Amuria TLT - Teaching the Christian Faith

By Anthony:

In August, I taught the 5th TLT manual, Teaching the Christian Faith, to the Amuria group.  This manual equips pastors to teach others through the apprentice method or through classroom teachings.  The main focus in on learning how to create a Bible lesson (as opposed to a sermon), to use in adult or children's Sunday Schools, or Bible studies. 

I typed up a couple pages about Sunday School and handed it out for extra discussion.  It was very moving talking about how best to raise up children in the church.  I learned that most of their churches did not have any kind of Sunday School program for children.  What usually happens is that the church building gets full and the children are sent outside and they just play on their own.  Through their discussion together the pastors decided they that they wanted to start or revitalize their Sunday School programs, and have their churches sacrifice some money to get blackboards for the Sunday School teachers to use.

One highlight of this TLT week was that we had a visit from important people.  The visit included Sara, our friend Kathleen from the US, staff of World Renew, and the executive director of the CRCNA, Steve Timmermans (see his reflections on his entire trip here).  It was very meaningful for me to have them visit and see what I've been doing.  I received such great words of praise from my TLT pastors and from the visitors.  But I need to continually point out that I am doing very little, and it is these pastors who are the ones God is using in amazing ways on the ground in their communities.

This time the reports were exciting as always, but I can summarize them generally.  Most of the pastors either went and trained others in the preaching manual, or they put into practice what they learned and their preaching has greatly improved.  They were so excited to share testimonies of their church members coming up to them voluntarily to tell them how much their preaching has changed and improved.



I had an impromptu idea as we neared the end of the manual.  I had them divide into groups and each group had to prepare a Bible lesson for a children's Sunday School class.  Then they had to present to all of us with one person being the teacher and the others being children.  They got really into it and it was hilarious.  But it was also helpful as they got to put into practice what they learned, and it led to some very deep and complex discussions after each group presented like, "what do you do when a child comes to class and hasn't eaten?  What do you do when a child says their drunk father has been beating him at home?"



The presentations/skits were quite funny but as they were in Ateso, not English, it would be hard for you to appreciate them fully, but I put a couple short clips in anyway.  Some of the "children" were quite disobedient and some kept saying, "but I'm supposed to get an avocado today, I want to eat my avocado."

The action plans were very similar for all the pastors.  75% of the action plans involved finding and training new Sunday School teachers.  The rest involved teaching children directly or teaching this TLT manual to other people.  Please pray for these pastors and their churches as they try to care for and raise up all their children in the Christian faith.  (Remember that 50% of Ugandans are under the age of 15).

Cool Conservation Agriculture Successes

 By Sara:

Again, you heard some about this from Geoff, but he and I went to do a visit to monitor the progress some of the farmers in Katakwi are making who are doing conservation agriculture with our Ugandan partner development organization KIDO.  This is also a time for advising and encouraging the field officer who works directly with the farmers.

In the picture below, you can see one of the gardens that the lady in the pink shirt started to compare mulching and no mulching.  You can see that the maize on the left side is very small - that one is not mulched.  The maize on the right is mulched.  Salome, the woman on the right, is the resource person for this group and she helped her group members start small gardens like this to do comparisons of different techniques.

Salome also has intercropped maize with jackbean, a gm/cc.  We will wait to see how this benefits the maize and the soil, as time goes on.

KIDO is also working with the farmers to start kitchen gardens where they can grow vegetables right next to the home to improve nutrition and health.  I think this newly prepared garden below is the most beautiful one I have ever seen:

The same farmer showed us his mulched maize which is about ready to harvest.  He pointed out how, strangely, the maize is very short, but the cobs are quite big.  (The unmulched maize did not produce anything.)  The shortness of the maize may have been a blessing in disguise anyway, since there was a recent heavy rain and most peoples' maize got blown down, but his was too short to fall over.

I have wondered, sometimes, about whether farmers would really want to go to the trouble of mulching anything other than high-value crops in their gardens, since collecting the mulch can be a lot of work.  Of course, not everyone will do so, but for this lady below and the members of her farmers' group, when I asked whether they would mulch something like maize or beans, the answer was an emphatic "yes!"   She said that getting mulch is much less work than weeding and also that she has seen that she will get some harvest of mulched maize and beans, but nothing from the ones that were not mulched.  This is the same demonstration that I showed before, where they had tons of weeds in the unmulched part and no weeds at all in the part that was mulched.  Well, they weeded it and then there was no rain for a few weeks.  The maize and beans with no mulch have almost shriveled up completely and will yield nothing, while the mulched maize and beans are doing just fine.  This, I think, is a great example of how conservation agriculture helps to protect crops when weather is not optimal.

Here is another one of those kitchen gardens.  This woman just transplanted tomatoes into it, so she covered them with leaves to protect them from the sun.  She dug a hole in the middle, with a trench leading into it and then circular trenches going out from the center.  The garden is in a place where water runs off from around her house, so the trenches catch the water and put it to good use, watering her vegetables, rather than being lost.

Random - Dancing, Pets, and Rubbish

By Anthony:

Male dancers at our guesthouse one time when we were staying in Kampala

Female dancers

The picture below shows the road outside of a church where I did a training in Mbale.  So sad.  In trying to not actually drive through the rubbish (trash) pile I accidentally drove into the ditch the morning of the training.  Thankfully a few boda boda (motorcycle) drivers lifted me out.  There are always many Good Samaritans in Uganda.

One of our chickens that became a wonderful dinner of Sesame Chicken.

Video of Caleb

This is how they were paving a road in Kenya.  Put down the bags of cement, then hack them open with machetes.

Video of Sara's goat, Luthien.

A super exciting meal we had while traveling in Kenya, a pulled pork sandwich.

Randomly visiting a school in session (our friend Tom is the one in front, talking to the students).

Sara's baby guinea fowl, hanging out on top of her oven.

Thieves stole from us but God provides

By Anthony:

Most of you know already that when we were in Kampala some weeks ago we had things stolen from us.  I wanted to briefly reflect on the experience, but first I'll give a brief summary of the events.

We were in Kampala for meetings and staying at a guesthouse nearby.  We left our computers and things in our room, locked it, and went down the stairs to eat dinner.  We ate with our World Renew colleagues for 30 minutes then returned to our room to find our things rifled through and missing 2 computers, our camera, 2 internet modems, and all of our cash.  I immediately ran down the stairs in a panic telling the receptionist and guard to quickly lock the place down to see if they could find the thieves.  We told our World Renew supervisors to check if they were missing anything, and then they helped us figure out what to do.  We are really glad that they were there to help us and talk it through with us.  But we couldn't do much other than to wait for the guards to pull up the security footage from the hidden cameras.

We are thankful that our regional team leader was around.  He remembered seeing people standing in the hallway and then ducking into their hotel room as he passed to go down to dinner.  The receptionist reported that those guests had paid for their room for another evening and then left to go to dinner elsewhere (with a backpack on).  Our leader was finally able to convince the hotel staff to not only just sit and wait for the footage, but to go inspect at least that one room while those guests were out.  The staff did so and we were very overjoyed to find my computer in that hotel room, along with Sara's computer case with one modem inside its pocket. 

In the hour or so between the discovery of the robbery and the discovery of my computer, many things went through my mind.  I'm very aware that if anything is an idol in my life, it is my computer.  I use it for most of my daily work, my communication, watching movies, playing games, listening to music, etc. etc.  My biggest fear always is that it will get broken or stolen.   When it happened, I was praying fervently that God would let it get returned.  But I was also working through my idolatry, thinking it was possible that God was using this to make me less attached to my computer.  Before it was discovered, I had accepted the reality that I wasn't getting it back, continued to proclaim my trust in God, and reminded myself that it's only a computer and not the end of the world.  But I sure had a lot of stress imagining how I would get a new computer to Uganda, and how I would download my massive programs and updates, without spending hundreds of dollars in internet airtime.  You cannot believe how much relief I had when my computer was found.

For those of you that don't know, my computer is very big and people regularly tease me about how cumbersome it is to move around.  It's so big that I needed to order a special unique backpack for it.  But its bigness is what saved it.  The thieves carried everything out in their backpack, and must not have been able to fit my computer so they left it. 

The computer footage showed that the thieves were able to get into our room with a physical key, even though the rooms were also locked with electronic cards.  The hotel is going to try to revamp their security.  They said this is the first theft in many years there.  The thieves were long gone and not coming back so there was not much else to do.  We decided not to rush to call the police because we were told they would only try to get money from us, or take my computer as evidence.

It's almost too bad that the thieves didn't take my computer, because if they had done so, we would have been able to help the police to catch them using the free program on my computer called, "Prey."  This program tracks the movement of my computer geographically, sets off alarms, locks up the computer, and even takes video of the person on the computer.

The hotel talked to the police the next day and Sara made a statement while I led a computer maintenance training.  We had to get a police report for our computer insurance.  But the hotel graciously paid for that large expense.  The hotel also graciously gave us cash to replace all the cash we had that was stolen.  Most hotels do not do this.  They all have signs up saying they aren't responsible if things get stolen.  But this hotel offered without us asking.  They clearly value World Renew's regular business.  More good news came when I discovered I could freeze my modem account and get the airtime transferred (at least 6 months worth), to a new modem. 

All in all, you can see that we were very blessed.  The thieves did not take near as much as they could have.  We were very relieved that they only took our cash and didn't just grab our wallets whole.  We were relieved that they did not steal our Kindles or mp3 players. 

Sara has handled her computer being stolen very well, much better than I would have.  There has been much more laughter than tears.  More good news was that World Renew had a computer Sara could borrow while she waited for a new one.  And providentially our friend visited just weeks after the event, bringing the new computer with her.  My brother served us by getting the new computer up and running and everything downloaded for it.  It's really amazing how well everything came together.  We are also thankful that Sara backed up her files just a couple weeks before this event and didn't lose anything important.

But this whole episode was disturbing in another way.  These thieves did not simply see an opportunity to steal and then run.  They studied us for days.  They had been in the hotel with us, eating at tables beside us, watching us, greeting us, etc. 

We had gotten lazy in our security consciousness, but this episode makes us much more security conscious.  I am very against living in fear, and living in mistrust of people.  Around the world, I have seen some missionaries live this way and I feel like they might as well go back to their home country.  You can't live and you can't do ministry, unless you are willing to trust people and live out of love not in constant fear.  This episode has not increased my fear of people, but it has given us the new rule that we will take our computers with us every time we leave the room, no matter how much hassle it is! 

I also reflect on this episode realizing that I will never be truly in poverty.  We have too good of a social network.  We are too firmly entrenched in the extended family of God's Church.  It is a privilege most people in the world do not enjoy.  We have so many supporters, so many people that care about us, that even when things like this happen and things get stolen, we have insurance, we have friends, we have people who give to us.  Thus in an episode like this, I find myself praising God for all he has provided.  I am rich in community, in loving friends, and in family.  God has blessed us so incredibly much, far beyond what we need, and beyond even what we want, and I need to respond daily in gratitude, praise, and generosity to others.

So if you want to pray about this, I ask for only two things:
1.  Praise and thank God for his sovereignty that things worked out so well.  And thank God for the amazing ways he has provided for us.
2.  Pray for the thieves that they repent and come to know Jesus as their Savior and Lord so that one day in the New Creation, we can meet and hug and reconcile and laugh with joy together at God's great mercies.