A few photos from our time in the USA

By Anthony:

In this post I'll share a few photos from our time in the US. I'm not going to share about everything we did or show photos from all of our visits to family and friends. Here are only a few selected snapshots.

We were able to get good quality time with everyone in each of our families. Here are just a few photos. The first is with my parents:

Sara's parents:

The Sytsma clan:

We enjoyed peaceful farmland. 50,000,000 people are crammed into the small country of Uganda, so quiet places like this were a nice change.

Sara got to see lots of goats.

We visited and presented in 16 churches, and visited some churches multiple times. It was a lot of traveling around the country, but it was a joy to be with God's people.

And we had some chances to do fun things. We hiked in Texas at Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

We hiked at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. We even did sand sledding there.

I caught a kangaroo rat there, which was running around our campsite every evening. They are really cool animals.

We were surrounded by buffalo in Custer State Park:

We enjoyed the fall colors at Lake Michigan.

Sara made some cool acorn people.

We even had time for a few games of cornhole!

I'll be sharing more reflections about our time in the US soon, but for now enjoy these photos.

Mwanza, TA and Moyo, UG HWHIA Trainings

By Anthony:

I thank the Lord for many great opportunities to teach Helping Without Hurting in Africa along with my co-author Jonny. Here are some highlights from two trainings earlier this year.

One training was in Mwanza, Tanzania with World Renew Tanzania and their partner organizations and churches. I got sick with strep throat while traveling there, and therefore Jonny had to lead the first half of the training on his own, but I improved enough to help teach later.

I thought I had completely forgotten all my Kiswahili, but by the end of the week a lot of it had come back! It made me want to try learning it again, but it's just not that useful where we are in Uganda. Another cool thing about this training is that we had four bishops attend the training the whole time. These are the types of participants we really cherish because they are able to go home and implement significant changes in how things are done in the churches and organizations. Sometimes pastors come to our trainings but are unable to easily make changes due to their leaders not being exposed to the principles we are teaching.

Another training was in Northern Uganda near Moyo, Uganda. This was right next to the South Sudan border at missionaries Jacob and Carol Lee's training center called Reaching Africa's Unreached. To get there we had to take a car ferry across the Nile:

While waiting for the ferry one cow enjoyed the shade of our car:

Most of the participants were pastors coming from materially poor areas. So this training was less about how organizations should do programming to reach out to the poor, and more about how these pastors can help their own families, churches and communities. There were participants who were from Uganda, refugees from South Sudan, and refugees from Sudan. For this training it's best to just have you read Jacob Lee's blog post about our time there. He included a lot of wonderful photos! Sara was with me on this trip and in that blog post you can also read about some of the things she taught while there.

Beyond what is shared in Jacob's blog post, I can add a few interesting tidbits. First, the photo above is of the drums they had at the center that they use to call people back to class after each break. I had a ton of fun being the drummer! I played percussion and marching tenors and drum set my whole youth, so I really miss it. 

Second, I learned some interesting things from the participants who came from refugee camps. Apparently many Ugandans have registered as Sudanese refugees in order to get free food. I'm sure that it is very difficult to sort out who people really are, especially when many refugees don't have any official papers or ID cards.

I also learned that each refugee family has been apportioned plots in which to farm to grow their own food. I'm not sure how much land, but I'm guessing it might not be enough to easily survive on, but nevertheless, it's something. Recently there has been a big furor over the UN reducing the amount of food rations that each refugee family receives. They have been getting rations for years now and it is something that is financially difficult for the UN to sustain, and besides the cost, it is not healthy for people to live in a state of absolute dependency forever. On the other hand, you don't want to reduce assistance too early for people in desperate situations, unless people have viable alternatives to support themselves. The participants told me that a lot of refugees simply refused to cultivate the land plots they were given, but now, years later, when the UN has started to reduce the food ration, those people have finally begun to farm. It is a very interesting example that touches on many of the discussions and principles we look at in HWHIA.

Worshiping together was beautiful, especially since we didn't have a sound system: