Anthony's Thoughts on the Village Weekend

If you know me well, you know that I, Anthony, am rather long-winded and write a lot.  I already made Sara add many of the videos to her blog post on our visit to Otubet village.  Read her post first.  But there's more interesting stuff I wanted to say below.

For much of Friday I was just sitting and talking to our host, Moses, and some other men from the community.  It was a difficult time because they were very limited in their English, and I was very limited in my Ateso.  In fact, it was too difficult most of the time for them to understand my question, "how do I say ____  in Ateso?"  One of the men sitting with us was deaf and mute and I think he understood more of what was going on than I did.  So that was difficult, but things improved steadily over the weekend as we got used to the way each other spoke.  While speaking to these men, I asked them how old they thought I was.  They thought I was probably eighteen, which they had thought seemed young to already be a reverend :)

It was beautiful each morning in the village as you can see in the picture below. Saturday morning we were actually quite cold (though I doubt it was colder than 65F).  It's amazing how much the temperature fluctuates.  By Saturday midday we were roasting in 95 or so degrees.  

It was interesting to see how the family brushed their teeth in the mornings.  Since they cannot always afford toothbrushes or toothpaste, they just use sticks on their teeth.  We still used our toothbrushes that we brought and we drank filtered or boiled water, but we did adapt to village life in other ways.  We used the squatty potties.  We ate with our hands instead of forks (which is difficult with things like rice and lots of broth).  And we slept on a very small single bed together with one pillow.  (Ugandans don't sleep with pillows out in the village, so we brought one of our own and a mosquito net).

One of the highlights of the weekend for the family and the community was definitely Sara's artwork.  Here is a picture she drew of part of the home, and you can see how happy Moses is about it.  Over the weekend she kept entertaining people, especially the children, as she drew portraits of family members and band members.

One of the KIDO staff, Geofrey, (pronounced Joffrey), was with us much of the time as he does agricultural work in this community for KIDO.  We enjoyed getting to know him.  He told of how during the years of the Lord's Resistance Army, he almost starved to death hiding in the bush as a child.  But Geofrey values God's grace.  He spoke of how he hopes Kony will return home and come to know Jesus so that God can use him in great ways in sharing his testimony to reach more people for Christ.  If you think about what Geofrey went through because of Kony, it's amazing that he has this spirit of forgiveness.

The weekend was very interesting theologically.  Firstly, it seems that many of the people are somewhat superstitious about reverends and about muzungus.  Being that I am both a reverend and a muzungu there was a lot of superstition about me.  People said that God would bless them with rain because of my visit.

Church on Sunday started late.  It was supposed to start at 8:30 but people didn't really show up until 9:30 or 10:00.  I had a fun time preaching in their small village church.  Geofrey translated for me and he did a great job.  I preached on the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19.  I talked about how our giving of money should be a response to God's grace and his acceptance of us because of Christ, such as was the case for Zacchaeus.  Zacchaeus was accepted by Christ and then was transformed, and then became exceedingly generous.  It was not that he was generous in order to obtain forgiveness or God's favor.  Geofrey told me he had never heard this concept before and was quite sure it was the first time the people there heard it as well.  The common idea in Uganda is that we give out of obedience to a law or to earn blessings from God, and nothing is mentioned about giving with joy out of gratitude for our salvation, or giving as part of our worship.   I hit home the good news of the free Gospel in this sermon and felt like it was a very worthwhile visit for this time of preaching alone.  Here is a picture of Geofrey and me preaching.

After the service, I prayed for people who came up to the front for prayer.  Every person that I prayed for had some kind of health problem, one diabetes, one was going blind gradually, and others had either malaria or other unknown sicknesses.  It was quite disturbing to see how very many people of the small church were sick and asking for prayer.  I hope in the goodness and power of our Lord Jesus, that he heard my prayers and is working to heal some of these people.