Random Photos of 2023

By Anthony:

This post contains some old photos from all throughout this year! I planned to share most of these much earlier in 2023 but things got busy with our time in the USA.

First, here is a chameleon I found crossing the road while driving and I brought it back to our home to keep it safe, because there were people around and they would have probably killed it because many people hate chameleons, thinking that they are dangerous.

Next, here is a band which I heard at a traditional wedding (when the bride price is paid, before the wedding in the church).

Here are some photos from our Resonate team retreat which happened in South Africa in March:

Those of us at the retreat who live in Uganda:

Here is a meeting my colleague Stephen organized for several bishops and their wives. It was sort of a one day retreat, and he invited me to speak to them about forming deep friendships and finding people who will care for them. It is difficult for bishops, and even their wives, to find people who will not be afraid to have deep peer-to-peer relationships because of the respect for authority in this culture. The couples greatly appreciated the sharing together and some of them will try to be supportive friends to one another.

I and a team of about eight other teachers and translators continue to teach on the radio here. We have a lot of committed listeners. I teach about two out of every seven weeks.

A funny picture:

Sara the bird whisperer:

These are a couple of videos from when I visited a village church about thirty minutes drive from Soroti. When I arrived I found only a couple people there, but slowly the little church filled up. A lot of village churches are fairly small. It's not uncommon for a village church to have about 20 adults and then 60 or more children.

A photo of us:

An intruder to the yard who was pretty calm and friendly (not venomous), but we'd rather have no snakes....

This video is poor quality, but I really like it because it captures the enthusiasm and excitement of one our TLT graduations. This was a group that I did not lead any of the trainings for, but we sent facilitators to lead this training group in Bukwo, Uganda. They were marching down the highway.

This is my Soroti pastors book club. We read books together and discuss them and meet once a month. The discussions are engaging and sometimes controversial as we deal with very practical and real contextual topics facing our churches. There are about six to eight denominations represented in the group, but most of the churches are Pentecostal of some kind. We used to meet at our home, but now that we moved we have been meeting in churches in town.

Before we left for the USA, these pastors met at a local pork restaurant and enjoyed roasted pork and chips (fries). Pork is the popular food these days. I wonder if partly it's more and more popular now as I heard some people didn't eat it in the past because the Old Testament says its unclean. The pork here still has the fat and the skin on it, but it's really tasty.

This is what drilling a borehole (a well) looks like in Uganda.

When we moved, we transported our pigeons to the new house in a dog crate. If you are nice to us when you visit, we might let you eat them with us.  We started out with only 4 early last year and now we have 30 of them!

Beorn liked one of our moving boxes that we left on the veranda:

Sometimes I am in awe at the beauty of the sky:

As soon as we arrived in Soroti from our time in the US, some of our friends welcomed us back to our home with roasted pork! We felt really loved.

When we got back from the US, we were able to visit our friend Mackay at his village home. He is a pastor in Soroti that we know well. His wife Martha, one of Sara's friends that she used to visit who was struggling with cancer, passed away while we were in the US. We missed the burial and so we were glad we were able to visit with their family when we got back.

Soon after we got back from the US, our friend Nathaniel visited us. He is working in Uganda for two years. The last time we saw him at the farm we worked at in Texas, he was only 11 years old! We've kept in touch over the years and it's really fun now to be in Uganda together.

Here is our 2023 Christmas tree that Sara got for us from one of our trees in the yard:

This is me drinking coffee with milk during breakfast for the first time in Uganda since I'm not on medication to prevent malaria (you have to take the drug without milk). We'll see how it goes. If we start getting malaria a lot, then we can always go back on to the preventative medication again.

Last, and maybe least, here are some of the fun critters and insects from our house and yard:

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: