Stories from HWHIA trainings

By Anthony:

I am leading many Helping Without Hurting in Africa trainings these days. In this post I'd like to share some highlights.

I can still get nervous even after all this time. Partly this is because many of our participants are very busy people with important positions - bishops, heads of organizations, development workers, denominational leaders, etc. Fears still come that people won't appreciate the training or that I am not capable enough. But the reality is that much of the learning comes from the discussions, and our material is excellent at generating important and deep discussions. There are new things I learn from participants every time.

I love seeing the impact made on organizations and churches, that they actually consider real practical changes to their ministry practices to better help materially poor people in Africa. I love inspiring people to have a deeper love for the poor. I love being able to teach the good news of the Gospel at every training, talking about justification by faith, the Kingdom of God, teaching against the prosperity gospel, and much more. I don't love the travel, but I love what God has given me to do right now! I am generally limiting myself to one international training per month, and my schedule is booked up about 9 months out. Below, see my coauthor Jonny teaching:

There was one new simple initiative that came about from another missionary, Debbie Nutzmann. She helped to organize a training for us in Jinja, Uganda. She came up with the idea of locally printing these stickers and giving them out to the participants for them to put on their phones or laptops. I thought it was awesome! So we took up the idea and now we give them out at each of our trainings. It is a great way to freely advertise the material. More importantly, I think it's a great conversation starter. When people ask about a sticker, it gives participants a chance to share what they learned about poverty alleviation.

One participant put it on his vehicle. Very cool.

My coauthor Jonny Kabiswa is the main person I lead trainings along with. But sometimes we divide and teach in different places with other facilitators. We are trying to raise up a team of facilitators and coach them well so that we have people we can recommend to interested organizations. This is a high level training and some of these facilitators have Master's Degrees or PHDs or else extensive experience in community development or church ministry. Here are three facilitators from Ghana and Togo who work for the Chalmers Center, or joined us to lead a training in Accra, Ghana:

David Fugoyo helped us lead a training in Kampala. He is from South Sudan but lives in Uganda. He is one of The Gospel Coalition Africa council members and also a contributor to the Africa Study Bible.

From the previously mentioned Jinja training, here is a photo with some of our co-facilitators and hosts. We actually had 8 other facilitators besides Jonny and me at this training.

The Jinja training group as a whole:

Monica, a co-facilitator in Jinja shared an interesting story. She was visiting Germany some years ago. A man asked her what country she was from and she told him she was from Uganda. He said, "Ohhhhhhh, you are from Amin's country!" And without losing a moment, she said back with a smile, "yessss and you are from Hitler's country."

I think this story is really illuminating. Most of us in the West would immediately and instinctively know that it would be seem rude and offensive to even mention Hitler to anyone from Germany, unless in a serious conversation about history. People don't want their country to be associated with that one time in history. Why don't we think the same way when it comes to African countries? Surely Ugandans don't want their country only to to be thought of and associated with one of their very worst times in history. Their country is more than that bad president. They have a beautiful country and are proud of it.

This is just a small example of a larger issue of the narrative in the West about Africa being so often just negative: lack of development, famine, bandits, violence. Of course, there are some famines and violence, but the negative narrative needs to be balanced with the true positive stories of Africa - beautiful joyful people, hard-working innovative people, hospitable cultures, thriving developed cities, passionate churches strong in faith, etc.

One of our recent trainings was in Malawi and it was very cold! I wished I had a winter coat. I got sick with fever, nausea, and digestive issues at the end of our time there and I could not get warm, even with all the blankets in the bed. Traveling back on the airplane while sick was a nightmare, but God sent me a Christian stewardess from Ethiopian Airlines who bumped me up to first class and took good care of me. Some photos from Malawi:

One thing that always comes up in our trainings is the importance of trust for development in a society, and the church's role in building trust in a society. But trust is a big problem in places like Uganda. You can read on the back of many taxis and buses the slogan, "never trust somebody." When I ask my Ugandan friends, most tell me they don't have a single person they fully trust in their life. I usually shock our training participants by talking about how I will send mobile money to people in Kampala I meet over social media, who I've never met in person before, paying them for a product to send it on the bus to me, trusting that they will actually do so and not just keep my money. Of course I have no possible way to track them down or figure out who they are. And yet I've never been cheated even once. It may happen someday, but I do this all the time and haven't been burned yet.

Here is a further reflection I have on trust. When someone warns you, "don't trust anyone" or sometimes, "you can't trust anyone in this country" or "anyone from this group,"  I think it is very likely that one of these things is true about that person:

1. They have been deeply wounded by someone breaking their trust and are now assuming all others are the same way.

2. They are not a trustworthy person themselves. They can't believe others would act in an honest way because they don't themselves.

3. They feel a deep sense of shame and hopelessness about the corruption of their own people.

For missionaries, it is often #1. They can take one bad experience in a relationship with someone in their host country, and then stereotype everyone else and never attempt to trust someone again. This has really hurt many relationships with Africans in particular who feel pre-judged by missionaries who won't give them a chance to be trusted.

However, unfortunately, it is often Ugandans who will warn missionaries not to trust anyone. It sometimes is from #2, but more often from #3. I wonder if it was foreigners in the past who made Ugandans to feel like everyone is corrupt and not to be trusted. But my experience now is that it is Ugandans themselves who are the ones perpetuating that lie. And they often cannot believe the trust I will place in people that they never would.

The lesson for all of us I think is to keep on building trust by giving people a chance. Trusting is an act of love, and every time you trust someone it's an opportunity for more trust to be built up.

The training in Ghana was really fun because they had great spicy food and a lot of seafood. I enjoyed trying a lot of new things.

This meal had cow skin, leg joints, fish, and crabs and was my favorite. With an okra sauce. This was the first time I ever ate crabs like this with the shell on. You just take a bite of them with the shell still on, very crunchy. You eat the whole shell. It was a lot of fun. I am adventurous when it comes to eating almost any type of animal. What is hard for me is eating fruits. Thankfully in Africa fruits are mostly served as dessert, so it's okay to pass on them. 

This was greens and tuna over rice.

There are a lot of criticisms today against sending missionaries to "reached" countries, rather than to unreached countries. I understand that criticism and agree with much of it. We are not sending enough missionaries to unreached tribes and places. It bothers my heart enough to make me feel guilty sometimes, am I in the right place? But I want to present another side that people don't often consider when it comes to missions today. 

In one of our trainings (I won't say which one), I was teaching a group of Christian leaders, educated leaders, who have been in church all their lives. As I was teaching them about justification by faith, I realized that for 90% of them, what I was teaching was basically new for them, that they are hearing it for the first time. Up to this point, they mainly were taught salvation through Christ but also by works. They fear God's judgment, never knowing if they have been good enough. Then some of the leaders also learned for the first time about the goodness of our bodies, and how we will be resurrected physically like Jesus was, not just living in Heaven forever as disembodied spirits. This was totally new for some of them.

On such days, when I get to spend hours teaching people how to understand the good news for the first time, in an overwhelmingly Christian country, I remember why we also need missionaries in such places.  Being "Christian" in name, does not mean that everyone in a country calling themselves "Christian" actually knows the Gospel.  In some countries the vast majority of people call themselves Christians because they believe that God exists, and because they call on him for help with food and finding a job, and because they know they are not Muslim. So they say they are Christian. 

I try to be the biggest proponent of what we can learn from African churches, but the other side of the coin is that there is still a great need for teaching and discipleship here. 

A participant said he thinks only 5% of churches in his country preach the true Gospel, the rest preach prosperity or salvation by works. He and several others told me later that if they preach the true Gospel they will be scolded or pushed out of their church. So they told me I need to stay in their country longer so that I could preach in their churches. I was of course so glad to see their excitement for the Gospel and wanting their churches to hear it! But I assured them that they could preach it themselves, and tried to encourage them to preach it despite the consequences.

Photos of a training group of all pastors in Moyo, Uganda near the South Sudan border.

Here are some random things that have come up in trainings - 

• An example of unintended hurting while trying to help that a participant shared. The UN or World Bank apparently shares weather predictions and shares about possible rain shortages or flooding. Apparently, farmers will often view those predictions as "what is going to happen" with the result that if they are told there will be floods or famines they won't even bother to plant at all.
• A participant said - "Fathers, give the girl child the gizzard!" Sometimes, mostly in the past, certain meats would not be served to women or girls, but saved for the father or boys.
• There is still belief in charms and witchcraft in many places in Africa. I learned that sometimes a person will pay a witchdoctor and they will scoop up soil underneath where another person has walked. Then they believe the witchdoctor will have power to do rituals against that person using the soil.
• Related to witchcraft, there is a lot of African traditional religion that has been syncretized into Christianity, especially in prosperity gospel churches. A participant's friend paid her pastor to come to her house to cleanse it of spirits. He did so by cutting in half an orange, then putting salt in it and sticking it to the window. Problem solved.
• One participant in Ghana shared his life story about struggling to develop himself. His father was not able to do much for him because he was the last child, child #50. His father has 8 wives and could not take care of all of the children adequately. 
• In one lesson, we discuss gleaning laws in the Old Testament concerning not completely harvesting your field, and leaving something for others to come and do the work of harvesting. One participant in Rwanda did gleaning as a child to get money for shoes and school fees. At that time people congratulated him and appreciated him for doing so. Neighbors welcomed him. But things have changed. They tell me no one allows people to do that anymore in Rwanda. People are more individualistic and life is generally more competitive. The same is true in Uganda.         
        Although people's standard of living is incredibly vastly improved from say the 1950s, the population has grown exponentially, education is prioritized much more and education is expensive. People are better off financially compared to 50 or 70 years ago, but school fees are so expensive that it seems everyone is constantly struggling with debts and poverty. This has resulted in people being more self-focused and sharing less with others.
  

Photos from Rwanda:

We have a lesson which looks at orphanages/children's homes and caring for vulnerable children. In most training groups, participants favor other approaches to care for children besides orphanages. In Rwanda, many orphanages have been shut down by the government.

But in one group in Northern Uganda, surprised me by being more in favor of orphanages. They say that communal culture has been eroded and spoiled through NGOs giving handouts and child sponsorship. They said that orphanages are better because when relatives take orphaned children into their homes, they often treat them as servants while treating their own children really well. When organizations try to support such families rather than orphanages, the parents will often use the money they receive for themselves rather than for the orphan. Or they will send their biological children to good and expensive schools and send the orphan to a bad school. 

Issues like this make an already complicated topic very complex to work through. I sympathize with the NGOs who are trying to help vulnerable children, getting criticized sometimes by people like me, but struggling to know the best approaches. I generally think that 90% of our energy should be in strengthening communities and families to support vulnerable children, and 10% in children's homes and orphanages. But I don't have all the answers either.

Last, here are a few testimonies from a training group in Liberia, a group I did not lead.

Sam - (in response to what is in our manual about caring for God's creation) "After the teaching I was taking some passengers in my taxi and I threw some plastic out the window. I said “Oh no I forgot" and I stopped the car and went back and picked it up. My passengers thought I was crazy at first but later after I explained I think they respected me."

Ab - (in response to what our manual teaches about culture and a biblical worldview) "Culture does not need to control us; we have God." 

Elvis - "I talked with my strong neighbor for 45 minutes the other evening. He has a problem with laziness and drinking but he came asking for money. So after we talked he left saying thank you for the help even though he never received any money. But he had many ideas to go and think on." 

Toroma Farmer Group

 By Sara:

Sometimes, it is too hot to meet inside for a training.  When it is 100 degrees and there are no fans or air conditioning, everyone eventually just falls asleep in the hot building.  What can you do?  You just have to look for a shady tree where you can get a breeze:

Group members having fun making a plan for their garden this season:

Remember that experiment with celery in food-colored water that shows how plants take water up through their stems?  We don't have celery here, so we need to be creative in finding something which can show the same thing:

In 2019, I did some trainings in this same area and the group planted a tree at the church.  Here is the seedling they planted as it was in 2019 (the thorns were to protect it from being eaten by animals):

 

This is what it looks like now (2024):

 It is pretty amazing how quickly a tree can grow here!

Chaya and Moringa in Karamoja

 By Sara:

My friend Jane and I traveled to Kotido in the Karamoja region of Uganda (northeast of Soroti) to help train women how to use chaya and moringa for food.  PAG is working with World Renew on a project for improving child and maternal health in that region.  There is a lot of open land in Karamoja and some of it is very fertile, but people in the region have traditionally been cattle herders and there has been a lot of insecurity there.  Additionally, the area has a long dry season when they need to depend on stored food.

Chaya and moringa are perfect for nutrition in such a region since both are perennial vegetables which do not die during the dry season.  Chaya actually prefers drier weather and moringa is a tree, so it survives when it stops raining.

Several people and I donated lots of chaya cuttings to bring to these trainings so everyone could take some home after the teaching on growing and cooking it.  Most people have already planted moringa seedlings at their homes too, so they were inspired by the experience to take care of the seedlings.  Everyone is looking forward to eating greens, though they will have to be patient since it takes a while for anything to get growing. 

We cooked with both chaya and moringa so everyone could see how it is prepared and have an idea of what they taste like.  In the end, everyone only got about a bite of the different dishes we made, though, since the group the first day was about 200 people and the group on the second day was around 350!

Jane (in the black and red dress) giving some tips on the cooking process:

Each of these plates was given to a group of about 30 people to share:

On the last day, it was hard to get the attention of a huge group of over 300 people.  One of the PAG staff got a song going in order to have everyone focus.  It was some beautiful singing!

HWHIA Kampala Evangelical School of Theology

By Anthony:

Most of my ministry work now consists of leading Helping Without Hurting in Africa trainings in Uganda and other countries, and doing the administrative work to plan and prepare for those trainings. That means I get to teach pastors and development workers (which I love), that I have to travel a lot (which I don't enjoy), and when at home I have a lot of zoom meetings (which I don't mind, because I like being home!). I loved a recent training at Kampala Evangelical School of Theology, in Kampala, Uganda. KEST is a Resonate partner, and Sara and I go way back with the principal Philip Wandawa. He did his PHD at Calvin Seminary. Here is Philip on the right with Titus one of our co-facilitators on the left:

The training took place at the school with around 85 total participants. KEST invited alumni and partners of the school. Most of the participants were development workers from different organizations, or pastors. Some KEST staff and students also attended. It was a diverse training with people originally from Uganda, USA, New Zealand, Germany, South Sudan, and we even had two people fly to attend the training from Liberia. The two from Liberia then went back and led the training themselves for their staff and partners in Liberia. I'll also mention that we had staff from Watoto Child Care ministries attend. I know many of our supporters have enjoyed having the Watoto children's choirs visit their churches in the USA.

Jonny and I have been working hard on coaching other facilitators so that we have people to recommend to other churches and organizations who request the training. We don't want organizations to be reliant on us as the authors to lead every training. At the KEST training, we had three other people join us as co-facilitators. Moses and Titus work for Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) in the development work of the denomination. I've been working with Moses since 2014 when he and all the development staff he was managing took part in Timothy Leadership Training with me. Sam teaches at Africa Renewal University. I've known Sam since 2009 when we taught with him at Pentecostal Theological College. (In the photo: Moses, Sam, Jonny, Myself, Titus).

With a training like this, it's impossible to relay to you all of the great discussions we had. I will just share a few of the things I found interesting myself:

Two different participants challenged the culture around burials in Uganda when we talked about the importance of daily work. One of the beautiful things about Ugandan cultures and African cultures in general is the sense of communal hospitality, celebrating in community, and mourning together in community. But as the participants mentioned, many people are attending a burial every week, and each burial has 2000 or 3000 people attending. You attend even if you don't know the person who died, but you have a friend who somehow was an acquaintance with the person who died. Burials therefore take away a huge chunk of the working hours in the whole nation every week. And burials last the entire day. 

On top of that, feeding 2000 people takes a lot of money. While the idea of mourning together is good and biblical, in Ugandan burials what ends up happening is that the family trying to grieve is completely stressed out by trying to figure out how to feed all the people coming. The way people show love and support to the stressed family is by coming personally but also giving financial support which goes to pay for all the people coming who need to eat. If all the people didn't come to the burial, the money wouldn't be needed. So you see why the situation is complicated. This is a very controversial subject. We have a friend who decided to stop going to burials because he views it as bad stewardship and a waste of time (except for burials of his family or people he knows well), and other friends looked very negatively on him for making this decision. As foreigners we are given more flexibility because people know we are of a different culture and they know that sometimes our work prevents us from attending. But we still end up going to quite a few burials (and weddings).

We talked about tribalism and painful stories were shared about discrimination in public offices. A participant from South Sudan said that each type of government office is controlled by a certain tribe. So different tribes control different government sectors and different NGOs. This results in a system that hardly functions because favors are done for people of your own tribe and others are forced to pay bribes or not given the services they require. And NGOs generally focus on giving charity to communities of their own tribe.

We talked about caring for the environment and people lamented about all the city laws being broken through people constructing buildings in swamps and wetlands through bribes and other shady practices.  They said even churches are doing this. They also talked about rich people throwing their trash out of their posh cars while driving through Kampala.

On the other hand one participant shared a story I really loved. He said his children love watching animals with him, especially birds. But he lamented that with all the trees in their community chopped down, the birds had disappeared. But he planted many trees at his home and now the birds have come back and his children are delighted. What a great father.

In Uganda, hotels usually have contracts with drivers or driver companies. I learned that it is extremely common for hotel managers to ask for a kickback. Since the manager gets to choose the company, he will say he will give a certain driver the contract, if the driver gives him personally 10% of the profits. It's just mind boggling all the ways to engage in corruption.

Here is a photo of Jilanne German who is a partner missionary with Resonate teaching at KEST. She was very helpful in registering all the participants for the training. She worked hard and we are grateful!

Several owners of businesses, who are born again, gave some very interesting reflections that I found helpful, especially for this context. They said they tend to want to hire non-believers more than Christians because the Christians don't have a good work ethic.  They arrive late, or close the shop early.  They are not committed. The excuse that the Christians give is that they are supposed to be in church for programs or choir practice. So they end up missing a lot of work and causing problems at the business. When the bosses, who are born again Christians, complain to such a person's pastor about the person missing work due to pressure from church leaders to be in church throughout the week, the pastors scold the business people for being worldly.  Unfortunately, these business owners have had to terminate the employment of some of these Christians who couldn't manage to have good work ethic.

I know from experience that Christians are pressured by pastors to attend mid-week programs in church. They are told they will be blessed if they do, and it's implied they won't be blessed if they don't. People are made to feel guilty. Some people figure out ways to be at church five days a week. But then they are constantly missing work. Sometimes poverty is caused by injustice or natural disasters. Other times it is from people not working six days a week as God commanded.

When we examined the Parable of the Talents while looking at Asset Based Community Development, we discussed together how organizations should be helping people nurture and use their talents and assets for their own development. But one participant made a strong and profound statement. I will paraphrase what I remember hearing: "in the parable, God punishes the one who buries his talent, and yet as our organizations try to help the materially poor, sometimes we actively try to help people bury their talents and instead create dependency through constant handouts. We need to repent."

In the end participants shared testimonies that they had gone through great mind-set change about community development. Organizations pledged to change their practices to stop creating dependency among individuals and communities. Leaders said they were going to stop dictating to the materially poor what they have to do, but to learn how to listen to them and work with them to see change. Some people said they intended to train others in this material in the future. I loved hearing that some churches are going to begin to set aside a portion of their money collected from offerings to reserve for caring for the poor in their church and community.  Another pastor said he will preach through all the Scripture passages taught about in our manual over the next year.