marry her son after passing her on the road; I made fried okra in Uganda for the second time; Ashley and I pulled a prank in Uganda for the first time; and, lastly, I had many good times saying goodbye to some dear friends that I love very much.

Hopefully I will see many of you soon! I’d love to hear how all of you are doing also, and look forward to talking or spending time with you!

Stuck

I am currently in Kampala. I am supposed to be on a bus headed back to Gulu. But when I arrived at the bus station this morning, I discovered that the bus is broken down and is not running today. So now I'm back at the guest house waiting until tomorrow to leave.

While frustrating, it is kind of nice to have a day of rest. The bus cancellation caused me to realize that I've been feeling quite overwhelmed the last couple of days. Laura left, my computer crashed, I'm applying to go back to school (yes, really!), and I'm leaving Uganda in less than three weeks. I needed a day to refocus, so I'm thankful that I get to stay here, whatever the reason.

"Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you..." - Psalm 55:22a

Happy Father's Day!!

Because of a combination of poor internet availability, crashing computers and busyness, we have been having a hard time making blog posts. We actually have a couple that are almost ready to be posted but saved on a computer that isn’t working, so we’ll try and update you on the latest happenings. This will be a joint blog post between the two of us.

Laura is leaving early tomorrow morning and will be back to the States on Wednesday; she’ll put up a few more blog entries and then Ashley will start posting by herself again.

On to the big news, Father’s Day was on Sunday! To say a proper Happy Father’s Day to our Dad, we thought we would include a couple of [very manly] animal stories from both of us:

Story 1: Killing, taking apart, cooking and eating a chicken.

Ashley: Learning how to properly “prepare” a chicken was on my maybe list of things to do while in Africa. On Sunday I happily moved it over to the “I’ve experienced this” list. I guess I can really only halfway check it off the list because Kent did the honors of the chop while Laura and I looked on. But it really wasn’t bad. I’m pretty sure I could even do it on my own in the future. I’m also equally as sure that I wouldn’t want to, but at least I know I could if necessary. And the biology lesson that fresh chickens provide is quite interesting. Nerdy? Maybe, but true.

Laura: The chicken was eerily warm inside afterward. After holding it in my arms as it snuggled against me, I wasn’t about to chop its head off. Once it was properly dead, however, (it is true that chickens don’t exactly stay still right after they’re killed) taking it apart wasn’t quite as bad as I had imagined. Surprisingly, I was even able to eat it when we were finished! We had very good chicken spaghetti: if you ever need some fresh chicken for dinner in the future just give me a call…

Story 2: The white ants.

Ashley: This was the second and largest swarm of white ants that I’ve experienced. It’s hard to understand how many bugs swarm during these times. Literally 1000s. You can hear the wings through the windows.

Since Ugandans eat white ants, we helped collect the ones that were making their way into our house. I would say at the end of an hour we had collected somewhere between 200-400. It was quite disgusting, but a very Ugandan experience. And our night guard was happy to have the extra bugs that we collected for him.

Laura: Despite the name, these look nothing like ants. They are oversized, fat termites each possessing four wings, and there were 1000s of them. Since our house is in the middle of huts, the light attracts the swarm. Being outside when one of the largest swarms came, I might have had more bugs hit/crawl/sit all over me in that 1-2 hours than I have in the rest of my life combined.

Because of a varied audience, we thought pictures would be best kept off the blog. If you do want to see some of these experiences just let us know. The videos and pictures are great! Happy Father’s Day, Dad! We love you!!

Churchplants, Children and our Summer Team

These last couple of weeks have been really awesome. On Sunday, we were able to go to the very first week of a new church plant. This was not on my bucket list, but it definitely should have been. It was so incredible, and I was blown away watching the Holy Spirit move on this first day. There were all sorts of very different people there. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a church with that much variety, but it was really great to tell people of all backgrounds that they are loved. We’ll keep visiting with and pursuing the people there and are praying that everyone will soon come to know Jesus personally.

It was held in a disco joint (they told us we could use the building any morning of the week), and I was so incredibly blessed to be there. While it wasn’t exactly conventional, it was great. The main people that helped to start the church plant were all really faithful and excited about what was going on and it was really neat to see the fruit of that (I was not one of the main people to have started this, but did get to see some of it unfold).

We’ve also been having wonderful times with our neighborhood friends. They are probably all under 10, and I’m starting to wonder how I would be able to love kids more, even if they were my own. One of the girls is deaf, but she always has so much to say. She’ll run up and give us a huge hug when we see her and then proceed to tell us, with her hands, stories from whenever the last time was that she saw us. A lot of times these stories are a bit lost in translation, but it is fun to talk to her. We’ve started praying for her often, she is so great. The other kids will a lot of times run up and start attaching themselves to our hands. We’ll sometimes find ourselves with three or four kids on each hand, which is great.

The summer team also arrived today. There are two women, one my age and another closer to my parents (a first grade school teacher) and they are both very sweet. They’ve only been here for a couple of days but are doing great and both seem like they will be really great to get to know over the next few days.

A Little Bit of Aggieland

As an Aggie, I thoroughly enjoy spreading around Aggieland traditions. This weekend, while watching the four Forester girls for 3 days, I have had a unique opportunity to do so. Kent Forester, their dad, is a very enthusiastic supporter of Texas Tech. Because of this, his girls have been taught many of the cheers from the school and also have much of the paraphernalia. Kent has been really careful about not letting me change their minds with Aggie traditions.

Since he and Becky were gone this weekend, I thought it would be the perfect time to teach them a little bit about the awesomeness of Aggieland. Amidst our various other fun activities, I decided to teach the girls: how to whoop, the hullabaloo, a yell and each of the class wildcats. They all want to do the hullabaloo and then whoop together for their dad when he gets home. This’ll probably make the Forester’s love me forever, I’m pretty excited : ) Whoop!

Unexpected Blessings (Part 2)

I got a package! A real, USPS, sent-all-the-way-from-America package from my sweet friend Amelia! I got it a couple days ago and was ridiculously excited. And it made it here in near record time – only a little over a month!

She sent me a collection of poems by Amy Carmichael, who was a missionary to orphans in India. The crazy thing is that I had JUST finished a book on the life of Amy. How cool is that??

Oh, and when I went to check the mail, I didn’t have my key. Instead, I just walked behind the counter and asked the man in the back for the mail for Box #116. He gave it to me without any hesitation. Guess I looked trustworthy.

So anyway, thank you so much Amelia. You made my day!

Portugal

The FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa on Friday. If you have ever lived or traveled in Africa, Europe, or South America, you will know that this is a big deal. Basically everywhere BUT the States is crazy about futbol (or soccer, if you prefer).

[For those of you who know nothing about futbol (of which I am one, except that I’m surrounded by it), this is the first time the World Cup has been in Africa and six African teams will be participating – South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Cameroon.]

Naturally, I felt the need to purchase a jersey with the FIFA 2010 patch. I mean, this will probably be the only time I’ll be living in Africa at the same time the Cup’s in Africa.

So I go to a sport’s store in Gulu to make my purchase. I’m hoping for South Africa, but am pretty willing to accept any African team, with the exception of Nigeria (for you, Dad).

And of course my only selections are Portugal or Nigeria.

I opt for Portugal. Then I regret it on the way home. Portugal? Seriously?? I didn’t even know where Portugal was until I looked it up on my handy little World Cup map!

Nevertheless, as I’m watching the first match of the Cup between South Africa and Mexico, I’ll be proudly wearing my Portuguese colors. And hoping that no one realizes that Portugal plays the Ivory Coast on Tuesday…

Unexpected Blessings

It seems that since Laura’s arrival there have been a multitude of different reasons why trips to the village have been canceled. This has been discouraging on one hand but very exciting on the other – discouraging because I love the village and encouraging because I equally love the town of Gulu and the people that live here!

The Foresters (the family I met in the airport when I first arrived) had a team come in this week and yesterday we had the opportunity to spend the day sharing the Gospel with them. What a blessing that was! The team is 10 college students or new graduates and they LOVE Jesus. It was a huge honor to be able to work alongside them and have no other goal for the day but to talk to people about Jesus.

The morning began with a time of praise and worship, reading Scripture, and praying. I felt so filled and realized how deep my longing for community has been over the last few months. And that was just the start to the day.

We split into groups of 3-4 and spent the rest of the day walking around Gulu and sharing the love of Jesus. I don’t know what happened in most of the other groups, but in my group we saw one person accept Jesus. We also met a man who is already following Jesus but has been longing for a solid church and community.

Finally, we met Mary and Martin and their four children. Martin is a prison guard/chaplain and Mary works at one of the little shops in town. They love Jesus like crazy and we spent the afternoon encouraging one another. The family spends much of their time and money ministering to others and they are just a huge blessing to the people around them. So cool!

As we were preparing to leave, Mary said she wanted to wash our feet. So she brought us inside her home and prayed over us as she washed our feet. I somehow managed to hold back tears, but I’ve never been more humbled in all of my life.

“If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.” – Isaiah 58:10-11

Hope

One of the hardest things to process about being here is the previous activity of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) and the impact that this group has had on Gulu. The village we work in, Tegot Atoo, actually means “place of death”.

There is not a single family in that village that we have met who are not directly affected by LRA activity. Hearing stories about this is unavoidable, and especially at first I found it incredibly upsetting to watch as people brought up how the LRA affected them. They visibly change when talking about their stories. Many cover their pain with alcohol, abuse or various other coping activities.

I won’t go into specific stories, both because that is not the purpose of my post and I don’t want to write what I’ve heard over a public forum, but you can almost definitely find something about this group on the internet if you are interested. “Invisible Children” has some good videos that actually center around the place we are right now.

More importantly than what happened, what I’ve found that is so incredible about all of this is the amount of hope and change that Jesus provides to His people today.

Richard, his eyes actually seem to glow. I’ve read this in books, but don’t know that until now I’ve really seen someone that I feel this is true of, but I can see it in him. He is filled with joy and peace. As he abused her continually, his wife Evelyn prayed 10 years for Richard to come to know Jesus. About one year ago he did, and he is a wholly changed man.

He, despite cultural norms, helps his wife in the garden, goes out to dig for her in the community if she cannot and interacts with people with a great humility, something rarely seen here in men (this was not an insult to men, culturally here men have absolute dominance over women and oftentimes treat them mainly as property, not people, this is very different from western culture : ) ).

Another cultural difference is that parents don’t really interact with their children. There are not really hugs or kisses given to any of them. Richard and Evelyn LOVE their children and that love is returned. They hug, kiss, talk with and interact with them. In a very real way, they show the life changing power that Christ has over the lives of His children.

In addition to this, they also display hope and assurance in their future; not that they know exactly what will happen to them, but they know that what matters is they will one day spend eternity actually being able to see their Savior with their own eyes. Richard and Evelyn were weighed down with sins, the actions of the LRA, culture and many other things, and Christ freed them from all of that. And hundreds of other people in this community as well. People are undeniably changed and freed through Christ. “For by grace we have been saved through faith.”

This is actually one of my favorite things to talk about with people. Email me if you have any questions or want to know more, I would love to hear your input! I love you and am praying!

“And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.””
-Mark 2:17

Top Ten

Upon further reflection on my trip to the hospital, I realized that I left out a lot of important (and entertaining) details concerning my time there. So here are the top ten ways you know that you are in a Ugandan hospital, not an American hospital:

1. The doctor looks about 20. Maybe 23 at most.

2. When taking blood, a latex glove is tied around your arm. To the point that your arm turns a bluish/purple color.

3. One of the supplies for taking a blood culture is aluminum foil over the top of a glass bottle.

4. Anyone can read your chart. This is to include any hospital employee, fellow patient, or any random person roaming the halls. Definitely no HIPAA laws here.

5. The waiting room and halls are filled with people lying on grass mats on the floor.

6. Your total bill is less than $10.

7. The TB ward is next to the children’s ward.

8. A 20-something boy tries to come see the doctor with you. You say no. So does the doctor.

9. The toilet is a hole in the ground.

10. You are asked to name your tribe. When you respond, “none”, you receive blank stares. You finally state, “America.”

Murchison Trip!

This Thursday was Martyr’s Day in Uganda! While I find this to be a pretty unique reason for a holiday, it gave us a chance to take a group trip to Murchison Falls, a game park in Western Uganda. It was so much fun and a nice break! We went with the Forester family and Andrew. Here are a few pictures and stories:

Our more interesting experiences started when we drove up next to the Nile River. Baboons were all over the place, with huge teeth, and didn’t seem to hesitate to approach you or come swiftly toward the open door of the car. We quickly learned to keep the doors shut and the children inside. Here’s a picture I took of the baboon that had decided to come up to Ashley and me, I snapped a photo before jumping in the car. It was kind of close..



While still next to the Nile, we were also able to have a close encounter with some elephants. This experience came right on the heels of Kent telling us the story of how previously in the same game park an elephant had killed one of the visitors. As a few of us walked to the bathrooms, and Mom and her two baby elephants started walking toward us. We put the young Forester child in the bathroom as the family walked within 50 feet of us, the Mom staring as she walked by. Elephants are huge when in the wild (they actually grow to be larger when not in captivity), and it was pretty awesome:



Our boat trip down the Nile was full of interesting animals. The most memorable experience was probably when we passed a dead hippo. Our guide estimated that he had been dead for 2 days (probably after losing a breeding rights fight with another hippo) and there were around 20 crocodiles feeding on him. It’s kind of hard to see well in the picture, but it was definitely a lot rather large animals in one place:



And lastly, Ashley and me in front of the falls:



"Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all."
-1 Chronicles 29:11

A Little More About LIfe in Gulu

Today is going to be full of random facts/thoughts/stories, hope you enjoy : D

-It is rainy season here, and you can definitely tell! We have a tin roof, and when it starts to pour I’m still not entirely accustomed to the noise. It is very loud.

-The other night, Ashley and I took a boda-boda home in the rain and dark. I laughed for almost half the way, going through dirt roads after it has been pouring is hilarious.

-Many of the people here add please to the end of statements: Example: Me: Do you like to drive? Him: Yes please.

-Small children can carry jerry cans (containers that hold 20 liters of water) on their head for miles. I can’t even lift a full one of those onto my head to begin with.

-Because we are white, we stick out here. As we pass, people literally yell “white person” at us in Acholi (munu or mzungu). Also, seemingly for the same reason, it is not too uncommon for children to lick my skin and then run away laughing.

-I have had either an Acholi version of “Jesus Loves Me” or a clapping game song stuck in my head for possibly the majority of the day.

-My bedtime probably averages around 11:00 here (for those of you who know me well, yes, this still kind of shocks me also).

-The common response to “How are you?” is “I am fine”, which is basically the equivalent to “I’m good” in America.

-Children here will be taught the above phrase and not always know what it means, resulting in kids sometimes running up saying “How are you? I am fine. How are you? I am fine.” in an adorable accent that makes me laugh every time.

-The World Cup is in South Africa, on the same continent I am currently residing, and begins in less than a month!

-Our neighborhood kids call Ashley “Annas” (a name actually in the Bible), we’re not sure why. If they forget our names they just yell “Munu!”

-The light switches are oftentimes the opposite way as ours (down is on), but not always, again we don’t exactly know the reason for this.

-Because of the culture and environment, I am almost constantly in skirts or dresses down to my ankles. If anything goes even close to as high as my knees, I feel totally inappropriate. I’m already thinking readjusting to shorts should be pretty funny!

-And lastly: Our neighbor has a pet monkey, that sits outside attached to a rope : )