frozen chickens

When we moved to Bundibugyo, we joked that we would stay here until frozen chickens came to Nyahuka.  This was a way of gauging development:  a place with electricity, and enough development that there were people around who were willing to pay for their chicken to arrive dead, plucked, and in a bag rather than running out the door.  It was also a way of saying, we may stay here forever, because the idea of a shop with a freezer seemed impossibly remote, and by the time it came there would be other needier places to go.  Well . . . . drumroll . . . the power lines which we've watched go up this year, are, as of today, CARRYING ELECTRICITY.   Scott just came back from dropping friends off post-dinner, and announced that the transformer is humming and AN ELECTRIC LIGHT IS SHINING IN NYAHUKA.  Amazing.  Hard to imagine or predict all the changes this will bring.  We aren't leaving yet (!) but the frozen chickens can't be far behind.

Proud Parents

RVA is off to a stellar start in this year's soccer season.

We are very, very thankful for Luke and Caleb's opportunity to play on the teams this year, but

it is a sacrifice and a loss to have hear their reports on the games from a distance. There is nothing Scott would love more than to be on the sidelines watching and cheering his boys on.

We are scheming if it might be possible for him to get to a game, but it is two days travel each way. We'll see...

For now we're thankful to Greg, one of Luke's dorm mates who's learned how to handle Luke's camera quite well.

first call

One of the important strategies for CSB to move into the second decade of existence will be to hire a fully qualified and spiritually alive Ugandan Head Teacher.  This has been the goal since the beginning, and on the priority list for years, but now the time is right.  A Head Teacher (HT) who understands this school system and has managed other schools will not struggle in the same ways we missionaries have done.  And a HT who manages the bulk of the school's day to day operations will free missionaries to focus on long-term vision, discipleship, staff development, extra-curriculars.  In our recent meetings we affirmed our commitment to CSB as a mission, and affirmed our readiness to take this important step.  Scott chairs a search committee and made fliers to be forwarded through board members, consultants, church leaders, community leaders.  

Today we got our first phone call from an interested applicant.

This is our A#1 prayer request for the next two months.  It is the top request we gave to the WHM board when they met this year.  It is the main thing we asked our churches to pray about.  That God would provide a man or woman with the professional excellence, character, spirituality, leadership that will make CSB a place where the Kingdom comes.  

shepherds

We've felt a bit like beat-up-sheep lately, walking through dangerous valleys.  On Friday we had two good reminders that we are not shepherd-less.  First, a kind, sensitive, encouraging email from the pastor of our main supporting church.  This smallish congregation faithfully prays for us by name every single week in their service, and gives us a level of financial support few mega-churches would match.  We know we are loved there, but it was nice to read it in an email, too.  The same evening our local pastor and elder came over for dinner with their wives.  We see them as partners in mission, and wanted to bring them up to date after Paul and Ward's visit, and dispel some rumors they had been hearing about the mission.  They prayed for us, and then did so again publicly in church this morning.  We are in a privileged and unusual position of prayerful support in two continents, of sharing our lives and dreams and struggles with wise people in many places (WHM leaders, family, supporters, and local friends and colleagues).  As it says at the end of "It's a Wonderful LIfe" :  no man is a failure who has friends.  Amen.

One blood, groping for the Nearness

Today's sermon came from Acts 17.  Paul's sermon in Athens is a pretty amazing example of crossing culture and presenting God.  We are all of one blood, all looking for the same thing.  But we grope in the dark, worshiping what we do not know.  Yet God is near, all around us, findable.  He does not overwhelm but leaves humans to seek and choose.  

Musunguzi preached on the same pattern.  He talked about how Africans, like ancient Greeks, approach the unseen spiritual world with shrines and ceremonies, seeking what they do not know.  It is rare to hear someone describe witchcraft as a first-hand witness, but he did, telling stories of the clan shrine to the ancestors that he visited regularly with his family, offering a rooster as appeasement to the spirits.  Later, a windstorm blew the huge tree which marked the shrine down.  And his father had to make a choice:  to rebuild, or to see the presence of a more powerful God in the wind.  He chose the latter, the unseen God whom we worship but can not manipulate.  Then Musunguzi boldly challenged the congregation to grope for God, to trust the Creator rather than resorting to witchcraft, or to education or money, the new idols of Africa (and everywhere!).  It was the kind of sermon an American can not preach with nearly the same authenticity.  

I left thankful for the one blood which makes us all seekers, for the shared journey to approach the unseen God, for the truth with which He gently awakens us to His presence all around us.  The "Unknown God" is Near, and Knowable.

wholeness

One thing I appreciate about African world-view is the sense of integration and wholeness, the acceptance of spiritual, emotional, relational and physical dimensions to illness and health.  I'm not very good at exploring and caring for all those axes, but I wish I was, and several opportunities have arisen this week.  

Case one: a neighbor family whom we have known for many years.  We got messages when we were on our trip that the wife was ill, attributed to malaria (as most things are initially) but with an uneven and incomplete recovery.  By the time she came to see Scott there was no definable physical illness, but he treated her for gastritis/ulcers and anxiety.  She told me that she needed to stay with her parents for a while, because her house and kitchen were "not good".  Hmmm.  I thought this was probably a typical marriage dynamic, women are relatively voiceless and use temporary separations or vague illness to draw attention to their needs.  But as it dragged on, I talked to the husband, and a deeper story came out.  The land they live on is owned by his uncle and others in the clan, not himself.  His first wife and child died while staying there.  This wife, even though a decade has passed, believes that the land-owner relatives are trying to curse her to get the family off the land so they can sell it for cash. She has run for her life.  He seems to find the fear legitimate, and wants to move, to land he owns nearby.  But that means building a new house, from scratch (mud and poles, actually).  Our medical advice?  Do not run away from curses that can not harm you because God is more powerful than greedy clansmen.  But do consider whether this is an opportunity to show love for your wife and kids, and choose a better environment for all of them, by moving.

Case two:  a friend of a friend, a lady I had never met, wrote an eloquent letter of desperation, then came to visit.  My friend confirmed that though she teaches at a primary school, she's rarely paid, and that this lady's husband does not care for her because of his alcohol problem.  The woman was concerned because her 1 year old had been ill three times recently.  She is not from Bundibugyo, and she believes people are against her as an outsider.  Her only recourse in the marriage, really, is to turn to her male relatives to put pressure on her husband's family (they are both from another district).  Her presumably ill child looked fine to me, perky and cute and babbling and walking.  Medical advice?  A small gift to help her with transport to go to her relatives, the only people who could really solve her problems.

Case three:  Another young woman who has come here to work, her tall thin frame and deeply black skin marking her as a Northerner and clear outsider.  Almost as soon as she arrived, she fell ill.  At first it seemed like a typical dysentery one might encounter in a new place, then possibly malaria or typhoid . . but as it dragged on into the second week, with lots of nausea and abdominal pain, we thought again of ulcers.  These have a bacterial component, but the stress which she feels here clearly contributes to the acid environment of her stomach in which bacteria can grow.  She is far from her family in an insular culture that excludes foreigners (even those from within Uganda), a sincere Christian trying to work in a corrupt health system, and a quiet woman trying to supervise recalcitrant staff.  Medical advice? Treat ulcers, but connect with other young women, offer friendship and food, and bring two ladies home after church to pray for her, who also welcomed her and thanked her for returning.

In all of these cases there were physical symptoms of illness, but a pill would not reverse the underlying social and spiritual and emotional discord.  Wholeness takes a listening ear, better language skills, more time, persistence in relationship.  Wholeness demands more of the healer. More than we have to give.  Trusting that in our weakness God's power comes.

small smiles

Kyomwenda's smile at six months of age is a small miracle, if any are small. He had come to us shortly after birth, unable to breast-feed and dwindling from hunger due to a congenital anomaly. Thanks to a team-effort to get him milk (purchasing from Pauline, accounting from Sarah, organization and documentation from Heidi, distribution from Nathan, donations from our supporters, and faithful care from his mom) he more than doubled his weight over the last five months. And last trip to Kampala, I was able to visit a spiff new mission hospital specializing in surgical care for children with disabilities called CoRSU (something like coordinated rehabilitation services for Uganda . . ). Amazingly, the program coordinator explained that under a special charitable funding program, cleft lip and palate repair is FREE. All we have to do is get him there, connect him with the services. I was so excited to bring this life-saving news back to Kyomwenda and his mom. Tomorrow they will travel to Kampala for the surgery that will enable him to feed, to talk, to smile unobtrusively, to lead a normal life. His family already received a dairy goat from the Matiti program, so he'll have milk to drink once he can actually use a cup!

And his story helps me reflect on an aspect of life here that I find satisfying: entering the battle, small-time. The struggles are local and tangible. One child whose mother abandoned him and whose grandmother has to scramble to provide gets connected to food, and good triumphs. One miniscule triplet is brought to us because we've taken an interest in her survival since well before birth, and her little spleen seems too large and her breath too labored, so we divert her to the lab and catch a potentially life-threatening malaria, hopefully in time for rescue. Another one-year-old fails to improve on two full weeks of treatment, prompting further investigations which reveal probable TB, and a life that would have ended in the next few months now should continue for decades. An 8-month-old shyly smiles on her second day of admission, and her tired HIV-infected mother breathes a sigh of relief when her child's test shows that the virus has not been transmitted thanks to treatment and grace. Another baby's subtle lip-smacking is recognized as a seizure, prompting a lumbar puncture (only after arguing to convince the lab to give a specimen container) which reveals cloudy amber fluid of the wrong sort coating her brain, and she begins treatment for meningitis instead of marching inevitably towards death. All of this really happened, today. There will be more tomorrow, more small stories of grace and healing, of averted disaster and renewed hope. One child here, another there. Small steps towards the Kingdom Come, slow progress towards the New Heavens and New Earth without empty stomachs, infected brains, lonely people, or gaping lips.

Some people need to legislate justice, some need to delineate diseases, some need to change the agricultural approach of a whole nation. Many need to manage programs, to plan projects and see them through. God has asked us, over these many years, to do a bit of all that. But mostly He asks us to just engage on the very specific, obscure, remote, unnoticed field of battle day by day, to struggle for one life at a time. Just because it's the right thing, and He cares about individual lives, even small ones. Just because one baby's life struggle in Palestine a couple of thousand years ago was a local focus of cosmic war, and the same danger and desperation that is repeated in a million little lives every day. Eugene Peterson writes about the necessary privilege of staying grounded in the reality of one unglamorous locale, with a view of how that hand-messy real-people service fits into a glorious behind-the-veil unimaginable drama.

So Kyomenda's smile represents all that: the final triumph of good over evil, foreshadowed in one baby at a time.

more thanks, for community

Last Thursday, Jack's bike was stolen right out from under our noses, parked under a car-port by our garage-like containers, in the dusk or early darkness WHILE the whole team was here and we made pizza.  When people left and Scott was locking up, it was missing.  Later some of us remembered Star barking a lot . . but frankly the chaos of the team and the nightly nature of the dog's noise made this warning go unheeded.  We decided not to go to the police, but to pray and tell a few friends and see what happened.  Jack's bike had been stolen once before years ago and a friend recovered it for us.  I think we did pray with some heart once again because it is an emotionally stressful time for Jack to miss his brothers and re-orient to school . . . and he uses his bike for all his transportation, so it is a pretty significant thing to lose it.

Today we were at Christ School when we saw our normally quiet pastor, Kisembo, running across the football field to call us.  I thought someone was sick, but soon we saw our neighbor and friend Buligi wheeling the lost bike into the gate!  It turns out that two teenage boys who are our neighbors climbed over the cow-pasture-fence and stole the bike.  They took it to a pretty distant village and tried to convince a man to find them a buyer.  The man noted that blue child-size multi-speed mountain bikes are not exactly common in Nyahuka, and became suspicious.  He took the bike straight to his LC1 (local elected leader) who made enquiries about where the boys lived, and called on Buligi.  Now we have the bike back, and the families of the two guilty parties in cooperation with local leaders made a plan to call all the kids of our area together and publicly punish the boys.  I don't want to see that (I suspect it will be a beating), and in fact we don't want the consequence to come from us, it is stronger coming from their own families, a community statement that stealing (even from the rich foreigners) is not right.  I think I'm most amazed at how this played out on our behalf, with care from our community, and pretty much zero input from us.  Maybe that seems small, but it gives us a sense of peace and belonging.

Perhaps because last week was so consumed by other issues, we appreciate the re-entry into more community this week.  This evening we were delighted when our "grandson" Arthur visited with his dad Ndyezika and demonstrated his crawling and pulling-to-a-stand skills, as well as his dimples.  Then he was joined by Melen and Sophia (the late Dr. Jonah's sister) and their kids, so it was pretty raucous for a good while with bouncing balls and clacking blocks and babbling in many languages.  After dinner Scott tried to explain the whole concept of banks, investments, interest, and wise use of money.  Melen reminds me of the Proverbs 31 woman, who works early to late to care for her family with wisdom, dignity, and calm in the face of crippling grief.  Later Assusi came back from visiting another mutual friend, a nurse who is also coping husband-less with work and children and finances and survival.  These friends remind awe me with their courage in difficult life circumstances.  I'm honored to be part of their community, to offer a meal or an ear or just work alongside them as they cope in ways I don't think I could manage.

Tribute

A tribute to the leading hunger-fighter of our times, from today's Washington Post:

Norman E. Borlaug, 95, an American plant pathologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for starting the "Green Revolution" that dramatically increased food production in developing nations and saved countless people from starvation, died Saturday at his home in Dallas.  "More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world," the Nobel committee said in honoring him. 

Let us thank God for a tough Norwegian farmer-stock no-nonsense and hard-working hero who used science to save countless lives.  As I was doing rounds today on some pitiful kids, I was strengthened in my conviction that no child should die of hunger.  There are many diseases we can not reverse, but a simple lack of food is unconscionable.  And as thankful as I am for UNICEF milk and the generosity of our donors, agricultural improvements which percolate through the whole society over a decade or a generation give the best hope for real change.  And mental and spiritual changes which make those agricultural improvements possible (embracing hope, working cooperatively, living in stable relationship) are the real source of lasting development.  I'm thankful this evening for Dr. Borlaug and all those who follow in his footsteps.

Thankfulness

We had a chance to experience thankfulness from two sides this weekend.  First, as the thank-ers.  Team mate John came over about dinner time on Saturday night very distressed.  A few weeks ago he accidentally injured the cornea of his left eye when a metal shaving became embedded there after he was sharpening lawn-mower blades (a little recognized essential missionary task for remote stations with grass airstrips).  We were in Kenya then, and he ended up driving to Kampala where he received good but delayed care at Mengo Hospital.  The nature of the injury left him with a spot of blurred vision after the tiny fragment was removed, that may or may not improve.  So when he felt a similar irritating foreign-body sensation in his RIGHT eye last night, he was understandably upset, thinking it could be glass from a broken pitcher earlier in the day.  We could see an area of swelling of the conjunctiva, but no piece of glass.  Over the next hour or two with nurse Heidi and most of the team we (read Scott, I just held the flashlight) flushed with high pressure using a half litre of saline, took high-resolution photographs to blow up on the computer and see if we were missing something, PRAYED, anesthetized the eye surface and gently swabbed with a sterile q-tip, and flushed some more.  By this time it was pretty late, and we were all projecting worst-case scenarios of emergency MAF flights the next morning.  But even that looked bleak since the eye care in Kampala is at a hospital right smack in the middle of last week's violence and may not have been accessible.  These are the moments we realize we are hanging by a thread.  We have talked this week about God's strength in our weakness, and we were weak last night.  We could not see the piece of glass John felt, we did not have the proper equipment or experience, and even the means of connecting him to better care looked tenuous.  We sent John home to sleep hoping that God had miraculously removed the problem through our feeble efforts.  After he left we gathered and prayed again.  

So when he woke up feeling healed this morning, and looking almost normal on exam, we all rejoiced.  John's relief was giddy.  And after church a group of us gathered and prayed prayers of thanks--we are so quick to pray the desperation prayers, but forget to pray the thanksgiving when our worst fears are not realized.

We also had the rare privilege of being on the other side of the thankfulness relationship.  Among the many people who come and ask us for help with this or that problem, there was one who was a bit different--a man our age, a good friend, whom we respect highly, who has stood by us in some hard times ourselves.  He did not ask for a handout, but was in a desperate state for tuition for one son, and wanted to sell us his land.  Scott and I talked about it, and really felt led that this was not a time to draw the line, but rather a time to stand with someone as a friend.  We can not solve all his problems, but we could take on the university fees for two years for this one boy.  Scott told him carefully what we would commit to do, as a gift and not a land purchase that would impair his ability to survive,  and said it was not because we particularly believe in this kid, but because we appreciate his father's friendship with us.  I don't think Scott has ever quite experienced a similar reaction:  the man burst into tears and hugged and kissed him.  I think it was a measure of the anxiety and pressure men feel to provide for their children, and the unexpected nature of the gift.

I suppose the combination of events reminds us that we who have been forgiven much, given much, are called to generosity of spirit and of life.  When we live in a sea of need and demand, that is a difficult posture to maintain.  A daily discipline of thankfulness to God would probably help.  Pray for us to pursue that.