Bundibugyo Christmas . . .

A few verbal snapshots: Christmas Eve caroling with the whole team, dusky pink clouds and fading light, Scott and Nathan with guitars, stopping a dozen times as we strolled up the road and back, some neighbors a bit bewildered but most happily entertained, old toothless women squatting outside over their cooking fires or young women washing clothes or braiding hair for the next day, men standing on the fringes, listening, smiles, greetings, soda crates rattling in bicycles as teenage boys brought in the last feast items, walking back home and straight to the cow pasture, reading Luke 2 by candlelight leaning against our real manger, dodging smelly droppings in the darkness, our two cows and goat looking suspiciously at the crowd in their space.

Christmas morning: awaking to rain (only three bursts of rain in this month, on Dr. Jonah's memorial service, on his cultural ceremony called final rites, and on Christmas), a downpour of blessing . . .stockings, music, John chapter 1 and an annual candle lighting, a pastry ring extravagance of butter and nuts, sitting around our tree, reading a chapter of a new children's book, unwrapping ping-pong paddles and then the kids' surprise run out to the roofed car-port area to discover that (besides the Rwenzori climb!) our gift was a spindly ping-pong table that Scott smuggled back from Kampala and set up during the night. We are a real teen-age house now.

 

Christmas church service: Hours that did not seem tedious this year at all, but joyful; the women's choir in their new robes radiant, swaying, singing new songs; the children's choir bringing down the house with their synchronized dance; a visitor from Congo borrowing Scott's guitar for a beautiful Swahili folk rendition; our mission team standing up to sing "Joy to the World" looking back on the packed church, hundreds of faces smiling with us (and for me the peculiar shock that we live in Africa, so obvious, but I always sit as part of the congregation deluded into believing we blend in); being pulled (literally) into a traditional dance with the elders and wives in the front of the church, at first reluctantly embarrassed but then amazed at the inclusion and sense of community; hearing Revelations 12 read in Lubwisi for the first time from newly-translated typed pages, then a powerful sermon by Musunguzi who reminded us that this world is at war and Jesus entered it to achieve victory.

Christmas afternoon and evening: the team gathering at our house, a long table set outside in the shade for our feast, a crunchy bag of Fritos from a package from someone we never even met that arrived on Christmas eve (the small joys of crispness and salt!), singing and performing comical carols for each other, exchanging gifts from our name draw and the fun of the surprise of both who drew whom and what creative thing they managed to procure, the Quinns vs. the Naomis all- team soccer match followed by a cool-down round of catch-phrase, family phone-calls to America and the Sudan, birthday-cake shaped like a Christmas tree and desserts and then a patio dance party all by candlelight under the stars, ending with watching "the Grinch" projected on a big-screen sheet.

One of our best Christmases ever, just the right mixture of community and worship and fun and food and reality and giving.