Realizing the vision, CSB graduates

We pulled into Bundibugyo late evening, unpacked a few bags, visited with our team neighbors, and then this morning headed up to the Magistrate’s court for the latest in the long series of  several-minute appearances separated by months of waiting that constitute our defense from claims by the family of one of the men who sold us land for Christ School that we should relinquish the property back to them.  That does not sound like a great morning, but in fact, it WAS great.

Because in only a few hours in Bundibugyo, we have run into all of these CSB graduates out in the world doing their work.  And doing it well, with integrity and service. Here are a few of them whose photos we snapped (and this represents less than one day since arriving).

This is Rosette Kabugho, Class of 2011, now the Magistrate’s legal aid.  She organizes all the files for the main court in Bundibugyo, sits in the courtroom, answers questions, keeps track of what happens.  she is the center point of JUSTICE IN BUNDI.

This is her colleague Sadaa Muhindo, who also works as a legal aid.  

  

While we waited, a nurse-midwife Katusabe Rose came by.

Katusabe works at Nyahuka Health Center where she and her co-workers have been delivering 150 babies a month.  That’s a lot of life.

Next door to the court, we dropped in on Uganda Broadcasting Corporation’s Bundibugyo Office.

Namwaongera Geoffery and Manila Doreen are the Voice of Bundibugyo.  They broadcast from the studios of UBC, news, programming, interviews, music, public service announcements.  Both are CSB graduates as well.  Geoffery even interviewed Scott live on the air this morning!

And a few hours earlier, we had passed by the office of Stitch and Sew, an auto shop with contracts for large entities working in Uganda.  Joshua Mutegheki is putting his business degree to work!

None of the progress of CSB has come easily. Many people, teachers, administrators, donors, parents, have laid down costly parts of their lives to get us to this point. But we DO SEE THE FRUIT. We did not set out this morning to find CSB grads at work, we set out to get our own work done. But the truth is, in Bundibugyo now, if you want to accomplish anything, you’ll find CSB grads are your best means of doing so.

Back at school, here was one more grad, John Balitebiya, who studied accounting and now works as a liaison between the mission and our projects, tracking the considerable outlays of funds. This week he was tasked with spending money from our support account to replace half our wooden beds with metal-framed ones, as a fire prevention.  This is now a requirement of the government of Uganda, so he negotiated a contract and managed their production and transport.  Here he is with the first delivery.

Thanks to the many parents who have paid fees, and the many donors who have supplemented those fees to enable us to empower young people like these.  Now we are here facing the 2019 school year by faith.  Please join us in producing the next group of world changers. Please consider giving a gift to help us get a strong start to the Christ School 2019 school year which starts in a few weeks.  Follow the CSB or Serge links to give to Christ School.  Or click HERE to connect to the Serge website for a Christ School giving link.  We desperately need partners to make this work.

Gently leading the young: opportunities for teachers

This morning Patric led us in a slow, silent, meditative time in Isaiah 40.  My heart got stuck on  . . a voice says, "CRY!" . . because I often feel compelled to say something.  But others talked about verse 11.  Gently, our God leads those who are laden with young.

And we have a lot of young ones in our East and Central Africa Area.  We have over 60 kids on our teams. We reach out to hundreds, thousands of children who are hungry with our nutrition programs in Burundi and Uganda. We have pediatricians, med-peds docs, family medicine docs, OB docs, surgeons and anesthetists and NPs and PAs who are diagnosing and treating the young every day. We have teachers.  Coaches. Pastors. People who pour their souls out to develop the minds and hearts and bodies of the young. Moms, most particularly. The Kingdom of Heaven is made of such as these, we are told, and we often think of the young as innocent or receptive or simple or pure.  These may be true, but I suspect that verse refers more to their vulnerability. Children in most of the world do not experience life bending to their will, or catering to their safety. They experience danger and loss and higher rates of death. The most risky day of one's life on earth is the day of birth.

 

They are all too often trudging unnoticed. A caring adult input can make a lifetime difference.

We need some teachers on our teams, and soon.  Teachers for our team kids, who enable families to survive in a place far from home. Teachers who will love and serve our children, and those in the communities where we serve.

This weekend Scott and I will be in Charlottesville, VA to thank our Trinity supporters. We had the idea of encouraging Curry school (education) students to consider a two-year teaching adventure on one of our teams. So from 4-5 pm on Saturday the 12th, we will hang out at Shenandoah Joe's on Preston and buy coffee for anyone who wants to chat with us about opportunities.  We also need administrators and youth pastors and just about any gift you have, so even if you aren't a teacher feel free to come.

If you can't make it to Shenandoah Joe's, check out this page from our web site on education, and this one specific to our teacher-for-workers-kids need.

Good news for the world, good news for our kids, good news for the joy of participating in this adventure!

New Year, New Life, Same Grace

Ten days can feel like a lifetime.  We were in Sago, WV for only ten days but in that time we: opened up our farm, cut down a tree, put up all our decorations and lights, made umpteen traditional meals and baked treats, read books, floated down the river on an inflatable pink flamingo, hosted our family of SEVEN (see previous post) as well as nine other friends for various stays, fired up the pizza oven for homemade extravaganzas twice, played rounds of games, went on bike rides and jogs, spent two Sundays at church, washed sheets and remade beds and UNdecorated and stored everything and closed up. Not to mention keeping up with AD work.

It's been twelve days since one of our teams treated an Ebola patient with inadvertent exposure, and all the contacts (our doc and all the Congolese) remain asymptomatic, praise God. Having done the 21 day count more than once in our family, we know how long it feels, another short lifetime. Each day brings an increasing wonder of God's mercy, and gratefulness for prayers. Don't stop praying for the DRC.

In honor of new years and new lives, here is a piece New Growth Press asked me to write for Charisma Magazine.  It was published Christmas Eve.  You can link to the site or read the text below. We're on the road and making home as we go.

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As I sit down to write, my faithful little laptop computer is one of the few things I own that is not in a box, a bag, or the give-away pile. It’s moving time, that unsettling transition when every closet must be emptied, every cabinet scoured, when there is no chair left to rest on and we bump over trunks and suitcases and dismantled furniture. I’m paralyzed by a cracked glass: useable, so keep, or damaged, so toss? My son’s yearbooks made the cut; the shoes the dog chewed did not.

As I suppose most humans do, I resist transition, and hope to make the chaos as short-lived as possible. And yet there is an uncomfortable awareness that most of the best stories of God’s mercy and grace happen to people off-balance, people in-motion, people who are shaken out of one place and way of life and set in process to another. Since Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden, we are a race of wanderers longing for stability.  Noah and family, Sarah and Abraham, Joseph, Moses and Zipporah, Joshua, Jonah, Rahab, Ruth and Naomi, Daniel and his friends, Mary and Joseph.  Even Jesus had less lair than a fox; and his followers scattered to the winds as storms of persecution struck. Though the prophets and poets sing of the vine and fig tree, very few get to both live a life both rooted in earthly place and time, and central to the coming of the Kingdom.  Maybe Solomon, but the exception may prove the rule.

Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I packed up a rented house in Baltimore, snapped an 8-month-old into a cotton onesie, and boarded a plane for Uganda. And we’ve been living the paradox of creating home and embracing journey ever since.

I say paradox, because I have found most of the things worth believing require the faith to hold onto two truths that appear contradictory on the surface. Creating home is deeply embedded in our DNA. As soon as we had a cement floor, a mud-brick wall and a tin roof, I was pulling out fabric for curtains and modifying traditions from our childhoods to our new normal on the equator. From rigging car speakers to a battery for music to killing cockroaches, we were intentionally and grittily laboring to create a space where our family would feel they belonged. Sure we had to hide under beds during rebel raids a few times, but mostly we just lived, and the more normal days of laundry and visitors and work and laughter one passes in a place, the more at home we felt. God surely smiles upon those labors.

And yet . . . all that effort to make a new home cannot preclude the embrace of journey. After 17 years in Uganda, we were asked to move to Kenya, and then a new place in Kenya, and now ironically we find ourselves packing up and heading back to where we started. But only temporarily, the horizon beyond six months is completely obscure. And even in the most settled spans, we have always been aliens and strangers, ever stumbling with language and insight. And even if we had somehow figured all that out, the settled arrival remains elusive as kids grow, families change, jobs evolve, friends come and go. The truth is that this life is a reflection, and a dim one at that, of our final true home and that we are continuously in motion towards a new heavens and new earth.

Home and journey are both worthy goals. We seem to need a measure of both for spiritual health. We come from home and head to it, and we reluctantly admit that most of what we learn about God’s faithfulness and power occurs in between. Comfort and routine might rob us of knowing God deeply. Periodically by mercy, we are wrenched away from order and set out in the desert.

So, deep breath, here we go again, off-kilter and unsure of most things. Except this: the God who called Abraham and Moses and Rahab and Mary out of their homes and onto the journey goes with us. So ultimately the paradox resolves into this tabernacle-in-the-wilderness-party: home cannot be taken away by journey. Praying you sense the reality of God with you, the paradox of home on the road.

J.A. Myhre

Author of the Rwendigo Tales, doctor, mom, who loves to put down home roots and just set back out on the open road.

Representatives of the three other families with whom I grew up, for the first major Advent traditional gathering in ?a decade or more.