CSB 1, Bumadu Seed 0

It was not a pretty game. We were the better team, but we played like
we expected to lose. Mentally, the team was NOT there. But as the
sun turned the last shreds of western cloud into a magenta pink tower,
the ref blew the final whistle, and we were through to finals.

Visitors, partners, blessing, hope

One of the delights of RVA is connecting to a community of incredibly interesting, committed, diverse, creative, godly people, and pulling some of them into Bundibugyo as we go back and forth to Kenya. Last term as Luke and Caleb returned from RVA they brought a handful of senior boys with them to visit. This term they came with a whole family, one of their teachers. Alex H took a sabbatical from his job as a professor of computational biology at Duke (yes, he's pretty brilliant) . . . and because he and his wife Melissa (a teacher) attend the same church in Durham that sent us the Barts more than a decade ago, they corresponded briefly in their pre-sabbatical time with us about working at CSB. In God's providence it wasn't the best time in head-teacher transition to host short term missionaries, but they ended up, of all places, at RVA. God had many plans and we are only a small sideline in their life, but from our perspective this was a huge out-of-the-blue unexpected gift. Alex coached Caleb's JV soccer team, and taught Luke to love AP Biology. Melissa invited them over for meals. They were a huge factor in making this a great year for our boys. So before they returned to the US to complete their sabbatical with family visits, they decided to bring their kids out here and see CSB for themselves and as representatives of Blacknall, the church that funded a solid proportion of the dorm construction there.

We had a delightful few days, the kind of kindred spirit connection that comes through common friends (the Barts) and common experience (living in Africa) and common vision for the Kingdom and education and family. A whirlwind tour of a few Bundibugyo beauty-biology spots (Ngite and the Hot Springs/Ituri rainforest), as well as our work and life. But the culmination was a celebration at CSB of the partnership the Barts forged between the church and school over all those years. The students threw together a program of song and dance and worship, speeches and welcomes. We splurged for a special meal of meat for all (!). There was much laughter and enthusiasm as a group of about a dozen students very capably danced the muledu, a traditional dance for circumcision ceremonies. We believe it is so important for CSB, as the place where kids are being exposed to the wider world, to affirm their cultural roots as valid and honorable. Alex thanked the school for their welcome and affirmed the joy of seeing in bricks and cement the fruits of their fundraising years ago. At nearly the end of the evening, a massive driving-rain cold-front storm moved in. The rain on the tin roof of our assembly area made speeches impossible to hear. After a few minutes, some students spontaneously began to beat drums and sing worship songs. And what followed was a solid hour of pouring rain and pouring praise, of dimming light and raising voices, as the world turned to wet darkness the students danced and sang and sang, with all of us joining in.

Dinner was about two hours late, but that's all part of the Africa experience, right? As we left the school about 9 pm, the full moon's rays seeped through the clouds towards more rain in the west, and we saw the only moonlit rainbow I've ever seen. The promise that God will build and not destroy, that hope remains, that life will go one, was poignant in the silver light of night.

Whom are you seeking?

Passion week begins, the retelling of the story, the stepping back through time to remember.  

This week we studied John 18 in our team Bible study, the arrest of Jesus in the garden.  He asks, twice, "Whom are you seeking?"  

At first it looks like a rhetorical question, one with an obvious answer, one meant to challenge the guards.  But later, in another garden, he asks Mary the same thing (ch 20).  Whom are you seeking?  And upon further reflection, we see this is the essence of all questions.  Whom are you seeking?  We are all seeking something, and most of what we seek stems from broken relationship, broken identity, broken purpose.  So on the night of all nights, one of Jesus' last questions is this one.  And on the morning of all mornings, it is again among the first words from his mouth.  

Not a sermon on whom we should seek.  Not a challenge to the wrongness of His arrest.  Not a forceful assertion of the truth.  Instead a last chance for change.  Jesus poses the question to give Judas, the guards, Mary, us, the space to consider our own hearts.  

Which, if you think of it, is pretty incredible.  God withdraws, covers, suppresses His irrefutable power, in order to give us a moment to ponder and consider.  Which, if you think again, is the essence of prayer.  God has ordered the universe in such a way that we have to actually think about whom we seek, what we want, and ask for it.  Seek it.  Instead of just giving and directing, He waits.  He listens.  

Jesus asks whom we seek . . but he has also just emerged from the human experience of wrestling with the same question himself in the hour before the guards arrive.  He has struggled in the garden with a hidden God, been given the dark space in which to search and pour out his own heart to His Father.  He has acknowledged God's limitless power and love, he has asked for the cup to pass, but he has also come to terms with his commitment to drink the bitter dregs to the end if it is God's will.  He could have sought power, recognition, justice, a quickly-ascendent time-bound kingdom.  But instead he sought God, even at the cost of everything.  If God the Father wanted Jesus to have that space to choose in prayer, how much more so us.  

And so every day, over and over, let us take the time to reflect on whom we seek.  And if it becomes clear that the answer is God, then let us pour that request to Him too, which is prayer.  And as we enter that garden of reflection and asking, over and over, I believe our hearts will gradually become more the type that chooses the cross and the glory of God.

CSB 2, Semliki 1

Today's first quarterfinal match was a replay of last year's finals, Christ School vs. Semliki. Last year we had a heart-breaking defeat, and then Semliki, who qualified to represent the district, never even ended up playing any games in the national tournament because too many of their player were disqualified (too old, no longer in school, repeating grades, that kind of thing) for them to field a team. Our last two games of the regular tournament group-stage play last week were ugly victories, the kind where we win but the play is erratic and uncontrolled. So it was a bit nerve-wracking to go into today. However the CSB team came out strong, trapping, passing, dominating, showing team work, keeping cool. Both of our goals were scored by our own "son" Mutegheki Joshua, and were textbook. I am so proud of him, and so happy for him. He gave me a big hug after the game, which is not culturally typical at all, and a measure that this is a BIG deal. He almost didn't get to come back to CSB, but God had other plans for him. This moment of success will carry him through a lot of the inevitable grief to come in his life, which has already known plenty (both parents dying, for starters). Jack managed to get both goals on film, one above and one below.

The victory was even more remarkable in light of the fact that we played more than half the game one man down. A Semliki player blatantly fouled one of ours late in the first half, and the ref called it, but as he was whipping out his yellow card to book Semliki our CSB victim struggled to his feet and slapped the Semliki player. Red card. Out of the game. Foolish temper. And remarkable for the fact that CSB actually SCORED all three goals . . . the only one against us was a flubbed pass by our own player back to the keeper.

Weds will be semi-finals, and finals next Saturday. Only the winners progress, there are no second chances, so we are pulling for the best! OK I try to think that every boy out there wants a chance, and every parent longs for their kids' success. But really deep in my heart I believe our team has worked ten times as hard as any of the others, and I'm unabashedly rooting for victory.

must-reads

For heart-felt reality and worship coming from adversity:  Scott' Day in Kampala, which inexplicably got relegated to two days ago several posts below.

For sheer excitement and a few hard lessons:  Scott Will being chased by buffalo, from the side bar go to blog and go down a post or two.

last ride?

Sticky evening air, dust rising from the road, shouts of children
running through the cocoa groves, fathers relaxing in the sling-back
reed Bwamba chairs holding a toddler on their knees or playing cards
or drinking, groups of women peeling matoke or sorting through cassava
leaves, girls sloshing water in jerry cans, more school-boys with
their mocking hellos, break-neck barreling motorcycles, friends
calling "Jack-a, Jack-a" or "muka-Scott (Scott's wife)". I answer
some particularly nasal semi-English greetings in Lubwisi, and the
little boys chasing behind my bike call to onlookers (in Lubwisi) "she
doesn't speak English, she only knows how to speak Lubwisi!" Guess
they missed the point. Hazy rose horizon, sweat, pumping up hills,
gritty teeth. Evening bike ride.

Perhaps my LAST evening bike ride with my youngest.
1. Graded road = speed = momentum = danger.
2. Male chromosomes = risk-taking = ride down the hill with hands in
the air = fear in my heart as Jack sprawls across the road. He gets
up, unhurt, rides on, the only casualty the phone I entrusted to his
pocket. Oh well.
3. 12 = last victim of puberty in our family = muscle and speed = me
left gasping behind the child I used to wait for.

It's a new era in parenting, the mom-left-behind era. I'm not quite
ready for the rocking chair . . but realistically I'm now the smallest
and weakest in the family, the slow-down factor. Good thing they
still like my cooking.

on bugs and concentration

The pace for the day began at 3 am when I was awakened by Star making strange, half-whine half-snuffle noises that I recognize as distress. And as I rolled out of bed with my flashlight (Scott went to Kampala or I would have definitely woken HIM up to check on our safety) and walked outside, I diagnosed the problem as sharp stings attacked my bare feet. Biting ants had invaded Star's dog house space, and though she had stretched the leash she's on at night to the max, she could not escape them. I released her and she shot into the house, where I helped her get some of them off and sprayed, and she ensconced herself in Caleb's room for the rest of the night.

That pretty much set the tone for the day. We may build with cement and connect to electricity, but this is still an equatorial jungle. The insects rule.

By morning the invasion had formed an orderly line running less than a meter from our door. I stepped over it and noticed that there was a lot of debris on the side-porch bougainvillea-covered patio. Debris interspersed with tiny grey bird feathers. Then I looked up and saw that the line of mpali was marching up the trunk of the bougainvillea, into the branches, and swarming itself around a nest of presumably ring-necked doves that like to live there. A seething mass of ants had devoured the birds. Which happened the one time we tried to have pet parrots. . . Nature in Africa is not for the faint of heart. Thankfully my neighbor Saulo who does yard-work for us is quite competent with ant-killer and a panga, so I left him to deal with the mess and went down to the hospital.

Patient 1: a very very ill, anemic, 8-year-old boy, who desperately needed a blood transfusion, but we were out of his type. Phone calls, some small money to help him get to Bundibugyo. As his mother hurriedly picked up their mattress and things and left, I began on the next bed, Patient 2: a very confusing and unusual case of massive ascites in another young boy. While I began to see him, Heidi noticed a few roaches left behind from Patient 1's departure, and very reasonably reached into the store room to pull out a can of Bop, the insecticide spray. None of us could have imagined the horror movie result. The three modest roaches died. But the spray disturbed the dozens, maybe a hundred or more, other roaches that were hiding behind beds, in cabinets, in dark spaces all around. Suddenly there were 3, then 5 then 10, then 30. Huge ones. Flying ones. Scurrying ones. I keep trying to examine my patient which is not easy when an occasional nuclear-powered roach tries to crawl up my leg. Nathan arrives and tries stomping them out. Nurses and patients are laughing and stomping here and there, not nearly as perturbed I'm sure as Heidi and I were. I'm listening for subtle heart sounds but rather distracted by the 3-inch roach crawling across my patient's sheet. Hitchcock should have had film running.

And it kept going with that whole area of the ward. I was reminded of a video game. We aren't too high tech but Jack plays one on my phone where he's trying to knock things out of the sky while simultaneously being shot at. The idea is to focus. Good prep for this kind of medicine I guess.

And at the end of the day, Nathan got his turn to test his focus. I was helping him learn to do a lumbar puncture on a very ill neonate (15 year old mom delivered at home then after a week came in because the baby cries so much). As he's about to put the needle in, the baby shoots a warm orange stream of stool explosively out his bottom. Quick-reflexes, Nathan jumps back. We re-clean and re-glove, and he's through the skin on try 2 when another patient bursts into the treatment room with a convulsing child, and absolutely no qualms about getting right in our way. Heidi thankfully moves them over to the side and administers valium just as thick yellow purulent CSF fluid begins to eke out of the needle. Not what you want coating your brain, and we are not surprised the baby cries a lot . . .

Bugs, seizures, streams of diarrhea, and other hazards not withstanding, we finally finished the day relatively intact. Until I got back home to be informed that though the mpali are now gone (many dead, thousands and millions more diverted) one small problem remains: a cobra came out of the cocoa behind our house and got away before they could kill it.

poisonous blessing

Can a snake bite be a blessing?  Saw it happen this week.  A little 5-year-old boy woke up crying beserkly in the night, and his neck began to swell.  Parents noted what looked like fang marks at the base of his skull.  Snakes can enter mud/thatch homes fairly easily at night, seeking warmth from a kid sleeping on a mattress on the floor, then he turns and the snake panics and bites.  Most envenomations here cause local swelling but are survivable. In this case we noted that his sister, sitting by him in the hospital, looked rather stick-limbed.  We asked mom to bring her records.  She turned out to have sickle cell anemia and be moderately malnourished, qualifying for Plumpynut.  Then since she was positive we tested our little snake victim, who it turns out also has sickle cell disease.  So five days later the family is leaving with a healed and perky 5-year old, but more importantly two kids enrolled in ongoing care, getting daily medicine, and getting nutritional supplements.

I suspect there is a deep underlying truth here.  Joseph told his jealous, plotting brothers that what they meant for evil, God turned to good.  I'm afraid we often live in the moments of post-snake-bite distress, and fail to see the sure, slow good being accomplished.  Severe mercies, poisonous blessings.

a day in Kampala

Scott here. While Jennifer is at home battling the roaches, snakes, and biting ants, I'm here in Kampala merely to run a few errands and pick up Luke and Caleb at Entebbe airport tomorrow as they return from RVA for their post-term break.

Ahh, to escape the relentless demands of Bundibugyo for Kampala, the big city with cappuccino, air conditioning, malls and a movie theater. Or not.

Kampala is a city of 3 million people and maybe 5 million cars, motorcycles, and buses? Seems that way, anyway. My battleground: the gnarly gridlocked streets. My objective: passport pages, dog vaccine, annual park passes, grocery shopping, and a truck tune-up. Not a glorious life-saving agenda, but mundane stuff nevertheless which needs to get done.

Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, graced our capital with his presence for the past two days. As usual, the elite live and move at the expense of everyman. Road closures all over the city facilitate easy movement of the big dogs while every intersection chokes to stagnation. Walkers outpace cars—easily. The only way to really make progress in this situation is to hop on a "boda-boda" motorcyle. These scooter taxis weave between the clogged cars, zoom wrong-way down on-coming traffic, and jump onto sidewalks in order to speed their passengers towards their destinations. Some say that their proliferation is a reflection of the failure of the public transport system. Jonah always warned me against riding them. "You're not likely to die while riding one… only get maimed for life." That statement came after his trauma rotation in Mulago Hospital where the orthopedic service runs something akin to the civil war era practice of hacksaw amputations. So, I advise my team against riding them. Do as I say, not as I do. Today, with 2 days of errands to do in one day and my truck in the garage, I rode several miles through the horn- honking, mud-splashing, dog-eat-dog, might-makes-right, pot-holed roads of the "City-of-Seven Hills" on several—and lived to tell the tale.

My first stop- the USA Embassy. Their progressive "on-line appointment system" nearly thwarted me, but I planned a week ahead and got the last appointment available during the two days I am in Kampala. I was thankful and snatched it up. Now with our frequent RVA-related trips to Kenya and the fact that all the East African states use full-page stickers for their visas, our passport pages are eaten up in a hurry. Jennifer's passport is down to only three free pages. With a trip to Kenya and then on to Greece in May for our Triennial WHM Retreat coming up --she needs more pages. I planned ahead enough to get the appointment, but did not anticipate that I would be sent away from the embassy because Jennifer was not present to sign the application herself to GET MORE BLANK PAGES. It's not like I was trying to change her name or something…all we wanted was more blank pages. So, now we must return a day early on our way out in May, spend an extra nights lodging expense so that she can get do what? Get more blank pages. Sigh.

Next—five miles across town to the university small animal clinic where I got vaccine for our dog. I could tell by the way that they looked at me that they were prepared to refuse to give me the vaccine until I pulled out my handy-dandy collapsible cooler with a pre-frozen ice pack inside. This time the preparation resulted in achieving the desired objective. Score.

Next…the park passes. We pay a flat annual fee for special passes which allow us unlimited access to every national park in Uganda. The tricky part—I only remembered this task at midday. The application requires passport photos from each applicant. Without any of the family along, I resorted to hacking family photos from my laptop. So, back across Kampala to the guest house to grab the computer, cut and paste some head shots into a one-page 8x10 for printing, go back across town to a photo finisher, wait for the photos to print and then across town to get to the Uganda Wildlife Authority before closing. Non-traditional passports accepted, application completed, US dollars in my wallet enough. Done. Made it back across town before the garage gate closed and got our truck, now ready for another 3000 bruising kilometers before the next tune-up.

This morning these mundane errands seemed to require a Herculean effort to overcome the life-sucking traffic jams and the finger- wagging bureaucrats in pursuit of my ordinary goals. Though my spirit felt like it was ready to boil over from anger at midday, this evening I have returned to the psalms and the sacred sorrows there. It is where we see adversity acknowledged and articulated…and eventually set aside as it is put in perspective. The "vav"—the signal of the switch in gears from lamentation to worship—signifies the heart acknowledgement that everything pales to nothingness compared to the living God. Just wish I could see that big picture a little easier when I'm in the thick of it all…

solitude and silence

In Bonhoeffer's book about Life Together, solitude and silence provide the context for the inward disciplines of meditation and prayer and intercession for others.  Certainly our team has prioritized the "day alone" in new ways in the last few years thanks to the encouragement of Donovan G, who is a minister-to-missionaries spiritual encourager.  We fast from busy-ness to create the space to focus on God, to listen to His written Word, to rest in His presence.  But I was very curious as to how this concept would translate cross-culturally in a place where few people have their own mattress, let alone room or house.  Where ancestors and descendants give life meaning and context, where clan and community reign supreme.  

Not surprisingly, few people here spend intentional time alone, ever.  Perhaps they might be left in bed on occasion during a sickness, but even then family and neighbors do their best to be omnipresent.  A few staff had experience of "quiet time" for prayer.  But mostly they expressed deep concern that to withdraw communicates pride, conflict, anger, superiority, separation.  In a culture where living spaces are communal and crowded, families huge, villages huddled, closed doors or shut shutters rare, where sharing is the highest moral value, and the group affords most of identity, where people prefer to do almost everything together, a person who goes off alone for hours is highly suspect.  Either he is eating/enjoying something he doesn't want to share, or he is passively aggressively punishing the group.

So what do African Christians do with Jesus' example of early morning mountain-top prayer time alone?  Of withdrawing to the desert to struggle with God?  

That's a question for them to answer.  I suspect that it is a bit like our team.  Until there is a critical mass of people who affirm the value of solitude and silence, few individuals will risk being known for it.  But eventually it will become a part of the rhythm of life in community, perhaps with different cultures having different patterns and proportions of time alone and time together, but all having some devotion to both.