Kaberamaido Boat Race

By Sara:

I had the opportunity to represent World Renew at a boat race that is part of the HIV/AIDS prevention project that KMDP is working on in Kaberamaido.  This is the project that is using the Stepping Stones curriculum.  They are focusing on working with fishermen, so one of the activities they had for getting the community involved and informed was a boat race on Lake Kyoga.

It was quite the event!  There were songs performed and dramas put on by participants in the community groups, who shared, in an entertaining way, on such topics as: the ways that people can become infected with HIV, the importance of getting tested and knowing your status, and ways to resist people pressuring you to have sex.

There were also speeches by people who work in the area in hospitals and health centers.  (Oh, and since I was the World Renew person who was present, I also shared a few words!)  And at the end of all the festivities, people had the opportunity to get tested for HIV if they wanted.

I had a few little followers during the event:

There were actually two boat races - one for women and one for men.  Each village involved in the Stepping Stones program chose someone to race for them.  Lots of people turned out to cheer for their team member.  They had to row out to the boat you can see in the distance in the picture below, go around it, then come back.

Whenever someone made it to the finish line, they were joyfully splashed with water, so they ended up completely soaked!

It was a really fun event.  I enjoyed seeing the ways that the community has taken hold of this project and how they are promoting to one another good health and the importance of faithful marriages.

TEA Conference with CRWM in Kampala

By Anthony:

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the TEA conference (Theological Education in Africa) put on by CRWM (Christian Reformed World Missions) in Kampala.  The conference was quite good, but I especially enjoyed the fellowship.  Rarely have I ever been with so many people I know, from so many different areas of my life, all in one place.

I won't bore you with a bunch of names of the people who attended, but of the 300 or so participants included: about 20 of my church leader friends in Soroti (including my co-leaders with TLT), several students I had at Pentecostal Theological college 5 years ago, a couple of my Calvin Seminary professors, a couple CRC pastors from the US, the regional TLT leader who lives in Kenya, a World Renew Kenya colleague, and CRWM friends.  In addition I got to meet the CRCNA's new executive director, Steve Timmermans, whom I very much enjoyed talking to.  He is the right man for the job.  I also met pastors from all over Africa, stretching from South Africa to Ethiopia.

Taking the Lord's Supper with such a gathering of people like this was very meaningful after many sermons about unity over the week.  I also attended a sort of reunion or union meeting with all the TLT members from all over Africa to hear about what God is doing. 

Throughout the week, I participated in two workshops.  From Steve Timmermans, I had the privilege of learning how to better include people with disabilities in the full range of church life and worship.  This is a huge issue in Africa.  Many people with disabilities are just shut inside their homes as children, as the parents don't really know how to deal with them and are ashamed of them.  I can't imagine how painful and lonely some people's lives are just because they have certain disabilities.  Thankfully some pastors are creating awareness and teaching the Church, and learning to treat people with these issues as real people and valuable members of the church.  Change is slow, but it's happening.

I also took a workshop on preaching and the Gospel of Luke, with David Rylaarsdam from Calvin Seminary, which I really enjoyed.  The TEA staff assigned me to be prefect (class assistant) for that class, so that was pretty funny and fun.

One passage we focused on was Jesus' transfiguration (Luke 9).  I never knew how to preach on this passage and definitely hadn't thought about it enough.  Studying it was powerful for me personally.  We discussed how Jesus was getting ready to go to Jerusalem, to his death, and had just been teaching his disciples that they would have to follow him in suffering.  The disciples probably had trouble understanding.  Then in the Transfiguration, Jesus was clothed with glory.  What I now understand was that it was a foretaste for Jesus, like an encouragement to him, that at end of his suffering awaited glory.  He talked about his upcoming death with Moses and Elijah.  It was a comfort to him as he prepared to grit his teeth to go suffer and die in Jerusalem. 

The disciples wanted to shortcut the suffering and stay in the glory and build tents on the mountain.  But the glory only comes after the cross. To me this was powerful in thinking about my own life and suffering I have gone through.  I used to just say to myself, "Jesus promised us we would suffer for following him, so just deal with it, and grit your teeth."  But now, I feel I have a more balanced understanding.  Now I can say, "Jesus promised us we would suffer for following him, so I must grit my teeth and face it, and yet I know this suffering is temporary and I will one day be transformed in glory as Jesus was."

Stepping Stones in Kaberamaido

By Sara:

I represented World Renew at a community meeting for the beginning of an HIV/AIDS program in Kaberamaido.  This was the initial meeting where KMDP shared with the community what their program would be like and gave them the opportunity to join groups and participate in Stepping Stones training.  I have shared about Stepping Stones before, but it is a really great training about family and community relationships, sexual health, and the importance of good communication.  

KMDP has been doing this program in different communities, so they had the male and female health champions (good role models who lead the different discussion groups of older men, younger men, older women, and younger women respectively) from those communities come to this meeting to encourage the new participants about the benefits of the program.  There were new health champions there as well who are trained to lead the groups in this community.

I have been to one Stepping Stones meeting and I loved seeing how well the facilitators (health champions) did their work - the group members taught each other through guided questions rather than the facilitator having to tell them what to think.

Randomness

By Sara:

Okay, we've got lots of fun pictures to share with you here.  Plenty of cute baby animals and interesting cultural experiences.

First, I had my first soap-making experience some months ago.  After this success, I've continued to make more and made shampoo bars too!  Here I am with all my protective gear:

And the first batch of regular soap:

A couple of crazy cattle-loaded trucks:

By the way, we saw a driver education vehicle and the name of the school was "Area 51 Driving School".  We passed by too quickly to take a picture, though...

Some Ugandan fast food:

Here is a photo of the garden from June:

Then a couple from August:

And now, plenty of cute baby bunnies to warm up your day.  When they were small, they were like velcro:

And after they grew a bit:

Now they're all grown up and there are five new babies!

September 2015 Prayer Letter

Enjoy our newest prayer letter.  Thank you again for your prayers and support!

Amuria TLT - Teaching the Christian Faith

By Anthony:

In August, I taught the 5th TLT manual, Teaching the Christian Faith, to the Amuria group.  This manual equips pastors to teach others through the apprentice method or through classroom teachings.  The main focus in on learning how to create a Bible lesson (as opposed to a sermon), to use in adult or children's Sunday Schools, or Bible studies. 

I typed up a couple pages about Sunday School and handed it out for extra discussion.  It was very moving talking about how best to raise up children in the church.  I learned that most of their churches did not have any kind of Sunday School program for children.  What usually happens is that the church building gets full and the children are sent outside and they just play on their own.  Through their discussion together the pastors decided they that they wanted to start or revitalize their Sunday School programs, and have their churches sacrifice some money to get blackboards for the Sunday School teachers to use.

One highlight of this TLT week was that we had a visit from important people.  The visit included Sara, our friend Kathleen from the US, staff of World Renew, and the executive director of the CRCNA, Steve Timmermans (see his reflections on his entire trip here).  It was very meaningful for me to have them visit and see what I've been doing.  I received such great words of praise from my TLT pastors and from the visitors.  But I need to continually point out that I am doing very little, and it is these pastors who are the ones God is using in amazing ways on the ground in their communities.

This time the reports were exciting as always, but I can summarize them generally.  Most of the pastors either went and trained others in the preaching manual, or they put into practice what they learned and their preaching has greatly improved.  They were so excited to share testimonies of their church members coming up to them voluntarily to tell them how much their preaching has changed and improved.



I had an impromptu idea as we neared the end of the manual.  I had them divide into groups and each group had to prepare a Bible lesson for a children's Sunday School class.  Then they had to present to all of us with one person being the teacher and the others being children.  They got really into it and it was hilarious.  But it was also helpful as they got to put into practice what they learned, and it led to some very deep and complex discussions after each group presented like, "what do you do when a child comes to class and hasn't eaten?  What do you do when a child says their drunk father has been beating him at home?"



The presentations/skits were quite funny but as they were in Ateso, not English, it would be hard for you to appreciate them fully, but I put a couple short clips in anyway.  Some of the "children" were quite disobedient and some kept saying, "but I'm supposed to get an avocado today, I want to eat my avocado."

The action plans were very similar for all the pastors.  75% of the action plans involved finding and training new Sunday School teachers.  The rest involved teaching children directly or teaching this TLT manual to other people.  Please pray for these pastors and their churches as they try to care for and raise up all their children in the Christian faith.  (Remember that 50% of Ugandans are under the age of 15).

Cool Conservation Agriculture Successes

 By Sara:

Again, you heard some about this from Geoff, but he and I went to do a visit to monitor the progress some of the farmers in Katakwi are making who are doing conservation agriculture with our Ugandan partner development organization KIDO.  This is also a time for advising and encouraging the field officer who works directly with the farmers.

In the picture below, you can see one of the gardens that the lady in the pink shirt started to compare mulching and no mulching.  You can see that the maize on the left side is very small - that one is not mulched.  The maize on the right is mulched.  Salome, the woman on the right, is the resource person for this group and she helped her group members start small gardens like this to do comparisons of different techniques.

Salome also has intercropped maize with jackbean, a gm/cc.  We will wait to see how this benefits the maize and the soil, as time goes on.

KIDO is also working with the farmers to start kitchen gardens where they can grow vegetables right next to the home to improve nutrition and health.  I think this newly prepared garden below is the most beautiful one I have ever seen:

The same farmer showed us his mulched maize which is about ready to harvest.  He pointed out how, strangely, the maize is very short, but the cobs are quite big.  (The unmulched maize did not produce anything.)  The shortness of the maize may have been a blessing in disguise anyway, since there was a recent heavy rain and most peoples' maize got blown down, but his was too short to fall over.

I have wondered, sometimes, about whether farmers would really want to go to the trouble of mulching anything other than high-value crops in their gardens, since collecting the mulch can be a lot of work.  Of course, not everyone will do so, but for this lady below and the members of her farmers' group, when I asked whether they would mulch something like maize or beans, the answer was an emphatic "yes!"   She said that getting mulch is much less work than weeding and also that she has seen that she will get some harvest of mulched maize and beans, but nothing from the ones that were not mulched.  This is the same demonstration that I showed before, where they had tons of weeds in the unmulched part and no weeds at all in the part that was mulched.  Well, they weeded it and then there was no rain for a few weeks.  The maize and beans with no mulch have almost shriveled up completely and will yield nothing, while the mulched maize and beans are doing just fine.  This, I think, is a great example of how conservation agriculture helps to protect crops when weather is not optimal.

Here is another one of those kitchen gardens.  This woman just transplanted tomatoes into it, so she covered them with leaves to protect them from the sun.  She dug a hole in the middle, with a trench leading into it and then circular trenches going out from the center.  The garden is in a place where water runs off from around her house, so the trenches catch the water and put it to good use, watering her vegetables, rather than being lost.

Random - Dancing, Pets, and Rubbish

By Anthony:

Male dancers at our guesthouse one time when we were staying in Kampala

Female dancers

The picture below shows the road outside of a church where I did a training in Mbale.  So sad.  In trying to not actually drive through the rubbish (trash) pile I accidentally drove into the ditch the morning of the training.  Thankfully a few boda boda (motorcycle) drivers lifted me out.  There are always many Good Samaritans in Uganda.

One of our chickens that became a wonderful dinner of Sesame Chicken.

Video of Caleb

This is how they were paving a road in Kenya.  Put down the bags of cement, then hack them open with machetes.

Video of Sara's goat, Luthien.

A super exciting meal we had while traveling in Kenya, a pulled pork sandwich.

Randomly visiting a school in session (our friend Tom is the one in front, talking to the students).

Sara's baby guinea fowl, hanging out on top of her oven.