By Sara:
During the Christmas holiday, we had fun visiting Stephen and his family in their home village.
Overall, we relaxed together, but Anthony also interviewed Stephen for his podcast:
We saw the biggest bunch of bananas ever:
By Sara:
Anthony and I have visited many of our friends' village homes, where their extended families live and which they usually visit around Christmas. But I had never seen the village where my friend Betty grew up. So we organized a time to go there during a week when Anthony was busy.
This year hasn't been great for farming, but sorghum is pretty resilient and was one crop that was doing well in the village:
We visited the homes of three of Betty's brothers and walked all over the land of her childhood memories. She pointed out the different places where she remembered working in the garden, the place where some relatives were buried, and where the house used to be that she lived in as a young child.
We saw the natural well where she used to get water when she was young. It used to be the only place for people to get water at the time, but now there is a borehole somewhat nearby. The well is not in very good shape now.
Betty was sad that people have allowed it to get so run down and contaminated by animals.
We had a nice lunch with many family members, prepared by some of these ladies - sisters-in-law, nieces, and Betty's daughter.
By Sara:
One of our friends, Rose, the women's leader in North Teso, told me years ago that she had a dream about me doing ministry together with her. To some extent, her dream came true when Betty and I went to Katakwi to teach some of the women in her area how to make cakes, chapatti, and mandazi. Betty is an excellent translator and home baker, so she helped me with translation and taught the sessions on chapatti and mandazi.
Only one of the women had ever made chapatti before, so there was a lot of laughter as everyone struggled to roll out a perfect circle of dough.
A few young men also showed up to learn and got a chance to try cooking the chapatti too.
After mixing together the ingredients for one cake, under Betty and my supervision, the group felt confident enough to make the second one alone. There's no social distancing in the village...
Mandazi are like small, simple doughnuts. Basically just balls of fried dough. You can buy mandazi and chapatti pretty much everywhere as street food, so some of these ladies were hoping to make a business of selling one or the other. The challenge, though, is that the price of ingredients, like flour and oil, has been steadily increasing, but people refuse to buy the final product for less than the price they've been used to over the past years. We calculated that they would make hardly any profit (like 30 cents) from what they made if they sold all of it at the accepted price. Betty had to give them ideas of ingredients to leave out and fillers to add in (like maize flour or cassava flour) so they would be less expensive to make for future business ventures.
By Anthony:
I am excited to share with you about a theological education network that I've been coordinating since December 2020. I hadn't shared about it yet because it started slowly with few people and we have only met three times in total. The goal was to meet every quarter, but covid slowed down our plans.
I have always had a passion for bringing different denominations together in unity to focus on Christ and our common goals while also keeping our distinctions and even debating our different beliefs. In my context here in East Africa, my impression is that there are many small Bible colleges and programs led by different denominations or missionaries and often they are quite isolated from each other and compete with each other. I've written about that in this article. I have a passion to see how we can have our schools working together better and learning from each other. Theological education is incredibly important in a country in which the vast majority of pastors have no training or only a little informal training. And yet there are common frustrating challenges of illiteracy, material poverty, staff shortages, and many others.
The idea I started with was to have all of the Bible colleges of our region in Uganda come together one time to see how we might find ways of partnering and strategizing for theological education together. After the first meeting, the idea morphed into an ongoing network for mutual learning with participating institutions consisting of both formal Bible schools offering accredited programs, as well as informal Bible training programs offering unaccredited certificates. The first two meetings were at our home, but then we grew from there. The participants have been mostly principals of each school, but also other teachers and bishops from different denominations.
By Anthony:
Recently I and another facilitator, Tom, led the preaching TLT manual for 4 days in Soroti. It was a wonderful and intense training. I've shared about this training many times, so this time, I will only share a few video testimonies I captured from the participants. You can view them here or click on the names to go directly to YouTube. Some are sharing about their action plans from the previous manual, From Harm to Harmony: Overcoming Violence in the Family.
