Pallisa Youth Conference

By Sara:

In early January, I was invited to speak at a youth conference in Pallisa, about an hour and a half from Soroti.  I have done some work there before and they asked if I could come share with the youth something about agriculture.  I agreed to do this and later found out that there were going to be hundreds of youth at the conference...way more than I expected.  But I survived and they were great participants in my training.

There were also some Dutch pastors and youth leaders there who have been involved in these annual youth conferences for some years, in case you're wondering who those other people are in the front row:

It was very hot and not everyone was a youth, so...

I decided to cover the topic of soil during my allotted two hours.  Since I usually teach this to a smaller group of people, I had to be a bit creative about how to do the fun demonstrations about characteristics of soil.  But I had different volunteers come up and help me with each one and then describe to the people in the way back what they observed.

These young people were very willing to interact and answer my questions and between them, they were able to give a lot of scientific definitions and explain things such as what kinds of agricultural practices damage the soil, what plants need to survive, ways to improve and care for soil, and differentiate between organic and inorganic materials.  Afterward, several of the youth, as well as some pastors who were present, came and told me how much they appreciated the visual aids and practical ideas for how they can be better farmers and care for the land God has given them.

Kids everywhere at lunch break:

There was a wonderful choir which performed in between lunch and the next session to call the youth back into the church.

Bible Survey Class and Fireless Cooker

By Sara:

Like Anthony, I also had the opportunity to teach a class for IBS (Inservice Bible School) in Amuria.  My class was an introduction to the Bible in which I was supposed to cover the whole Bible in only three days!  Too much to condense into that short time.  In the past, I have taught Old Testament survey as an entire semester class at Bible colleges, as well as New Testament survey.  It was very painful for me to have to cut out topics and discussion on entire books of the Bible in order to get the material down to 21 hours of teaching time.  Not to mention the need to do translation into Ateso to help some of the students who struggle with English (my friend Betty, who is an excellent translator, came along to assist with this).  Nevertheless, I hope I was able to make it focused enough for the students to get a good foundation for further study and reading the Bible.

On the first day of class, I wanted to get an idea of where these pastors were in their Bible knowledge, so I asked how many of them had read one of the books of the Bible.  Out of the ten students, only three of them had read one whole book.  Of those three, one of them had read the whole New Testament and most of the Old Testament.  I hope this class helped them develop a greater love and appreciation for God's word and to inspire them to read it more.

The students were fun to teach because they were so interested in the material and had lots of questions.  Biblical knowledge is very applicable to real situations which they experience in their churches and communities.  For example, they wanted to know whether a temple is necessary as a place for Christians to come and pray, if it's okay to go to church the day after having sex with your wife, whether artists should be allowed to paint pictures of Jesus, and if you need to be baptized to be saved.

In preparing these lessons and teaching, I loved being reminded myself of what I have learned about and studied in the Bible.  Things such as how the whole Old Testament points us to and teaches us about Jesus (Jesus explains to the disciples on the road to Emmaus how to understand Moses and the prophets speaking about him; anytime the New Testament teaches Christians about the inspiration and importance of Scripture, the original readers would have understood that to mean the Old Testament; etc.), the way we can have hope in suffering since God is in control of all situations and has a good plan he will complete, and the clever way Paul structured his letters to get some of his points across.

The students had heard that I taught different skills to people and asked if I could include one of those lessons in my time with them.  Since we had very limited time for the Bible survey class, which they had come for, I was only able to squeeze in the fireless cooker lesson.  In the evening of the second day, we soaked the beans in water and the next morning, boiled them for 10 minutes and put them into the fireless cooker to keep cooking while we had class.  We all enjoyed tasty beans for lunch that afternoon.

Collecting some firewood and kindling:

The cook adding some tomato, onion, and seasonings:

The fully cooked beans:

One student went home that following weekend and made one for his wife, then cooked her beans using it.  She was very excited it worked and they called me on the phone to let me know about their success!

Teaching and Preaching in January

By Anthony:

I had a nice week of rest to celebrate Christmas, and then 2020 started with a bang! I've been very busy with organizing, planning, preaching, and teaching. I am not complaining. I am extremely blessed to have the job that I have. I find it incredibly stimulating and satisfying. I thank the Lord for giving me all these opportunities and for giving me such fun work. It's looking like it will be a very full year.

The photo below is of me preaching at a small Reformed church in Soroti:

I've been preaching in many places, not only on Sundays, but also at special events and also on the radio. I preached at the main PAG church in Soroti in January at their annual prayer cloud event which runs for about 10 days straight. The theme this year was all about family life. The topic I was assigned was about loving God as a family. I focused on the greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, soul, and mind. I talked about how we can only truly love God if we have first experienced his grace and love for us.

I also talked about teaching children to love God. I emphasized the importance of making sure to read Scripture every day together as a family. I then urged parents to buy Bibles for their children. While poverty is a big problem, people do have money for Bibles, but spend their money instead on airtime, school fees, or other things that are not as important as the Word of God. I believe people were really convicted after my sermon and wanted to prioritize buying Bibles. One of my close friends here, Martin, was at the event with his children. His 8 year old son was apparently listening very closely to what I was saying. Martin says, "he has been on my neck every day to get him a Bible." Martin is now purchasing Bibles for both of his children who are old enough to read.

During January, I also had the opportunity to teach pastors from Amuria and Katakwi in the IBS (In-service Bible School Program). Robert translated for me. You may recognize him below as he has translated for me many times over the years. I was in charge of three subjects - Doctrine of God, Christology, and Church History. And when I say church history I mean 2000 years worth of church history that I had to cover in about a day and a half! It was a great joy to teach these pastors who want to learn so that they can serve their people better.

Justification by faith was the most important doctrine I taught about which came up in looking at the work of Christ for us, as well as in teaching about the Reformation. Based on our discussion, I presume that this was the first time any of them had ever heard of this doctrine. They had been operating with a mindset that people are saved by a combination of believing in Jesus and being good and holy enough. Such thinking leads to great fear and uncertainty about whether you will really end up in Heaven or not. They had been believing that you lose your salvation every time you sin until you confess and repent.

One of the things that helped them to finally understand the glorious nature of God's grace was a discussion on using the Lord's name in vain. They discovered that all of them were using the Lord's name in vain all the time and didn't even realize that they were doing so or that it was a sin. When we talked about justification by faith, they were able to realize that they were forgiven even for this sin that they didn't previously confess and didn't know about. They realized that sin is a more complex thing than simply to avoid sexual immorality and drunkenness. Once I convinced them that all of us sin every day, they were able to realize that we can only be saved by faith alone, that we are justified by the perfect righteousness of Christ that is given to us as a gift, not by our own works. Our good works, our repentance, and our love for God are evidence that we've been born again, the good fruit, but the good works are not what save us.

Because we spent so long on justification, I failed to get through all the topics that I had wanted to cover. But if nothing else, I wanted them to go home knowing the good news of the Gospel, the complete and wonderful salvation that we have in Christ, so that we can live without fear of death or God's judgment.

They really loved learning about church history. Many testified that they would love to go to Bible college to get a full semester of church history. They were amazed at the persecution the early church went through. And they appreciated learning that Christianity has been in Africa longer than in Europe or North America, and thus it is not a "white man's religion." We looked at the thousand year history of the Nubian church, and the close to 1700 year history of the Ethiopian church, and the church fathers in North Africa.

Bishop Emmanuel brought more students to be trained on the last day, so here is the full group with Emmanuel in the middle.

Bishop's Consecration

By Anthony:

We had the pleasure of attending the consecration ceremony of Bishop Emmanuel Okwalinga in Amuria, our dear friend. He has been serving as the Bishop of North Teso PAG pastorate for almost a year, and the official consecration happened earlier in Kampala, so this event was more of a celebration of the new leaders. Along with Emmanuel they were celebrating the new secretary and ministry coordinator on his team, Moses and George. All three of these leaders we love and respect, and we have known all three of them since 2009 when they were students at Pentecostal Theological College in Mbale, Uganda.

Here is Emmanuel and his wife Joyce entering the ceremony grounds. We and other church leaders escorted them to their seats.

We have done a lot with these three leaders. They have organized many trainings for us in their churches, and they have also served alongside of us in teaching other pastors. They have translated for us in our teachings countless times, they have visited our homes, we have visited their homes, they have invited me to preach, they have led TLT, and we have shared life's joys and sorrows together. It is such a joy for us to see how they have grown, and to see them come to these important church positions where God will use them and their integrity to bring transformation in their communities and churches in this pastorate.

Since they have taken up these new positions, we do even more together than before. I in particular spend a lot of time advising them as a team on issues like training leaders, budgets, fundraising, conflict resolution, using computers, accountability, and time management and scheduling. I mention that here because this is how I love to spend much of my time, but these things won't normally show up in our reports or blog posts.

Part of the ceremony included a triple wedding. I bet you haven't attended one of those! It's really a wonderful thing, and a way to save a lot of money. Weddings in Uganda involve inviting everyone in the community and that is an expensive food cost. 

Beautiful choirs to entertain us while they were getting the generator ready when the power went off:

One of the songs was a traditional Ateso drum beat. When the few people started beating the drums and people realized it was from their traditional culture, people started running up to join in the dance from all over the grounds. They then hoisted Emmanuel up on their shoulders and celebrated together.

Bureaucracy

By Sara:

When Anthony and I were traveling to Kenya for the last TLT training in November, we had our first personal experience of a vehicle accident in Africa.  While the accident itself was very minor - no one got hurt and even the vehicle wasn't badly damaged, the follow-up to the event of the accident turned out to be a long, drawn-out lesson in police bureaucracy.

It all began when a friend was driving us from Soroti to the Uganda border; we had hired someone to drive us from there to Mogotio, the place we were heading in Kenya.  While our friend was driving (remember we're driving on the left side of the road), a truck which was parked on the left shoulder very slowly moved out into the road.  So our friend moved over to the right a bit to go around them, but then the truck started turning to the right, directly in front of us, without signaling.  Our friend tried to slow down and swerve to the right, but it wasn't enough to get out of the way, and the truck slowly scraped the passenger side of our car, until it crushed the passenger side mirror and stopped.  We were all rather in shock and everyone realized it was the other guy's fault, but people came running from all over, and Anthony and I had heard all kinds of stories about accidents happening and then a mob torching vehicles or dragging drivers out and beating them, so we wanted to get away quickly.  Anthony went over to talk to the other driver, but he didn't speak English.  Some of the people around tried to translate between them, and Anthony told him we knew it was his fault, but we forgave him, and agreed to give him some money to repair his vehicle.  As soon as he did that, we drove away quickly and just down the road came to a police checkpoint.  A police officer stopped us and talked to us about what happened.  He called the police department in Mbale, the city we were just about to enter, and told us to go there and talk to the traffic police officer on duty.  (Interesting side note - after that first police officer, all the other police we interacted with in Mbale were policewomen)  In the meantime, I was calling people from World Renew to try to find out what we were supposed to do and also calling an American friend who lives in Mbale, who could help us in person.  We learned that we needed to get a police report in order to submit a claim to our auto insurance. One would think this would be an easy thing to get, but no.  Not only this, but the Kenyan driver was waiting for us at the border and Anthony had a training there beginning the next day...

In the end, after the three of us sat at the police station giving statements (which were all slowly and meticulously written out by hand) for a couple hours, I told Anthony he should continue to Kenya by himself.  My trainings didn't start until Wednesday, so we agreed that Anthony should get there to start TLT the next day and I would figure out the police report and continue to Kenya later.  Anthony felt safe leaving me knowing that our American missionary friend (who has lived in Uganda for decades and has a lot of experience with the police) was around and available to help me if I needed it.  Our friend who had been driving and I spent several more hours getting things photocopied for the police (because they don't have a photocopier at the police station) and going back and forth between different police offices and the copy shops, having them hand write our information, until we had exhausted everything we could do for the day, since it was Sunday.  Then, I walked our friend from Soroti to the bus park so he could get a bus home to Soroti.  I had to leave our vehicle parked at the police station overnight because they said I wasn't allowed to take it out of their sight until I brought it to be inspected the next morning.   So I walked all over Mbale doing various errands and then walked to a guest house, where I spent the night.

The next morning, I showed up at the police station at 8, as I they said I should, and had to sit around for a long time before they got me the paperwork I needed to take to the vehicle inspector.  When I finally was able to go there (with my vehicle), the guy wasn't in yet.  There is only one person for the entire region who can inspect vehicles after accidents and write an official inspection paper for the police and he has this tiny little one-room building.  But since he wasn't there, the guy cleaning the office told me to come back at 11.  So I did, but when I got there, the inspector was teaching about road signs to people who were about to take a driving test with him.  Someone called me over and told me to come back at 2:00 because the inspector was busy until then.  I figured if I left, there was no way I'd get anything done that day, so I said I'd just sit and wait there for the next three hours.  I sat down with the people listening to him lecture on road signs and began to read a book.   After only about 20 minutes, he was trying to get them to explain what a yield sign means and no one could explain satisfactorily.  He said "perhaps the mzungu (me) can tell us."  I figured it would be beneficial to be in his good graces, so I explained what it means to yield.  Apparently it made him happy because shortly after that, he paused the lesson and inspected my vehicle! 

As frustrating as it can be, it is often the best practice to sit patiently and sometimes be a nuisance simply by your presence until people do what they're supposed to do.  I continued in that practice for the rest of the day where I sat in the police station until they got me the form to go to the bank and make a payment for the police report.  Then I came back and waited until they sent a police officer to go to the accident site with me and draw a sketch of the scene and interview witnesses (everyone there agreed it was the fault of the other vehicle, but they wouldn't give up his identifying information to the police).  Then, I waited again while they slowly worked on the police report (typing it up on a typewriter because they don't have a computer).   By the time they were done, at 5pm, they indirectly asked me to give them money and directly asked for lunch since they hadn't eaten lunch. Well, I hadn't eaten lunch either and I had already paid for the report, so I just gave them a daily devotional (Our Daily Bread) and thanked them for the report and slipped out!  The next day, I took public transportation to Kenya and joined up with Anthony there.  It was crazy.  But could have been so much worse.  And now we have a great story.

Also, who would have wanted to break into or steal our vehicle when it looked like this?

The mirror actually hung loosely when the vehicle was moving, so we had to duct tape it to keep it in place.

After all that, it was a while before we were able to take our vehicle to Kampala for repairs.  And in the end, the whole situation resulted in a car which looks brand new.  The people working on it, rather than just re-shaping and painting the damaged side, re-painted the entire vehicle.  Here it is in the workshop:

Pictures from normal life

By Anthony:

These are just random photos from our lives. This first one is outside of church one day:

Taking a walk around our neighorhood:

At a friend's home in the village. Grass thatched huts are kept meticulously clean:

On the hood of our vehicle, can you spot the little gecko?

Or maybe you can see him in this one?

Tasty managu (a type of greens) and githeri (maize and beans) in Kenya:

I finally got around to getting my hammock out. The dogs like to keep me company:

Doing some cooking together in our big kitchen which we are very grateful for:

Sara's Christmas and birthday gift from me:

A banana tree growing in our yard:

A big snail we found on our walk:

Beorn is unable to rest and sleep without his head touching something:

Tiny frog we found in our house:

Recently I preached in Luwala. It was nice to know several of the leaders there in different ways. The pastor on the left, Charles, was our student in 2009 and we've kept in touch and both Sara and I have done some trainings with him. Next to him is Simon, one of my former TLT students. In the middle is Silas who works for PAG's development organization in Kaberamaido that World Renew partners with. And next to me is Mark, a missionary friend from the UK who lives in Soroti.

This last photo and videos are of our day guards chopping down a papaya tree. Their names are Paul and Walter and they alternate weeks, but came together on this day to help remove the tree. The tree was really soft and came down quickly, and the whole inside was hollow, filled with water.