Marriage Retreat

 By Sara:

After having to delay our plans for a long time due to Covid, we finally were able to go to Sipi Falls with most of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God pastors from Soroti and their wives for a marriage retreat.  It was a beautiful place and everyone enjoyed having the chance to rest and spend time with their spouse away from work and household responsibilities.  Anthony put in lots of time making phone calls to the pastors and the place where we stayed to coordinate everything, so it was a relief to have everything come together.  Including the facilitators, there were 17 couples total.

There was a bit of a shock the first evening when it rained and got down to around 60 degrees!  Most of the couples had never been to the area around Sipi Falls which is at a higher elevation than Soroti, as well as being less arid, and therefore cooler.  Some people must not have taken us seriously enough about how "cold" it would get and were freezing, wrapped up in blankets and winter coats!

 

Joseph, our colleague from when we worked with World Renew, and his wife Robinah, came from Kampala to help us facilitate the retreat.  We really appreciated the wisdom and marriage experience they brought and were able to share.  Between the four of us, we facilitated discussions about communication, the specific challenges for pastors and for their wives, healthy ways of dealing with conflict, and balancing work and home responsibilities.  While there are different cultural challenges people deal with in marriage in Uganda, Anthony and I learned that there are also some areas of disagreement which seem pretty universal, including minor ones like how one is supposed to squeeze a toothpaste tube! 

 

 

On the second day of the retreat, we were blessed with a beautiful morning for hiking.  Those who were able to participate in that activity had a great time hiking up and down muddy trails to see several waterfalls.  It was a challenge for some people since we're all used to very flat Soroti, but everyone who went was very glad they did. It was a really good activity for team building and doing something fun together, rather than only difficult ministry.

After the retreat, some of the wives of the pastors expressed how much they appreciated having the chance to be fully disengaged from their work, cooking, and household responsibilities.  One of them said this was the first time she benefited from her husband being a pastor!  The couples also appreciated how the discussion during the retreat gave them ideas about how to mentor new pastors and help prevent them from becoming over-committed, and as a result disconnected, from their families. This was the first time that all the wives of the pastors were able to come together, and it was the beginning of new supportive friendships.

Counseling in Everyday Relationships

By Sara:

While Anthony and Jude were leading TLT, I was meeting with a different group of women each day to teach about how we, as ordinary people, can care for and counsel other people in our churches and communities.  Our friend, Bishop Willy, organized all of the groups and traveled with me to most of the churches.  Willy was a student at the Pentecostal Bible College in 2009 when Anthony and I were there and we've kept in touch with him since then.

I worked very hard to summarize and put together discussion questions on pretty much everything I've learned in my counseling classes so far, to make sure I had plenty of material since I didn't know how long the discussions would take.  I ended up with 24 pages of notes...and only got through 2 pages with each group!  I clearly was vastly over-prepared. 

I hope the women (and some men) I met with went away with more confidence of how they can help others, even if they can't fix their problems, and with a better understanding of how to respond to people with challenging problems.

 

For many of the discussion questions, I had the women talk in groups of 5 or 6 so everyone would have a chance to share and could feel more comfortable sharing personal stories than they might be in the big group.

The most unusual experience I had was at one of the churches where Willy had been a pastor for 12 years before becoming bishop.  A large group of the women met us at the main road and sang and danced alongside the car until we reached the church.  As soon as Willy opened his door, he was swept up by the dancing women and carried around for a while.  I thought this was pretty funny until I got out and was also picked up and carried by them as they sang and danced!

I had a final activity where I asked them to anonymously write down a problem they themselves or someone they know might need counseling for.  Many women had stories about their husbands not telling them how much money they make/what they do with money, getting married to someone who already had children and struggling to relate to them, being a second wife to a polygamous husband, having a neighbor who maliciously gossips about them, and not knowing how to deal with unruly children. I knew I couldn't answer all their questions or fix their problems, so I summarized the issues they shared and gave them as sample scenarios to practice "counseling" in small groups.

They were to think about what questions they would ask to get to know the person and their situation better, think of Scripture they could read/study with the person, decide whether the situation required them to give advice or not, use their own similar experience to guide the person, and think about how they would pray with them. I hope they are able to use that guide to help others in the future.

I also had the opportunity to teach about the fireless cooker on two of the days:

Here is a beautiful afternoon/evening in Apac:

We ate a lot of matooke (like plantains) for breakfast at our guest house.  This was one of the days they served us a little less food than normal:

And finally, from left to right, one of the women's leaders, one of the pastors from Apac, Bishop Willy, his wife Mary, me and Anthony, and Jude.