Festivities and Snake Gourds

By Anthony:

This is another random photo post to show some highlights from our daily lives and ministries here. First, at Christmas time, we got together with our small group and had a feast at Federico and Belen's farm. It was an asado, where they roasted a pig in the traditional style from Argentina. It was very tasty.

It was very different from what our Ugandan friends were used to in terms of how they eat meat, but they tried it and enjoyed it and now are eager to do it again some time.

By the end, there wasn't much left. We made good work of it.

 

In December, Sara and I traveled to a guesthouse on the Nile River for a couple days to get some rest and time to pray and read. Here are some of the gorgeous views we had there:

I tried to befriend some monkeys to get them to ride around on my shoulder, to no avail.

Sara found this on the ground in town, there were tons of them all over. When people are desperate, and they believe in the power of witchcraft, they will pay a lot of money to people like this to try to get out of their challenges and suffering.

I recently took a bunch of pastors to the gym in Soroti to do some weight lifting together and get some exercise. For some of them it was the first time going to a gym.

We still often visit churches on Sundays, maybe once or twice a month, for me to preach and in order to visit our friends who live outside of Soroti. We usually forget to take photos and videos, but this time we got a video, especially because this church did not have a loud sound system and so the singing was very pleasant. 

We were visiting our friend Oliba Julius who was our student at Pentecostal Theological College back in 2009. A couple months after this visit, his wife gave birth to a daughter. One of his sons is named Anthony after me, and the new daughter, Sara, is named after Sara. 

If you didn't know already, Sara is kind of a crazy farmer who loves to try to plant, grow, and eat new things. Here is the aforementioned snake gourd. In the grass it certainly does look like a snake. When cooked it was like eating zucchini and it was nice. When you handle it raw, it stinks up your hands terribly, like really bad....

At our new land and house construction, the wall is not yet complete, so snakes can get in from the surrounding fields. The construction workers have killed several already over the last months. I have gotten help to identify some of them, and a couple have been cobras of different kinds, and a couple have been harmless. We will not have any problems with snakes once the wall is finished, though.

Sara has grown a lot of pumpkins lately. One of our common simple meals is cooked pumpkin with pasted chaya ("pasted greens" are greens cooked in a peanut butter sauce) put over top of the pumpkin.

Radio Ministry continues to go well. I teach twice out of every 6 or 7 weeks. Rev. Eliabu is now in a new series about singleness. Rev. Omoko is still teaching about marriage and family, and recently taught about bride price, challenging a lot of the cultural customs. I'm in a new long series on 1 Corinthians. You can listen to the previous recordings here - Going Deeper: The Bible and Theology Hour.

Our team started a new Timothy Leadership Training group in Rwanda. Here is Stephen Omoko and Emmanuel Magambo with the class for Manual 1 (front row, 2nd and 3rd in from the left side of the photo).

In January, Stephen and Kaka, two of my Resonate colleagues, led a big event in Uganda for our TLT facilitators. It was both a refresher training for the facilitators in TLT report writing and action plans, but it was also a marriage retreat and all the facilitators had their wives with them. There were 20 couples, not including facilitators. It was a great success. People were refreshed, marriages were strengthened, and the facilitators have a new energy for TLT. There were even fun games like a tug of war game where the women competed with the men, and jump rope competitions. Kaka and Stephen did a wonderful job.

Sara and I came for one day. Sara taught on counseling skills, and I led a discussion about handling finances as a couple and the different ways couples approach that issue. The most common approach in Uganda is for the husband to be in charge of all the money and make all the decisions with little or no input from his wife. However, in the last 20 years as women are working more and more, a really common approach now is for the husband to control the money he earns, and the wife to control the money she earns, and they may or may not communicate and make decisions about money together. It was a challenging discussion as we looked at what it means to be one flesh, and looked at what the Bible says about marriage.

When I visited Kenya in December, my friends David and Miriam gave me some fabric to bring back to Sara so she could make it into clothes for us. She quickly turned it into matching clothing:

Recently a friend sold us some pigeons, so we started a "pigeon project." We will start eating them when we get enough of them. Right now it is exciting that we have two rapidly growing babies, and the other pigeon couple has brand new chicks. Now the fowl we have consists of chickens, ducks, and pigeons. For those who have never raised pigeons, we do not keep them locked up. During the day they can fly out of their cage and even travel around the neighborhood (if they want), but then they come back for the night. 

 

This one is the oldest "baby":

Watch where you are walking in Uganda, or you might plant your face into a monster like this. I'd guess with the legs, it's probably 4-5 inches across. They are really common.

Sara continues to add to her repertoire of things she learns how to do, not only for our benefit, but to teach to others. This one has to be one of the coolest, though for those of you that don't like killing pests, it might be a bit sad for you. It's a rat trap. They try to get the peanut butter in the middle, but what they stand on rotates, they fall into the bucket, and then drown. It's a very helpful trap to teach farmers here who often lose a lot to rats. It's much safer than leaving out poison in food which you don't want children or other animals to get into. (Let me also mention that rats have destroyed wires in multiple vehicles that have parked at our home).

Another cool innovation is Sara's gift to me of quieting our cock (rooster). He constantly crows all the live long day. It constantly interrupts my naps or my meetings or phone calls. Sara put velcro around his neck. He can still eat, but it's harder to inflate his neck to crow. It doesn't mute the cock completely, but listen to the video to see the change.

Our house is coming along well. We feel kind of bad about how big the house is for just the two of us, but we trust the Lord will give us opportunities to use it to bless other people who will stay with us in the future. Here you can see they have just put in the windows and doors.

We were able to enjoy an extended Christmas celebration. In February, Sara got back from the post office with a huge package of goodies from First CRC in Prinsburg, Minnesota. I have enough M&Ms and chips to last me quite a while! What a feast! 

We also got Christmas cards from friends and relatives all over the US. It was nice to see your smiling photos. We even got one envelope of cards from children and youth from CMCS, a Christian school in Minnesota, where children of some of our supporting churches attend, and where Sara used to teach. They wrote encouragements and prayers for us. We feel very loved and cared for.

Last, here are a few photos from our Soroti TLT Graduation, a group I started many years ago but which got disrupted by Covid and took a long time to finish. It was a group effort by many different facilitators. Many of these participants are close friends who live in Soroti with us. It will be exciting to see how God uses them to start new training groups. As usual, part of the graduation was a foot washing ceremony. Edward Etanu from World Renew was the guest of honor who gave a great message about servant leadership.