Can you go home again?

Without a doubt, the 17 years we lived in Bundibugyo were the core years of our life: the longest we've lived any one place, more than half our marriage, the bulk of our child-raising years, abundant milestones and memories, deep friendships, the most near-death experiences and crazy views of God's mercy, a lot of grief and more joy.

So it is with not a trivial amount of trepidation that one goes back.

Yes, we've been here regularly for a few days or a week, but this stint feels different.  This time we're based here until at least May, and possibly longer. We're back to marathon pace not sprint, taking time to settle and ponder and pray. Changes abound.  The population has more than doubled since we came 25 years ago.  The town of Nyahuka is sprawling and increasingly urban. Traditional compounds have subdivided into smaller and smaller plots with home after home, almost all now with mbati (corrugated metal) not grass roofs, local-brick walls about to surpass the traditional mud-and-wattle construction.  Motorcycles galore buzz and swarm, piki-taxis for short trips. The road is an obvious game-changer, having made the rough places plain, leveling mountains and filling valleys and tying the district together top to bottom with a dignified strip of pristine pavement. Truck after truck, sedan cars, and the aforementioned clouds of pikis, pedestrians, cows.  Then there is the electricity--power lines infusing sound systems with pulsating music all night long echoing up the once quiet river ravine. Today Scott went up to our roof here to check the solar panels, only to realize there are none--the team now depends on the national grid electricity. With urbanization comes a shift towards anonymity, though we still get called out regularly by name. Economically the shift to a cocoa-economy means less food production, more importing of staple foods and market dependence. With cocoa-money and rising population, the number of schools has increased at least ten-fold. Former teachers from CSB started another secondary school, and former teachers from that school another one. The bedrock network of public primary schools seem to be dwindling in students as privately run primary schools also proliferate, many with fewer resources than the old government institutions but selling hope. A few years ago everyone ran to Super Primary; now it's Babungi's Primary, next is anyone's guess. And the cell phones! Passing young people holding their hands over their screens for shading the display in the 95-degree blaze of sun is a common sight.

And yet . . if we get off the main road, so much is the same. The musical rhythm of the tonal Lubwisi feels familiar even if meaning is just out of reach. Women still sit around three-stone fires cooking or peeling matoke, talking about what passes by. Children still yell "Mujungu mujungu mujungu" in a frenzy, or "I am fine I am fine I am fine", then quietly stand and reply when greeted.  Banana trees and cocoa groves, goats staked to graze, the jagged outline of the mountains, the powerful pounding of the sun, the fermented whiff-of-chocolate smell of drying cocoa beans, the background trills of a plethora of bird species.

And the people, the generational continuity of familiar faces, that is the main thing that makes this place home. Can you go home again? No, if by home you picture the place that was in your heart. We have changed and so has everything around us, and going backwards is not the trajectory of pilgrimage. This world holds no lasting home for any of us yet . . . but we are all creating truer and truer shadows of the ultimate New Heavens New Earth reality of home. So paradoxically, the other answer is yes. You CAN go home again to people in whom you have invested life, to a place which you have fought for, as long as you are willing to press on in that pilgrimage towards the next stage in making it more like Heaven rather than dragging it back to more-like-memory comfort.

It's harder to be a learner and off-balance in a place that was once your base of stability. But it's not impossible. So here's to a 2019 of walking by faith.  Prayers welcome. Enjoy the collection of snapshots of what it's like below.

Dr. Ammon worked closely with us for many years as a Clinical Officer, then received a scholarship to medical school in the fundraising done after Dr. Jonah's death. He is now medical superintendent of the hospital, and he and Dr. Marc have been working on this about-to-be dedicated newborn unit!

Basiime one of our foster sons, now with two lovely daughters, librarian at CSB!

Evening pizza at our old house with the team.

This oven is still going strong after 15 years of countless pizzas.

Another foster son John, on his son Jeremiah's 4th birthday, with wife Paula.

Team and CSB staff beginning a prayer walk, circling around to every area of the school to pray over it for the year about to start. We sang as we walked between prayer spots, and it felt like the Israelites marching around Jericho! 

Newly painted classroom block, thanks supporters!

How we spend most of our time, visiting people and showing pictures of our kids whom they know . . this is in Chris Kenobwa's home

Our old house is still the team meeting spot.

Another happy reunion with Juliet, who married another foster son, so thankful for her thriving children.

Stopped in the market by a former CSB classmate of Julia's.

Thanks for welcoming us home Bundibugyo.  We're in this together.

Good News from Bundibugyo: CSB Ranks #1 in District again

Schools in Uganda are made or broken purely on the basis of the end-of-high-school O-level standardized test results.  The tests themselves are demanding weeks-long sets of papers in 10 subjects, objective and essay format. Students take them in the final month of their Senior Four year. There are about 3200 testing centers representing probably up to 5000 schools in this nation of 43 million people. The schools are ranked based on the percentage of students whose scores put them in "division one" or "first grade", the highest scores.  Only the centers who have at least some students in division one or two are counted, bringing the denominator down to 2440 (that's a single school per center for the best, but often multiple schools per center for mid-level and lower schools).

(Beginning of Term Staff Meeting)

(Repainting classroom blocks)

(Staff and Myhres on Retreat)

I believe that each year since we had Senior Four students (2002), Christ School has ranked first in Bundibugyo.  Each year we hold our breath--was this year's class not quite up to it? Could corruption sink us? Could we fail? And like many years before, we praise God and thank the staff and clap for the students, as we see the good results again this year. We had four students score in division one. We had no failures. We had many division two's as well.  Our results put us #1 in Bundibugyo and #6 in the entire Western Region, behind a handful of very established schools in the much larger cities of Fort Portal and Kasese.  We are in the 12th percentile from the top nationally (meaning better than 88% of all centers in the country . . among the ranked schools, it would be higher if we used ALL schools to calculate the denominator).  In fact we are one of the only schools in the district to even have first or second grade results.

Each year new schools spring up, and parents flock to a cheaper alternative. Each year we beg them to consider their children's good.  Right in the center of Bundibugyo district we have a secure school, with dedicated staff, with high standards, with national-level results, at half the cost of similar schools outside the district.

But there is more here than test results. We have a school where we care about the heart. About integrity. About discipleship. About community service. About character. We have a staff who are embracing the latest research about how students best learn, in relationship. We have a school whose vision and mission are to equip and bless this entire district.

Success meets opposition, rumor, and destructive gossip all too often.  Please join Serge, World Harvest Mission Uganda, and the staff of Christ School Bundibugyo in praying for the safety and good of the 2019 student body.  Students begin arriving tomorrow. The last week has been a heavy push of planning, learning, meeting, organizing, painting, cleaning. Our newest apprentices on the team are even re-modeling the school kitchen for the massive scale of feeding hundreds. Pray that parents would invest their cocoa harvest in their children's education, that the fees would be paid on time, that we would each (parents and mission) uphold our commitments to this world-changing partnership.
 (cocoa drying by the road)

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.

Glad Tidings

This season has been, like many others before it, a full-scale plunge into the heights of reunion and reconnection and celebration and the depths of brokenness and risk and sorrow. In other words, just like life is supposed to be. While we are out in the night-fields metaphorically, juggling work and weariness, praying and communicating day and night about our Ebola-exposed colleagues in the DRC, the glory of the Lord has shined round about us in wonderful announcements that this world has been invaded by grace, that the stories we are living have plot twists towards happiness, that a beautiful force called love will prevail.

For us, that has been seen most clearly in Luke's Christmas-Eve proposal of marriage to Abby.

She said yes.

There are many things to love about these two, but one of them is that Sago, West Virginia, is a meaningfully romantic place in their story.  So much so that he spent weeks not only planning the ring but also negotiating a 48-hour surprise trip for her to come with him to this little farm (heartfelt thanks to Abby's supervising doctor for allowing her to come, and parents for agreeing too).  And instructing his brothers to construct a temporary bridge to a particular bouldered island mid-river where he wanted to ask the question. A second thing to love is how much they value this braiding of their lives together as one that includes family. Part of the timing meant that the engagement preceded a week planned where Abby's parents were visiting her in Utah, so they would have lots of time to process and enjoy the anticipation of a wedding. Abby is the only one who didn't know what was coming--Luke had brought both sets of parents on board. And while we were about to pop with excitement when he invited her on a Christmas Eve mid-morning hike a few hours after arriving here . . . we were doubly delighted when he suggested the whole fam come along.  So a third thing to love is that we were witnesses to joy. We held back and watched from a little distance, then rushed in to welcome Abby to the family and share the sure sign of God's goodness. Every marriage takes faith; there is no way to lay down your life for another without it. For these two, even finding a couple of days in the next year when they are both NOT WORKING is going to be a challenge.

But they both love Jesus, each other, and their families in the right order, and we trust a celebratory ceremony will eventually be planned.  For those who don't know Abby, she grew up in Annapolis but met Luke in Charlottesville where she finished her BSN at UVA and worked as a nurse. Then she did a master's degree (Nurse Practitioner with a Critical Care focus) at Vanderbilt, and moved to Salt Lake City a few months ago for a very competitive year-long fellowship in trauma/ICU. She ran her first marathon somewhere in those first weeks in Utah, is an outdoorsy, musical, kind person who loves coffee and house plants and puts up graciously with all of us.

So Christmas Eve was a pretty great day, as was Christmas and the whole week.  Hannah, a good friend of the family's from our days together in Kenya, joined us as well.  We baked and played music and ate great meals and exchanged gifts and hiked. There were some river trips down rapids on the giant inflatable pink flamingo, some heartbreaking card games, some old movies. There were long Pittsburgh airport runs, and long bike rides. There were uncountable phone calls and texts but we are thankful to report that all the Nyankunde Ebola contacts are so far without symptoms of disease, and the non-medical non-contact evacuees are stressed by the uncertainty of their lives but doing well. Please do keep praying for peace in the DRC, for sensible responses, for grace where our responses are fearful, for an end to this epidemic, for the bigger organizations like Samaritan's Purse who are sending in the next wave of help, and for wisdom for us as we walk with our people.

And every few minutes, there is the thrill of hope . . the realization that we have a better and bigger family than ever and more to look forward to.

No Room at the Inn: the Shame of NOT BELONGING

A few weeks ago, a former student whom we know wrote a post about growing up in her multicultural world, and used the phrase "the shame of not belonging".  That phrase jumped out at me. Sure, there is pain in not belonging. But shame? The more I thought about it, the more it resonated. The world keeps us in line by shaming deviance. If you don't belong, then you are made to feel it is because of something wrong with you.

For instance, we landed in America on Saturday. Mostly we are back and forth so often, and we grew up here, so we know how to fit in. But 25 years is a long time to miss the small trends (toilet paper squares with scalloped edges, pretty cool . . .) and fall out of step with some of the larger ones (the sense of persecution and injustice felt by people who are in a pretty solidly powerful and comfortable position, for instance). A minor example caught my attention--my family knows that The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is one of our favorite books; we have traditionally read it aloud while camping in a game park over a December holiday. This year the Children's Theatre of Charlotte put on a musical rendition of the book.  It was professional and moving from start to finish, great costumes, sets, singing, orchestra.  A story that never fails to get to the heart of grace, and done with entertaining beats. Now I have not been to a theatre other than school productions in a couple of decades.  So towards the end, I took a photo on my phone, which is what I would do for an RVA high school show, to honor those performing and post something positive. Only this time, a green light bounced off my phone. It took me a while to figure it out. Photos are not considered positively in the professional Children's Theatre. Someone in the back was holding a laser to shame anyone who held a phone. I was embarrassed to be so foolish as to not know the accepted norms. I was out of step with the rules. And I felt the shame of not belonging.


That started me thinking: sure, being without a room at the Inn was inconvenient, messy, anxiety-provoking, a hardship. But perhaps for Joseph and Mary, it was also shameful. Perhaps they were considered too marginal, too poor, too young, too unknown. Perhaps the whispered rumors of their pregnancy-before-the-official-wedding preceded them and led respectable inn-keepers to prioritize other customers. Perhaps Joseph was made to feel he should have planned ahead better. Or Mary was suddenly aware that other families had cousins to welcome them in, so how could they claim Bethlehem yet be left on the street? Being relegated to a barn was not just uncomfortable, it perhaps felt like a verdict on who they were. Unworthy.

And yet, if God wanted equally shamed and marginalized shepherds to witness the good news, where else could the baby be for them to be allowed access? The place of shame, of the periphery, of the stable, was also the place where anyone could approach.

I am mother to four adult (well, the fourth is only 3+ months away from that official milestone) children who have experienced the shame of not belonging much more regularly that I. For all the kids who have been pierced by the unkindness meant to wound with shame, let us remember that Jesus was born on the edge. That God sent the best news of several millennia into a place where anyone could approach. Into a space of shared not-quite-acceptably-in-line-ness, so that all could approach. To a family that, while of a diffusely connected lineage, had a low social status and little economic or political security.

The baby in the manger is a picture of NOT BELONGING, of a shocking outsider, poverty status that embraced the majority-world experience in a way that 21rst century North Americans may struggle to grasp.

The antidote to shame is love. This Christmas let us try to remember the core message: that the Creator of the Universe risked humanity to live our life, die our death, and open the door to resurrection, leaving shame behind forever.  We belong.

With my mom and sister last week at church in Matthews

We met up with Greg and Beth Farrand, 20 1/2 years after evacuating from rebels together

Julia's host family in Greensboro

Dear friends, the Spangler family, part of our original intended Bundibugyo team, though our paths diverged when war started. Truly still kindred spirits.

With my sister's family in NC

Seeing spectacular lights in NC

At my mom's for brunch

Julia's fellow fellows in Greensboro

With Julia touring her sustainable gardens with spiritual purpose too

My mom with 3/4 of her grandchildren 

An evening Advent gathering for 27 of my childhood friends

We arrived in WV yesterday--stop one, groceries, stop two, tree

Sago Baptist had the BEST Christmas Pageant this morning.  Really.

Right now, a peaceful night as snow falls and 3 kids are on the way to Pittsburgh to pick up the 4th.