AI and Technology Teaching

By Anthony:

A month ago I was shocked and discouraged when an African friend sent me a personal Whatsapp message and I realized it was written with AI!

In Uganda, most people are not using AI yet. But many youth and professionals are. You go to a burial and you hear a speech, and realize it was made with AI. Someone asks a theological question on Whatsapp, and a person makes a nice response, and you realize it was a copy and paste from AI. You see AI being used to generate reports for NGOs, letters, CVs, and assignments. It is out of control.

When many Americans think of Africa, they unfortunately think of poverty. But Africa is far more developed than Americans realize. Americans should realize that the same technologies springing up in the USA are springing up in Africa as well. Life for many rural Ugandans remains quite difficult, but in Ugandan cities, most people own a phone, and often a smartphone. (43% of Ugandans over age 10 own a mobile phone). Family disconnection due to devices and screen time is an issue here too. The average urban home has a television and a smartphone. 

One key difference is that Americans have adopted new technologies much more gradually over a longer period of time. But technology in Uganda has exploded at breathtaking speed. Someone can go from never having used the internet before, to suddenly having a smartphone, Whatsapp, and free AI. 

I felt a burden to create this teaching in November 2025 when I first started noticing a couple pastors using AI in a dishonest way to create instant sermons, without letting people know that they used AI to do so. This really distressed me. Then I thought about other issues like our friends' children lying awake at night unable to sleep because they are addicted to watching videos and chatting on phones, and the rampant cheating in schools using AI, and parents having no idea about the internet pornography accessible through their children's' phones. 

That led to a teaching on technology from a biblical perspective. It takes anywhere from 5 hours to 14 hours to get through the whole thing, depending on the amount of time we give for discussions. Here is an advertisement for one of the conferences that I made using my AI. (I'm not against using AI, I'm just worried about the misuses).

I've taught this now 5 times: a conference for 110 church leaders in Soroti, a conference for 200 youth in Soroti, a half-day church teaching, a two day teaching for our group of Bishops and their wives, and another two day conference in Kaberamaido with 167 church leaders from PAG.

The feedback has been great. One pastor traveled from Kenya to Uganda just to take part in the conference. People say it's the first they've experienced of its kind. I already have invitations to teach this in Kenya and in Tanzania. 

Some pastors who attended these conferences did not yet have smartphones themselves, but they wanted to understand what was happening in the world, and why their youth are so addicted to their phones. 

These are a few of the many topics I cover:

• Technology from a biblical perspective
• Smartphone etiquette
• Social Media and Mental Health
• Dopamine Addiction
• Pornography Addiction
• Using AI
• Pastors and AI
• Fake news and Whatsapp Forwards

I teach about AI with some hesitancy. For the pastors who don't yet know about it, I'm creating a very real and strong temptation for them. But people are learning about it quickly anyways, and this way we provided a forum to discuss how to use it wisely as pastors in a way that glorifies God. 

I do demonstrations with an AI voice chatbot and also AI text chatting and show them some of the features and some of the things I warn against. AI seems almost like magic to those who have never been exposed to it (still does to me a little too!). I also show them some videos I made by asking AI to turn some of my photos into videos. 

Here are some of the things we talk about in the conferences:

• I teach about the injustice of AI companies making Nigerians and Kenyans do the dirty work of training AI. See this article.
• Questions about the Mark of the Beast always come up. Even today there are regularly social media forwards about Obama introducing a microchip as part of his health care plan. Some people think that Americans have microchips in their bodies already. But more generally we talk about misconceptions about the Mark of the Beast being something a Christian could accidentally purchase, and explain why we shouldn't necessarily think it's a piece of technology or vaccine.
• We discuss the rampant problem that people answer phone calls and text messages while also trying to have a face-to-face conversation. 
• We talk about how phones get misused in the worship service. Unfortunately it's not uncommon to see a person watching Whatsapp videos during the sermon, or pastors sending messages during worship.
• In the social media topic, I learned that while body image issues in terms of weight can be a problem for girls in Uganda, the bigger issue is that photo apps include skin-lightening filters. One young woman testified that she would no longer do that to her profile photos. She changed her photo to "the original me."
• In the US, it's hard enough for parents to help their children not misuse phones and internet. But here you have parents who have never used a smartphone themselves buying them for their children, and having little idea what is possible for them to do on the phone.
• We talk about lazy parenting. It is very common for parents to pass to a crying baby or young child a tablet or phone to get them to be calm.
• We hear that many university students are so lonely that they spend hours talking to AI chatbots.
• I learned that some best men and maids of honor poorly prepare Christian couples for marriage by advising them to watch pornography to learn how to have sex. 
• Many people are guilty of talking on the phone or texting while driving a car or motorcycle. They have pledged to stop after this training. We regularly see people on motorcycles or bicycles on our crazy roads here trying to text. There are a lot of road accidents.
• One youth had an action plan after the teaching to no longer leave music on in his room all night every night.
• People are really touched by ideas of having tech-free meal times with no phones and no televisions.
• People are convicted of phone addiction for themselves and their children. A lot of people shared about the problem of endlessly scrolling social media or Tiktok.
• Very few people think it is okay to leave your phone on silent or off at night, because there could be an emergency. Yet many people don't know how to mute Whatsapp notifications and they may get hundreds every night.

The need for this teaching is HUGE! I realized I need to do more research and study and improve on the curriculum I made, and perhaps make it accessible for others to use to teach it as well. So I have a lot more work to do.

Harvesting the Fish Pond

By Anthony:

I always am able to catch tilapia, but I was worried that there were too many catfish in my pond eating most of the small tilapia which thankfully reproduce regularly. But some catfish is good to keep it from becoming only tiny tilapia in mass numbers. The catfish weren't reproducing so I knew there were about 28 left (I started with 33, and with 200 tilapia). All other methods including hooks and traps to catch the catfish were not working. Some of them were getting huge. So I recruited a bunch of friends to help me use a wide net, moving with it across the whole pond.

To start though, we first had to remove all of the pond plants (we put them back in when we were done). We also pumped out a lot of water to the plants around the yard to make the pond less deep so that we could stand up without the water going up to our heads.

The first day we used our own net, and it completely failed. We fished with it from 8am to 1pm and only caught tilapia. We didn't catch a single catfish. I gave everyone some tilapia to take home but it was really disappointing. There were a lot of exclamations about Jesus' disciples saying "we fished the whole night and caught nothing!"

I planned another day to try again. We fixed all the holes the catfish had punched in our net. We made it like 5 nets thick. We did major renovations on the net to try to make it much less likely for catfish to sneak around the sides of it, or under the bottom of the net. We used a hosepipe filled with sand along the bottom of the net to weigh it down. We were really optimistic and did a lot of work! Only to find out it still completely failed to catch any catfish.

That same day, we had to call our guard's friend, who has a really good large net, with a long pouch in it. We rented it for the rest of the day. The fish look at the opening in the middle of the net (the pouch), and think it's a way to escape, so they go into it, only to find it has a dead end. Then they are stuck.

We seriously muddied up the yard and even killed small tilapia in the mud. We also accidentally netted huge logs that I had in the water. That made the net really heavy when it had a 3 foot log in it!

However, we were much more successful this time! We managed to get 10 catfish. Catfish have to be some of the sneakiest and smartest fish. Because we dragged this net so many times trying to leave no space for them to escape, using all of our efforts, and still most of them never got caught.

Here is the biggest catfish we got. It was very strong.

We threw back in the small tilapia, but kept about 15 or so. We all got dirty. I took the longest shower I've had in the last few years. It was a fun and interesting experience to do with friends here and we will remember it! It's been a few months already that have passed by the time of this post and the tilapia have multiplied greatly with thousands of fingerlings.

Reverend Moses Farm Tour

By Sara:

Another farm tour happened in March.  The latest farmer group to complete their lessons got to travel to Abwanget, where a friend of ours, Rev. Moses Opus lives (in the straw hat in the picture below).  Moses is a very creative farmer and has (more than a little bit) of almost everything on his farm.  Fruit trees, vegetables, staple foods, bees, goats, and chickens, among other things.  I love the way he uses what he has, to do amazing farming.  Any enterprising farmer who is willing to work hard can copy what he has done, without any expensive inputs.

We all admired this huge jackfruit tree:

Everyone also loved how beautiful this new grass thatched hut is in his home: 

Moses is growing passion fruit in a small, fenced area, and is utilizing their shade as a nursery for starting seedlings.  His family intends to plant 100 lemon trees this year, so he is starting them under the passion fruit.  He also uses old water bottles for his seedlings instead of buying potting bags, which helps him save money and reuse waste.

Moses was on the trip to Uwepo and one of the plants he came back with was a grape vine.  Everyone was amazed to see it since they had all read about grapes in the Bible but had no idea what a grape plant looked like:

Another great innovation Moses uses is planting a certain local plant densely around his tree seedlings when they are small.  This protects the seedling from getting eaten by goats or cows.  Since he puts a lot of mulch on the ground around the trees, chickens also aren't able to squeeze inside and scratch it up. 

Uwepo Farm Tour

By Sara:

Thanks to a generous gift from one of our supporting churches, I have been able to take groups of farmers on learning visits to different places.  In early March, I led another such visit.  I brought the Magoro farmer group to Uwepo, an organization and teaching farm in Jinja.  The farmers in Magoro have shown their enthusiasm for learning and willingness to contribute to further educational opportunities, so it was a great opportunity for them to get exposure to more new ideas.

Since Jinja is very far from Magoro, the group traveled by bus part of the way on the day before the tour.  They spent the night at a church.  The next morning, they left at 5:30am in order to get to the Uwepo farm before 9am!  The Uwepo staff were so impressed by the group's timeliness.  

I really appreciate the work that Uwepo is doing in educating farmers and in propagating unique varieties of plants.  We ate breakfast at the farm and one of the items in our breakfast was breadfruit chips.  Breadfruit is a tropical tree which produces starchy fruits that can be eaten like cassava or potato.  One tree can live 80 years and can give up to 250 kilos of fruit in a year!  This is a great investment since it allows the farmer to passively get a lot of food, without a lot of intensive labor.

Although it poured while we were eating breakfast, the rain stopped in time for the tour to proceed.  There were lessons on grafting:

We got to see examples of vegetable growing, mixed with trees:

Everyone got to do some hands-on activities with preparing food for black soldier flies and learning how to raise them (even me):

We saw how the farm is raising chickens and learned about new things to feed them: 

At the end of the tour, we went to the nursery where Uwepo sells many varieties of plants.  The group found lots of trees they wanted to take home to their gardens.  Even the driver of the bus bought a seedling for himself!  And although the breadfruit seedlings are expensive, compared to other tree seedlings (due to the difficulties in propagating it), five people bought seedlings and were excited to go plant them at their homes.