Guest Post #1

By Sara's mom, Nancy:

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Uganda to see Sara and Anthony. We saw so much of Uganda, thanks to their willingness to drive us around.  It was a five hour drive for them to come to Kampala to pick us up.  From Kampala, we crossed the Nile in Jinja and visited Mbale, seeing where they lived and worked five years ago. They planned a nice variety of things for us to do and see in Soroti, as well as visits to remote villages that Sara and Anthony work in.  We also took time to relax and have fun together, and celebrate both of their birthdays by being tourists for a few days at Murchison Falls National Park.

The best part of the trip was just being able to participate in their daily life.  Now I have a better understanding of who their neighbors are and what they see when they walk out their door.  We walked the dog around the neighborhood, washed our clothes in a plastic bucket and hung them on the line to dry, we collected eggs from the hens, and helped bring Sara’s beloved goats into the barn in the evenings.  We attended their local church one Sunday, and tried lots of new foods, including fried termites!

One of the highlights for me on this trip was seeing Sara’s joy living in an agricultural area.  In case you didn’t know, she was not raised on a farm! She grew up in town, and we had a small garden and a dog. But now, she seems right at home raising chickens, guinea hens, rabbits and goats. She and Anthony seem to have adapted well to the culture, and have mastered some phrases in the local language, which pleased the people in the churches we attended.

I enjoyed meeting so many of their Ugandan friends and co-workers.  It was nice to spend time with them and hear their stories. One day, their friends, Tom and Agnes, came to their house to deliver local Ugandan produce for Sara and Anthony since they were entertaining company in their home.  It was fun to visit with them over snacks and tea, and listen to stories of how the TLT training has impacted their lives and how much they care about Sara and Anthony.  As a mother, those connections were important to me, to meet their friends and see how they are valued there.

It was a blessing to hear Anthony preach a sermon in a village church, and to watch our daughter teach a Biblical farming lesson to a local church group.  And then we spent a day in a remote village watching her teach cake baking.  Even though we had read about this on the blog, we did not realize that a big part of this lesson to men and women in the villages was explaining American measuring methods. Sara helped them make their own measuring cup with a plastic cup, a knife to mark lines, and a photocopied ruler.  Some women had walked an hour and a half to attend the baking training.  By the end of the day, the attendees were working as a team, building the fire, mixing, measuring and making three steamed cakes out of local ingredients. They had been empowered with a skill they had not had before and they seemed to enjoy the whole process.

 

This was my first visit to Uganda, and to Africa.  Besides participating in their mission work, we took a few days to vacation at Murchison Falls National Park.  We enjoyed a nature hike and safari drive, seeing lots of hippos, giraffes and warthogs.  There was lots of bird watching and bird identification, a hobby that Mike and Sara shared as Sara grew up in Michigan.  Even Anthony and I, the non-birders, were able to identify the Abysinian Roller by the end of the week!

 

 

As hard as it is to release our children to the mission field, this trip was God’s gift to us to see how He has uniquely gifted Sara and Anthony, and placed them where He wants them.  God showed us that they are not ours, but His, and He has work for them to do; at this time, it happens to be in Africa.

We celebrated Sara’s 31st birthday while we were there.  When our children are born, we do not know where God will lead them, but I must say that I could never have imagined as we celebrated all those childhood birthdays in our home, that one day we would be with her in Africa on her birthday so many years later.