Baking in Uganda

This past week, I had the fun opportunity to teach some people in Kaberamaido (a neighboring district to Soroti) how to bake cakes using the method of steaming them and with homemade measuring cups.  World Renew works with the development organization in Kaberamaido and they arranged a time for me to come train their staff and then to go to a community where they work and do a training in that place as well.  It was a great time.  Two members of a different community, Julius and Samuel, came to the training too.  They are part of a community group that has an oven and are experts on making mandazi.  They received this training from me so they can go and share the cake baking method with others.

Baking is fun, but it is also an income generating activity that people can do to help them earn money.  The people at the development organization calculated the cost for making one of the cakes I taught them.  They said the ingredients plus charcoal probably would cost, at the most, 5,000 shillings ($2) and if you bought such a cake in the store, it would be about 30,000 shillings ($12)!  So they were pretty optimistic that learning to bake cakes could really help some people out.

Here they are using a homemade measuring cup (made from a ubiquitous plastic cup) to measure out milk for a cassava flour cake.

Everyone got really into the cake baking.  They wanted to keep making new recipes, even after we had completed the ones that we had planned to make that day.

I think we baked for six hours and they were still going when I left to go back to Soroti!

One of the cakes they made (I didn't do any of the work - I just told them what to do and they went through the whole baking process themselves):

Everyone enjoyed the taste-testing.

After I taught the technique for baking cakes, Julius and Samuel taught me how to make mandazi.  It is a much more complicated process than I thought it was, with about 13 ingredients!  You have to mix together the dough, knead it, beat it with a rolling pin, roll it out and cut it into pieces, and let it rise before frying it.

Here's Samuel deep frying the mandazi.

The final product:

The next day, Julius, Samuel, and I trained people from a community where the Kaberamaido development organization works.  The venue was a church in Apapai.  When I arrived, I was surprised to find that Charles, one of the students from the Pentecostal college while I was there, is the pastor of this church!  It was a lot of fun to see him again.

We had a group of at least 100 people who came to learn how to bake.  The training would go on for two days, but I was only able to stay for the first one.

After I taught the theory of how to make your own measuring cup, how to bake a cake by the steaming method, and gave a couple of recipes, Julius and Samuel proceeded to teach the theory of how to make mandazi.

Mixing together the ingredients:

A half-kilogram cup converted into a measuring cup:

Making cakes is so simple.  It made me happy to teach it to one group and then to let Charles answer questions himself for the second group.  They didn't need me anymore after I taught the first group of people!

Preparing to steam the cake over a charcoal stove:

This is how you serve a cake to 100 people here in Uganda:

Here's one photo of the participants working on learning how to make mandazi.  It is not a very peaceful process - you beat the dough with a rolling pin for quite some time after you have already kneaded it!

Pastors and Development Workers Worship time

Here is a short video of singing together at a staff and pastor meeting at KIDO's office.  I just don't get tired of it.  I hope you enjoy it too.

Visit to Opiyai church near Soroti

Last Sunday Sara and I visited another former student, Daniel, at his church just outside of Soroti town.  The community is called Opiyai B and was within bicycle riding distance.  Sara taught about caring for God's creation, and I preached on the book of Esther.  We really enjoyed the singing because instead of loud electronic keyboards, the had traditional instruments and drums.

I wanted to write a post about this because I enjoyed preaching there so much.  Almost more than any other time I've ever preached in my life, I can definitely say that preaching there on Sunday was fun.  I was having a really good time.  The main reason for this was because out of the people at the church, 95% of them had not only never read the book of Esther, but never even heard the story at all.  It was all new for them.

My sermon was probably an hour and a half long, because there was translation as well, and I summarized the entire story of Esther.  But I really got into telling the story.  The people in the church made it easy because they were very much involved as well.  There were gasps, times of laughter, and the best parts were when an amazing irony or coincidence happened in the story, and then everyone would cheer and clap so loudly that I would have to stop and wait for them to quiet down.  They enjoyed it as a story, but they also understood what I was trying to teach about God's providence.  It was a really great time.  I had been worried that they wouldn't understand the story because it's so long and detailed, but God truly helped me to explain it well enough.  This was an experience that I think would be difficult for me to have found in the US, since many of us grow up learning these Bible stories as children in Sunday School.  It is experiences like these that make ministry very interesting in Uganda.

Sara teaching and our former student, Daniel, translating for her.

The Sunday School performed a song for us.

Soroti Timothy Leadership Training

This week I co-led the 6th manual of Timothy Leadership Training here in Soroti.  This group of pastors and leaders started the training a couple years ago.  They will complete the program in October and some will become master trainers who will go on to train many others.  Although I was not with this group for the previous manuals, the coordinators were in need of another facilitator, and so I filled in.  We met from 8-5, Monday-Thursday.



The 6th manual is: "Overcoming Violence in the Family."  This is a powerful manual and very practical.  Some of it is very intimate and hard to speak about.  We looked at what the Bible says about honoring other people who are made in God's image.  We were challenged to honor people in society that are not normally honored, following the example of Jesus.  We looked at examples of family violence in the Bible (there are many), and what they teach us.  We looked at what Christian marriage is supposed to look like, and discussed issues of domestic abuse and other conflicts in marriage.  We not only discussed personally how to deal with these things in our families, but also how to help those in our churches. 

We talked about contemporary issues like land grabbing, verbal abuse, female genital mutilation, protecting children from abuse, and other sensitive topics.  We spent a great deal of time talking about pornography and how we can help those who are struggling.  It is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in Uganda.  While we struggle with it in the US on our computers, in Uganda people commonly have access to it on their phones as well as stores that rent out pornographic DVDs.  We talked about other sexual sins like incest and how to protect people from it.  And we talked about how to help those struggling with homosexual desires.  We talked about how to help victims heal from past abuse, and how to help the perpetrators find forgiveness and transformation.  I also learned that alcoholism is a serious problem in Uganda.

People were very touched by the training, and they are very excited to carry out their new action plans based on this manual.  They are eager to help those in their churches with these difficult topics.  Some are planning to find ways to counsel people in their churches struggling with family violence, and others are going to teach this very manual to others.  Here is a picture of them praying for their action plans.



Here is a photo of me, and Rev. Ngigii in the middle who came from Kenya to be the leading facilitator for this training, and Emmanuel on the left, the local coordinator.  Emmanuel was also at Pentecostal Theological College while we were there, so he is a good friend.



Over the week I was able to hear testimonies about the previous action plans from the other manuals.  Here are three testimonies about action plans that I received permission to share with you.

Emmanuel,  (the one in the picture above), shared about his action plan which consisted of starting a drug store in Soroti, in an area heavily populated by Muslims.  The plan was for this store to help supplement his income to take care of his family, and also a way to reach out to Muslims with the love of Christ.  Emmanuel carried out this plan and created "Grace drug store."  It is doing very well and he has other employees that help him run the store, since Emmanuel also has full-time pastoral work.  They talk and pray for people that come to the store for drugs or treatment.  A few people have come to Jesus and been saved because of talking to him or other employees at the store. 

Martin made a plan to start a small nursery school through his local church.  He talked to the church and they responded well to the plan and they let him start a small school at the church property.  Since that time, the school went from about 20 children to over 100 children.  They are filling a big need in the community.  Martin named this school, "Timothy Nursery School."

Joseph, (another of our former students), is the pastor of the church in Soroti we've been attending.  After the stewardship manual, he wanted his Christians to know about the importance of giving.  He made a plan which consisted of teaching, as well as visiting the individual families in his church.  Once he carried this out the giving increased from about 400,000 shillings for a month to 500,000.   Then it kept going up, to 600,000.  And it kept going up.  I'm told that right now it is at about 1,800,000 - 2,000,000 shillings for a month.  This is about a 400% increase in giving because of the action plan Joseph made in TLT.



When you train in Africa, there is always something interesting in the environment to take notice of.  Here is a cute little guy I found on the church veranda.