More Fun Farmer Activities in Serere

By Sara:

I continue enjoying meeting with the farmer group in Serere and studying the Bible together with them. We have done a lot of interesting agriculture lessons together, including one about caring for our animals well.  I learned how to make homemade salt licks for livestock from an ECHO publication and they said that would be useful to them, so we did it together.  Grinding dry eggshells, one of the ingredients:

Mixing everything together (some people didn't want to get their hands dirty and used a plastic bag):

The final products, before they are dried:

One woman went home and made her own salt block after her meeting.  She brought it to show to all of us the next time we met.  It was very professionally done!

Another time, we tested seed germination rates.  Everyone brought in some of the seeds they are going to plant next season to see how well they have been stored and help them know how heavily/lightly they should plant those seeds.  The next time we met, people reported on the germination rate they got.

I also tested some of my seeds that had gotten infested with pests to see how bad they were, and they had a very low germination rate - only 30%!  Everyone else's seeds did much better, more like 70-90%.

Baking with Church of Uganda Women

 By Sara:

Earlier this year, I had the fun opportunity to teach some of the women's leaders from Church of Uganda Mother's Union about how to steam cakes.  The ladies were all in Soroti for a several-day meeting, but come from the whole region.  They were very enthusiastic about the cake baking and have taken what they learned back to the women in their communities.

I like how many of them have Mother's Union clothes - the blue and white, often printed with the Mother's Union logo.

Sending Out Gandalfs

By Anthony:

Here is a recent article I wrote about Resonate's ministry around the world - Sending Out Gandalfs. 

More Pictures from the Abim Visit

By Anthony:

We visited Morulem in Abim with Skip and Mary VandenBerg while they were here in August. Sara already posted about that, but we received some more photos from Skip so I wanted to share a few more with you. It's not often that we have a gifted photographer around who takes photos of us engaged in ministry.

First here is a video of us driving. You can see how driving can be tiring when you drive for a few hours on a road like this. Very bumpy.

The trickiest thing about driving on a road like this is not a worry about getting stuck, or worry about the bumps. The hard thing is the puddles because you have to slow down a lot for every puddle so that you don't splash the people walking and riding on bicycles that are continually on the road with you. On roads like this you can choose to drive on whatever side looks the best at any given moment.

The Abim area is breathtakingly beautiful.

This is a very common way for people to travel because it's cheap. There might be 30-40 people in the back of that lorry. When a lorry like this falls off the road or hits another vehicle, very many people die. After writing this post, I just saw in the news that one of these fell off Awoja bridge near Soroti, and five people died instantly, and another 8 had serious broken bones.

This home in Morulem is a bit different from the homes in Teso, the region we live in. Here they make fences/walls for better security from cattle rustlers.

Reading the Bible during Sara's Bible study teaching:

Mary, me, and our friend David answering questions from the pastors and other church leaders at the end of the day:

After Mary preached, David invited people to commit their lives to Christ. Many people and children came forward. David said that many of the people there were not from the church but they came that day. You can see them on their knees praying with us. It's hard or impossible to know how many of the people were genuinely beginning a new life with Christ and how many were just joining in the excitement of praying with the visitors. But we trust that God was at work in ways that we cannot easily see.