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Saturday, February 17, 2024

Back-to-School FANTASTIC news and yet . . help our unbelief!

 Two weeks into the 2024 school year: Ugandan schools follow a year-round calendar-year schedule, with three 3-month terms spaced by three term breaks, the longest one being between years and encompassing Christmas/New Year so just over. Every late January/early February finds us repairing/mending/improving the physical buildings, gathering teachers for training and spiritual formation, praying, and then receiving our Senior 2 to 4 (O level) and Senior 6 (A level) students back . . . while also promoting the enrolment of new Senior 1 and 5 classes. That's where we are right now.

The new students come a week or two after they old, because they must wait for the release of their end-of-school exam results by the country. Primary School (P1-7) finishes with the PLE (Primary Leaving Exam) whose results determine qualification for S1. Secondary (O Level) is judged by the UCE (Uganda Certificate of Education) exam at the end of S4 whose results send students into S5/6 or other pathways, and the Advanced "A" level UACE exam at the end of S6 determines who goes to University. In the last two weeks, the PLE and the UCE have been released, which allows us to rank applicants . . . but the UCE and UACE ALSO allow applicants to judge us. So we were very very grateful on Thursday to find that our Nov 2023 end-of-O-level UCE scores were amongst the best ever, and by a LONG margin the best in the District. 

Bundibugyo ranked 133rd out of 136 districts for secondary school exam results this year, nearly the bottom.  That's why we are here after all. God sends his people to the margins, to the places that most need to hear good news . . injustice is not equally distributed in this world, meaning those called to model and sweat for justice need to be in places like this.  So when Christ School's results show 75% of our students scoring in the top two divisions, and all our averages making us comparable to the top 10-15% of schools in the country, we're thrilled (to put it another way, we are living in a place that otherwise is in the 2.2%ile from the bottom but by God's grace we're enabling students to get to the 90th%ile!). 

All good news, but all that shining costs more than most families can afford, to pay fair teacher salaries, buy some books, and feed everyone. Yes, thanks to our loyal and generous supporters EVERY STUDENT pays a subsidized, reduced tuition cost, a bargain compared to similarly-performing schools closer to the capital. And 10 students per class receive full OVC (orphan and vulnerable children) scholarships, targeting kids who are even needier than the baseline. We gave 76 students the opportunity to join S1, but likely many will not show up on their first day on Monday because even our subsidised fees stretch their single moms or their grandparents raising kids left behind or their intact farmer families just trying to scrape by. Every half hour it seems another parents is knocking on our gate asking for help. 

So the back-to-school reality carries the same paradoxes as most of life here. We are so proud of our staff's good work and our students' great performance. We believe in the way this education allows kids to serve their district, sets them on the road to being nurses and teachers and pharmacists and politicians and pastors. And we know that the zero-tolerance for cheating or abuse means they are safe here, and the daily value of worship and Bible study shapes their souls. So much hope as the new school year starts!  And yet . . . the poorest parents will struggle to pay and so opt for crowded government day schools instead of CSB, and the few who have steady incomes will often succumb to the illusion that it's always better to send their kids far away so opt for schools in Kampala. We and most of our team mates will help those we can, but we also long to see the community believe and invest. This morning Scott contributed to a dad of disabled twins, but we wonder if he'll have the courage to commit to sending them. It is emotionally and spiritually exhausting to live with such flimsy filters of protection from all the sad stories. . . . but even more exhausting to be a parent trying to do your best for your kids, or a student dreaming of belonging.

Faith never gets easy. Lord we believe, help our unbelief, just as the parent of the child in Mark 9 exclaimed

First chapel back to school for 2024

Cocoa prices enable school fees: eat more chocolate for Bundibugyo!

Repairs to the stoves and chimneys to cook 3 meals a day for 300 people ... 


Leadership team organising entrance interviews

Running a school means stocking a clinic to treat minor illnesses. . . especially malaria!

The hopeful new students taking an entrance exam, managed by our excellent Director of Studies Kiiza

The never-ending projects include improved drainage around the entrance gate and . . 

Installing the many new smoke detectors we brought back. Chairman of the Board wears many hats, and climbs many ladders. 



Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Ragged Rainbows

 Dry season has failed to blow in in Bundibugyo. Usually right around Christmas a hot wind heralds a departure of the daily rains and begins a multi-month stretch of scorching sunshine, turning the grass a crunchy brown. This year we've continued to have frequent clouds heavy with moisture, and almost daily outbursts. Yesterday for the second morning in a row our morning walk left us damp with misty cloud and dripping rain. As we turned back towards home, the rising sun behind our backs peaked over the mountains with enough sparkle to form a ragged little patch of rainbow ahead of us. If an arch is 180 degrees, this wasn't more than ten of those, with indistinct tattered margins. It wasn't much of a rainbow.

In my head I heard the scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" where Jimmy Stewart meets Clarence, whom he's just rescued from drowning, and the pudgy little nobody with outdated clothes claims to be his guardian angel. Jimmy Stewart says "well, you look just like about the kind of angel I'd get." That was what I thought about the rainbow, just the sort for us in 2024. It only lasted a minute, and was so partial and subtle and early that I doubt anyone else remarked much on it. But it was there.

Such is hope these days. A muddled, scraggly sign more than a stunning, admirable sight.

One month into the year, and the way ahead feels foggy. School started this week in Uganda. As always, we have lots of competition for the OVC scholarships but it's more challenging to get paying students to enrol (even though every student is subsidised about 50%) ... our niche is families with capacity and will to invest a very modest school fee into their kids' education, but without the capacity to send their kids out of the district (the dream of anyone with an upwardly mobile life plan and a steady government salary). Part of the challenge of living in a marginal place is that everyone deeply believes that outside is better. Slowly we are giving the confidence and pride in the performance of the poor, but every year it's a struggle of prayer. The cloud here is a life of poor nutrition and substandard primary school and undependable subsistence, but the sunrise ray that lights a rainbow was the staff prayer walk on Saturday night. 25 years into this project, the 25 or so teachers KNOW HOW TO PRAY, they see the needs and have the vision for academic excellence and servant leadership for the good of Bundibugyo and the glory of God. For an hour or two we went from class to dorm to office to infirmary to kitchen to chapel to lab to pitch, praying for 2024. A ragged rainbow glow.

Half of January we were in the USA for a Serge leadership annual "objectives" meeting, putting practical plans onto the strategies we formed in September. More cloudy days of discerning the spiritual and physical needs of the world and our people, and debating priorities and praying for grace. We dashed around multiple states before and after that week to touch base with both moms, my sister, and each of our kids, for a day or two each, plus visited two of our supporting churches on the two Sundays we were there and a third church for a midweek lunch. The ray of rainbow-producing hope in all that non-stop interaction was the beauty and strength of relationships holding onto us over decades. Within Serge, within our church, and particularly within our family. Another Wonderful Life line fits here: "no man is a failure who has friends .. . a toast to my brother, the richest man in town."  Amen.

Now we are back in Bundi, in all its murky dampness and heavy responsibility, three multi-country many-leader zoom meetings in the last week-plus as well. The complexity of partnerships, the health challenges of isolated families, the inescapable reality of illnesses and injuries not easily fixed, the scramble to meet deadlines and write teaching and pay attention to everyone here, made cloudier by the inevitable trials of people we love on the other side of the ocean too. Both of our moms are plucky and independent, but both have had a harder time in the last few months. And all our kids seem to be approaching transition in 2024, the one first on our heart is the eldest who has several job offers, none quite ideally clear. Carrying the weight, asking God to enlarge our hearts. Then one day last week a shockingly large gift to BundiNutrition from the estate of a person we don't even know how we are connected to. The fragmented light assembles temporarily into bands of colour and beauty.

Here is a ragged rainbow recap of the opening weeks of 2024 . . wish I had a pic of the actual ragged rainbow, but this will have to do:


The Ministry Team: All Area Directors and Executive Leadership
And our faithful Home Office Staff with whom we met that week as well

My sis and fam!

Most photos in early Jan are in front of Christmas trees, but Caleb was moving the next day for a 6 month assignment elsewhere, so we helped pack his house into a storage unit.


Back to Christmas trees, Jack and Julia in SLC

Luke and Abby showing us their Baltimore neighborhood
Our favourite lunch stop on highway 1, with Scott's 91 year old mom Ruth!
    
And in my mom Judy's lovely home

The Grace OPC missions committee sending us off to the airport to return, after church and lunch. Grateful!


Then it was back to Uganda . . . . 


The annual beginning of school staff prayer walk, best way to start the year

Scott supervised 23 infrastructure maintenance and improvement projects.  100 buckets of paint do a lot.

More prayer

Staff in the teacher lounge for inservice and worship

Our theme was Be Moses: a leader BElives, MOdels, SErves, and EquipS.  


The January team, with visitors!

My computer . . hard to work when I'm just wanting to pray for these two. Join me.





Friday, December 29, 2023

Bucolic, exotic, horrific : why complex stories matter

 Mostly our Christmas readings tend to sanitise the historical event with a focus on miracles, angels, light, gifts, bucolic shepherds and exotic wise men. Cue the orchestral music, the peaceful candles and cozy cows. Which is not entirely unreasonable, given the fact that the events of that night instigated a cosmic shift in the trajectory of the human story from tragedy to glory. All memory is impacted by the outcomes of events, and a hard labor that ends in a joyful healthy baby is recalled differently than one that results in a stillbirth. I love putting out my wreath and hanging stockings and ornaments just as much as anyone. Beauty and community and joy are central to this story.

But the second half of Matthew 2, after the kings and gifts, is as horrific as any story ever told. And as horrific as the nightly news from the area in 2023. Herod can't find the individual infant that his  constituents are beginning to suspect could be the answer to prophecies, the awaited king, the potential disruption to a political and social order where he and his court are quite comfortable? Well then, just send in overwhelming force to indiscriminately kill all infant boys. To be safe, given the imprecise timing of stars and camel-paced approaches, all boys two years old and under. 

Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning, refusing to be comforted because they are no more . . . not the phrases we put on our Christmas cards. But certainly the lived experience of most of the world. Including the same area today, where the powers with weapons have justified killing 8,663 children among the 21 thousand (mostly) civilians killed so far. 

This story is one of the many I'd prefer to edit out of the narrative. But as a mom who once scooped kids and ran from evil men with guns shooting at us and our neighbours, as a doctor who has been present at the moment of too many child deaths to count, as an aging senior who prays for and supports so many families facing danger . . . I think this horrific chapter needs to be included. The incarnation does not magically make life immediately perfect, not even safe. And the need for the infiltration of God's ways into our world is seen in the blood of the babies. It's a serious story with real consequences. Evil really is evil. Jesus doesn't shy away from the worst our world can conjure. He entered real weeping, and because of that the end of the story will be no more tears.

I call my preferred movie genre "dark and redemptive",  because that's the truth of the world. Walking into darkness and not sugar coating the losses. BUT . . walking through that to light. 



Merry Christmas from the Bundibugyo Team

(since it's the 29th of December, probably incumbent upon us to remind any readers with end-of-year impulse to plot-twist some stories on our side of the globe towards the beatific . . .

Christ School Bundibugyo, BundiNutrition, and the Myhres, all plod on by your kindness.)

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Christmas in the Ruins . . . choosing to be a doorway to good

 


Christmas Eve Eve . . .since the 24th and 25th will both have major church services, and today is market day, it feels like we are fully into Christmas. "Webhale Bhilo Bhikulu!" we greeted this morning on our sunrise walk. Literally, thank you for the valuable/important/old/big days. In this community, people feel a sense of gratefulness and accomplishment for living through another year. The New Year's greeting is "Webhale Kwiko", thanks for reaching, making it, arriving. As the light faded in to the cloud-covered rainforest that is Bundibugyo, we passed women sweeping any twigs and leaves from the smooth dirt compounds in front of their homes, lines of kids carrying water or firewood, adults washing clothes or tending fires to prepare for cooking (and sadly a few tipsy men still reaching home from a night of drinking). A few hours later we needed a couple of things at the market, which was a chaotic mass of boda (motorcyle) taxis and last minute preparations. And now as I cook and clean and prepare, I can hear more traffic in five minutes than used to pass in a month. The sense of bustle and anticipation is palpable.

But it all occurs in the context of a place where the rubble of a broken world still longs for redemption to break in more brightly. This morning was the second time in two weeks that one of us has found a car window smashed from thieves who managed enter the fenced compound in the dark, searching for anything they can grab. Yesterday evening we visited our two nearest neighbours whose lovely welcoming spirit shone even though we found one grandmother quite ill. We've been harassed this week by a man who reported Scott to the police for taking a picture of his business sign (so we'd have the phone number!), just a person angling to make up an offence that he could "sue" us for. All while still reworking budgets that suffered from our own losses due to embezzlement, keeping in close touch with our DRC team during disorganised and protested elections (but thankfully no violence), all our Ugandan team mates as the ADF attacked a village about 50km south, and all our teams facing their own struggles. This world we live in has little veneer to create the illusion of glory. And in the world of Gaza, pictured above in a side-by-side painting of Mary and photo of a Palestinian woman in 2023, the suffering is almost unimaginable. 

But that painting and photo capture Christmas exactly. A baby has been born who incarnates hope, who has entered into the very debris of our lives with the power and love to crush evil. Mary didn't get to see the final restoration of all things, and niether do we, yet. Like her we are asked to participate on faith. To open our lives to God who is in the process of making all things new, while those things still apparently teeter on the edge of disaster. 

From Alea Peister on Biola Advent two days ago:

"In Advent we take four weeks to remember how we, like Mary, live in a world that is ill. It is broken down and violent. It is a place where people are isolated from each other and God. It is a world where we seem to always choose the wrong thing. It is a world that is dying. And we are, like it or not, participants in its death.


As we do so, we find – like Mary – that God visits us and asks: Will you let me dwell in you and remake you? Will you let me burn up the chaff within you and restore the wheat? Will you become the place where I reside, become yourself my throne and temple? (1 Cor. 6:19-20)


We cannot possibly know what our assent will lead to. We can hope for specific outcomes – but that is, in the end, not the point. Our task is simply to become a residence for the life of Christ, a doorway through which he will make his love known to the world. When God visits and asks if we will say yes, we find life can have no other eventuality than our total, simple, and grateful assent. 


Behold, we say with the Theotokos. I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word."


That captures life in the ruins of creation pretty well. We are part of the problem, and we suffer the impact of much of what was already broken before we added to the mess. But by grace we accept the calling to become a doorway of Heaven, a place where others can glimpse the feast of goodness to which we are invited, and where God can reach through to feed the hungry and comfort the weary. 

Been reading this excellent, thoughtful book on Advent as a time of spiritual formation, a fast before the feast.

The BundiNutrition team Christmas party is the type Jesus would enjoy . . 1178 kids got 9 weeks of locally made supplemental food this year, and they all survived.

Speaking of parties, this feast was followed by our very own Rwenzori Mission School Christmas Pageant, organised by the indomitable Miss Michaela below with the cast


Final weeks of the year mean budges and new contracts and a lot of meetings and work. But this crew keeps us all going, very thankful for them.

A few pauses in a non-stop week to actually harvest the bounty IN OUR OWN YARD, cocoa, mango, avacado and papaya are all in season.

Second year to lessen our impact on the planet by just cutting branches off trees planted years ago and stringing lights and ornaments to make it a Christmas tree

Bailey and the library crew ... love the safe space with old books from all the mission families shared with the community.

Annual watching of this movie hit home in our hearts this year. It's our story. 

Sweet to see kids we helped grow up now as parents themselves, particularly ones like Ivan who embody the spirit of this blog post, a doorway of good for the world.


Monday, December 18, 2023

Creativity as an act of both beauty and survival

This morning I read a quote by musician Jon Batiste, discussing a lullaby he wrote for his wife when she was hospitalised with relapsed leukemia awaiting her second bone marrow transplant. He called the song writing process "a testament to creativity as an act of both beauty and survival." 

Amen. It isn't often that a phrase knocks one over as a succinct capsule of the truth of life. 

Beauty and survival, inextricably intertwined because we are humans grappling through a broken universe, but resonant with the spark of God. So we see the goodness in colour, harmony, form, light, taste .. . but we also see goodness in making it through another day. Today we walked around Christ School again with Alex, the facilities manager. Beauty and survival could be his job description, and ours. And creativity is called out by our scarcity, our limits.

Many of the buildings and campus of this school are about to start their 25th year of service. . . and 24 years of heavy rain, abundant insect life, generations of student use, pounding equatorial sun, the occasional earthquake and landslide and flood and war, well, it takes a toll on all of us. Particularly when we started a quarter-century ago on a limited donation-dependent budget, using local materials and builders in a place where few concrete buildings existed. Perks of surviving, we are now past the establishment phase and squarely into the major maintenance and repair stage. Which sounds much less noble and exciting. 

But repair and restoration put us squarely into Jesus' redemptive story of all-things-new. In Bundibugyo these days, it's about replacing termite-crumbled doors and frames with welded metal ones, about re-plastering crumbled cement, about modifying beds to more securely hang mosquito nets in this malaria epicenter,  about digging out clogged drainage trenches, about fixing leaks and repairing bent rusted roofing sheets. A lot of survival. And then about new coats of paint to brighten and clean the students' bathing room spaces, to make new chalk boards for learning, to bring neatness consistency to the appearance of classes, to replace ceiling holes with new white tiles. A lot of beauty too. 

It's actually a very tangible example of all of life here. The repair and restoration of hungry little bodies or the wresting of drinkable water down a mountain slope or the patient teaching of young people all are ways we push back against the entropy of decay and give life into the groaning creation. With Alex today we tried to prioritise the many needs of the school, to choose the projects that we could do. Do we have to replace all 27 doors that are falling apart, or could we start with 20? Do we have to replace the whole ceiling in this room, or could we just do half? Even the budget we cut and modified will nearly empty our Serge fund. Scott sent out a fundraising letter, but if you read this far and want to participate feel free to click here and join in.  We need the help, and the act of creatively figuring out how to make this place renewed leads to survival and beauty. Not a bad goal for Christmas!

This is how the day looked: Scott and Alex pondering the needs (above) or showing a worker how to dig out the drainage ditch (below)


On to the next set of dorms and classes . . .


Termites munched the door frame above, and time has not been kind to the latrine below.






Leaking roofs ruin the paint and ceilings in the classrooms


Saturday, December 16, 2023

Global, tangible, contemporary ... what the prophets saw, and we see

 Week 3 of Advent took us to Isaiah and John the Baptist, two prophetic voices sent to prepare the way for the Messiah. Like most American Christians I think, we visualise the "salvation" the prophets preach as an appeal to the individual to shape up, and we think of that shaping up as a spiritual matter of inner belief, that matters mostly for an after-death dichotomy of eternity. Individual, spiritual, future . . . sort of an optional self-help program that can be indefinitely delayed. 

So it was a refreshing wake-up to be reading long portions of Isaiah this season (check out chapter 35) and also study the no-holds-barred words of John the Baptist. These messages paint elaborate pictures of hope, and don't mince words calling out anything that stands in the way. Their visions include the entire world, people of many languages and social classes streaming towards the mountain of God, forming a new community. The transformation they call for is practical, tangible, physical, tasteable. And while we live between the times of Jesus' incarnation into humanity and full enthronement over the universe, the all-things-new power of healing has already begun. Global, tangible, contemporary wonders fill the pages.

If Isaiah and John were looking at Bundibugyo, here are a few images of the week that they might have described.

BundiNutrition served 1178 kids in malnourished kids in 2023, with 80% improved enough to exit the program after 9 weeks of care. And we fed mothers of prematures and surrogate breast feeders, and supported clinical care and education. We're calling this global because donors from one side of the world plus dedicated workers from the other side combine efforts to shine light into the darkness of hunger, and fill kids with ground nuts and soya and vitamins and love. Entire cost of food and medicine and staff is $40/kid .. . pretty efficient for 9 weeks of feeding and care. So in spite of the heart-breaking financial mismanagement we experienced in other parts of the mission this year, BundiNutrition still managed tangible, real-time good. 

Bwampu has done an excellent job managing this program! 

End-of-year means budgets and contracts and untangling the losses, so the team Finance Committee (these three plus me) have been putting in some long hours.

Quick glimpse of new patients on Friday, why all the budgets and recored matter.

Our Executive Leadership of Serge traveled to Burundi to sign the new MOU we had earlier gone there to negotiate with our partners. . . .and this is definitely a global, tangible, and immediate blessing to the world. In the first decade our team and this hospital treated 300,000 patients and performed 30,000 surgeries. We are so grateful for the McLaughlins and Alyssa (pictured below) and the entire enterprise.


Lastly a few smaller celebrations. We spent a morning with a very impressively professional epidemiological public health team investigating a potential viral cause to some clusters of neurologic symptoms.


And engaging team kids in Advent and Christmas does my heart good.

A huge blessing for Bundibugyo is that BundiWater project has almost completed 5 km of pipe laying in Mabere, and this week Josh's team succeeded in a ferrocement design for pressure break tanks along the pipeline.

Just a glimpse of some of the many people we are thankful for, Zawadi and Abel.


And finally, seasonal shopping in Bundibugyo means buying vanilla beans seen drying out in front of dukas (look closely for Scott improvising a weighing scale with a water bottle and a tire iron).


We bought vanilla and sold chocolate . . the final pictures are of our few cocoa trees and the pods and beans we harvested today. Merry Christmas!