Redeeming Ebola: 19 years later, hope continues

In the Fall of 2007, nearly 20 years ago now, a brand new strain of Ebola virus crossed from the Ituri forest into the people of Bundibugyo. Our dear friend and medical colleague Dr. Jonah Kule, who had just completed his training to be the first doctor from our area in a generation, perhaps the third one ever, went into villages to investigate the reports of fatalities. He, and we, puzzled over negative screening tests and continued to cautiously consult and treat the mystery illness as samples reached further labs. The day the new virus was announced, he was already ill, and a few days later, he died. 

Dr. Jonah’s death was more than the loss of the hope of a desperately poor and undeserved district. He was a husband and father. He left behind five daughters and a wife, Melen, pregnant with a baby who turned out to be his only son. As we reeled from the tragic epidemic, our supporters generously poured their grief and support into two responses: the Dr. Jonah Memorial Leadership Fund that has enabled the training of nurses, doctors, nutritionists, public health workers serving Uganda. And the Kule Family Care Fund to ensure that all of his children would be educated. School fees are the primary concern of most parents and would have been impossible for his widow to pay. Remarkably, from a place and time where few girls finish high school, his daughters have all done so! The first is using her degree in business and management with a large avocado project, the second qualified as a lawyer, the third is a nurse-midwife, the fourth completed nursing training as well. The fifth, Sarah, just finished her secondary school and wants to apply to medical school herself. (Jonah, the little boy born months after his father’s death, is still in secondary school).

As we have left Bundibugyo physically due to cancer, we have not left spiritually or relationally. We remain committed to raising funds for Christ School Bundibugyo and BundiNutrition, Kingdom-bringing projects that remain. 

Last month in Uganda with Dr. Jonah's daughter Nurse-Midwife Magdalene (also a mother, married to another Dr. Kule from a neighboring district!)

Melen, the widow of the late Dr. Jonah, and Mbusa who helps her and us with all the ongoing projects, as we visited last month

We’ve rarely asked for any more contribution to the Kule Family Care Fund because the generosity of 2007-8 saw us through, but as we approach the 20-year mark, we are running low. Melen and her children are shining examples of the generational impact of justice and mercy. They continue to serve, and will do so for many years to come. The family care fund has seen six children nearly through university. Sarah, and potentially Jonah Junior, are intersections of visions to improve health care worker capacity and to honor our colleague by caring for his family. Their lives reflect God’s love for the world’s margins. If you’d like to refresh the Kule Family Care Fund with a one-time gift this year, or smaller annual or monthly gifts for the next 7, that will take us to the final graduation.

Hands capped, hands clapping

 I've been, literally, hand-capped for about 5 of the last 7 months. Two broken wrists,  the first one old-fashioned casted and the second one requiring a surgical plate and screws, then a thumb tendon rupture that required a transfer of a tendon from index finger to thumb .  . . I've had bandages and splints, plaster, fiberglass, molded plastic, velcro and fancy knobs and strings and slings, all restraining my hands. 

This has not been the most important or the most difficult part of the last year, by far. But it HAS made all the important and difficult parts more challenging. And, it's tiring to be on round 3. My current contraption actually does look like a plastic cap, so looking at it for the last week has brought the word "handicapped" to mind. The word came from a wagering game in the 1650s involving putting money into a hat or cap for betting, and evolved to imply putting at disadvantage or equalizing uneven chances in a competition. In the last century the concept spread from race horses to children with physical challenges, and in my lifetime seems to no longer be seen as fair or kind. 

Whatever term is used, the truth is: every human receives a unique set of human capacities, capped by genetics or histories or cruelty or injustice .. . and cheered on by clapping from family, community, governments, God. We are all in an every-changing story of breaking a bone and snapping a tendon  . . . or strength and dexterity building exercises and gifts. Right now my abilities to type, cook, dress, bathe, play the piano, drive a car, wash dishes, hold objects are significantly limited. And it's not hard to see that! My bulky braced hand is visibly impaired. Objects clatter loudly to the ground around me. I'm in a season of waiting (aren't we all).  Healing requires both grace (God's mercy in tendons reconnecting along stitched lines) and effort (PT/OT exercises). No guarantees how far either will take me. But as I sigh and look mournfully at this brace (that feels clunky and unwieldy, but is actually protective and a gift) . . . it's a good pause to remind all of us of the hidden truth.

post-op plaster and wrap, and our wood stove, two pics of survival.

Grateful for WV ortho care, and my companion through every broken bone . . .

We can't see the plethora of hand-capping events that shape other lives. But we can remember they are there, and clap for the small increments of hands creating and working all around us. 

Cheers from here to our teams all over East and Central Africa, where unfamiliar languages, dangerous roads, armed adversaries, drained budgets, protective exclusion, spiritual fears, abusive histories, and on and on, all cap the ease of living. Our teams and our communities deserve the celebratory reality-check, that feeding the hungry, healing the sick, speaking the truth, all shine in God's eyes. Schools like Christ School Bundibugyo are taking in their new class of students for the year, with parents anxiously gathering whatever they can to ensure their kids' thriving. Some Sergers are traveling hundreds of dusty miles this week to tell the good news in places that have never heard it. Others are staying put even though floods or wars or epidemics stalk uncomfortably close. Our partners are putting up with our mistakes 70x7 times and still going. Yesterday we made it to the end of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, and plodded back into "ordinary time".  

Certainly awards and contests and holidays get their share of the spotlight . . . but for today, let's clap for the ordinary.  People with their own unique stories of handi-capping, persisting anyway, for you are hands clapping. (Or hoping to clap if they are ever healed enough!).

Can we all pray this prayer of faith for 2026???

Please pray if for us.

Ordinary days, supporting extraordinary people from afar.

Prostest as lament; locating our story in God's

 Like many Americans who are people of faith, we've been pondering a Biblical framework in which the current story fits the big story of God's arc from "in the beginning" Gen 1 to "all things new" Rev 21. That is the daily work of "heeding, pouring, detouring", looking for truth and beauty in the reality we live through, investing our gifts and resources for the good of others, changing our plans to adapt to the constraints of life in time and space. 

This Chameleon was located in a story set in Rwendigo, but Luke re-located him in the icy story of Sago with his Christmas creation.

That's life. And how, we are all wondering, does that look in January 2026?

This morning one of my current reads focused on lament, and it gave me a location for much of what I see in Minnesota. Scott was born in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and his maternal roots come from the Norwegians and Swedes who settled on Minnesota farmland, people of faith and determination, tough and yet understated, who do what needs to be done. So we resonate with the 50 thousand marching in subzero temps to say: something is WRONG. Protest is a mass lament, a naming of broken systems, a resistance to harmful happenings. Lament acknowledges the gap between the goodness of God and the terrors of the world. When that many people lament together, physically, they provide a needed perspective that all is not well.  The Bible is full of people crying out to kings, to judges, to GOD, not accepting the status quo as right just because it's the status quo. Protest, lament, heeding what is happening, naming the sorrows, these are our calling.

And another read reminded me that all power is secondary to the rule of Jesus. Earthly rulers are derivative. Everyone answers eventually to God. There is no place that we are told to obey human governments IF they contradict God's ways. That is why the protests that eventually led to the abolition of slavery were largely located in Christian churches (though to our lasting sorrow, not all churches and not enough). Or why faithful Germans like Dietrich Bonhoffer stood against the holocaust (yesterday's remembrance). No government perfectly aligns with justice and truth, so "just obey" never absolves people of conscience. Current events are NOT as dire as slavery or holocaust, but they still require thoughtful believers to weigh their reaction. To live together, we have to compromise up to a line, and decide where that line is. For many believers, it is abortion. Or revoking citizenship for immigrants, or withholding food from the hungry or healthcare from the old, or other "love thy neighbor as thyself" summaries of the law. So expressing to our government that we expect constitutional protections to be respected by our military, AND by our customs and border patrols and immigration agents, is not ungodly. Pouring into the streets sometimes comes from an outpouring of love.

Lastly, we won't get this right. The quote that keeps coming back to me this week is: "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. " (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago). Every human (even the ICE and BCP agents who fired fatal shots, and the protestors who "impeded" their wishes) contains the imprint of glory, the image of God's goodness. And every human is marred by evil, the evil of their own choices, the evil of their hard stories in a world that doesn't work for their good, and the evil of a malevolence that lurks to harm. No people are only good, or only bad. We try, we detour. We admit our own self-centered self-protective self-justifying hearts, and we forgive the same in others. The platform for this "truth and reconciliation" as Bishop Desmond Tutu showed us can be the family, the community, the legal system, the institutions that connect us. To listen to each other, to call out right and wrong, to choose to restore the threads that bind. 

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were humans who tried to do the right thing from all we can see, yet it cost them their lives. Their killers were humans who possibly believed they had the right to kill anyone who got in their way. Lamenting this state of affairs, holding the policy-makers who led us into this situation of January 2026 to account, and humbly examining our own hearts as we seek to build bridges to others, these are all holy occupations for God's people in any country. We usually ask readers to pray for our teams in Africa, where injustice and death seem more common, where the concentration of power and money in the hands of too few is even more problematic. But we add prayers for America too. Prayer is a real moment, not a platitude, an action of putting the story of life into God's story of good. Re-orienting our priorities, and heeding the next step of pouring love and detouring plans. So let's pray.

Together, we can change the world.

Even ICE can be beautiful . . .

And speaking of prayer . . thanks for those who prayed my ruptured thumb tendon into a new story of surgical repair.

 preop to post op

The scars are incorporated into the story.

Epiphany, an ongoing season of eyes wide open

 'Til the season, of . . . epiphany, which has somehow come to mean a very individual big-idea insight, rather than a conspicuous manifestation of a reality. 

So in deference to the original meaning of the word, this is the season after Christmas, when magi traveled from Iran before it was being bombed, because their careful ongoing eyes-wide-open study of the nighttime sky led them to conclude a once-in-a-lifetime regime change for the known world had been set in motion by a royal birth west towards the Mediterranean. At extreme effort and expense, they mounted a caravan and spent weeks on the road towards a murky destination. And became the tangible moment that Christ's birth story's significance crossed borders, exploded to be relevant to all the nations, not just one.

"Heed" is a key word in this story. The tale starts in motion, because of attention. They had to heed the star-sign. Not everyone notices a new configuration of the galaxy-distant lights. Their awareness of the impending change, their finding a path they had probably never passed over, their questions of a bewildered court, were all active pursuits of opening their vision to new horizons, to the ancient truths taking new forms. 

"Pour" is another, upon arrival they showered Jesus' family with gifts that befit his kingly status. Heeding led to relinquishing. Precious metals, precious products, in an era where the spice trade and the gold trade were the mobile money and banking. These were not given out of an endless fringe of abundance, they were treasures they parted with to honor the occasion. Costly. Bestowed. Entrusted. 

"Detour" is the last key to the story. After heeding led to journey, and pouring led to treasures transferred . .. they were required to react to a changing scenario, to danger, to embrace a new path and plan. As Middle Eastern royal sages themselves, who studied and financed and acted . . they were perhaps more used to being in control than to being redirected. Dream-warnings needed heeding in the end, and they chose to NOT fulfill Herod's expectation of a return report, but to depart a different way.

The frozen river we cross to go to church

These wise humans set a pattern for our own millennia of post-Christmas wait for the baby to reign. 

Eyes open to heeding the ongoing work of God, which is often obscurely messy and disguised at the weakest margins, we begin 2026. Yesterday a long meeting with our leader in Uganda, trying to discern the complications of contradictory interpretations of our tax status, mourning severe illness and loss in friends we've known for decades, weighing out how to be faithful. Then this morning a letter from that team that fills the picture in with lives impacted. Same in Kenya, and Burundi, and all our Area. Very real challenges, and very real goodness. Seeking wisdom to heed God's merciful, true, calling.

From Boas Opedun, in Uganda

So we pour out hours in calls, meetings, emails, documents, payments, agreements and ideas. Not our favorite way to work, but the season's cost nonetheless. Most of our days stretch in an office, with some punctuation of distant meetings we must travel to, or more frequent medical appointments to attend, or family issues to be present for at last. And as we pour out this phase of our lives, we ask others to do the same, raising money for the very similar magi purposes of blessing babies who face danger, by BundiNutrition and Christ School support. 

Scott presenting at a Serge leadership meeting two weeks ago

And detour is the name of the game in 2025, spilling all the way through 2026 too. We wanted to be Area Directors who were present with our 11 teams in 6 countries, controlling our caravan's plans. Instead we are reacting to death threats and finding new paths. As are all at some level. The world spins into 'might makes right' and into the 'wealthiest drain the poorest', with fewer of the restraints that have limited evil through our lifetimes. Adapting to new road blocks and new open doors becomes essential.

    

At the Serge office, sporting the coat Julia made me for Christmas

Epiphany's root is the word "shine". Shine on, display, come into view. A star is best seen in the darkness of night. May Jesus' love, truth, hope, all be best seen in us shining our small lights in 2026.