September silence began with a Serge Ministry Team semi-annual meeting, where leaders from each geographic and a few cross-cutting topical areas meet with our US-based Executive Leadership Team to analyse current needs and opportunities and create rolling three-year strategies. Since some of our international work involves the risk of being disallowed from that person's country of work if associated with a faith-based NGO like Serge, we all avoid public pictures or current updates and practice silence . . . then after that week, we did a remote hike for a week as a real rest from work, then headed to California to care for Scott's mom, then back to NC/WV to be with my family for a wedding and "apple butter" making time together, stopping on the way to see Luke and Abby's first post-training "real" job and home. By the second week of October we were flying back to Uganda, a few days for key meet-ups in Kampala and then back to Bundibugyo almost a week ago.
Reflecting on the month, the themes of service and celebration were entwined throughout. We served our Area and our mission as we spent hours in intricate discussions and analysis and prayer . . . AND we celebrated friendships whose depth plumbs work partnership and personal care for each other. We served our family by moving a beloved mother into a safer sociable senior apartment or by assisting with hosting and projects . . . AND we celebrated the delight of a new marriage with dancing and toasts, or the traditions of Fall mountains with apples and stories. We served our decades-long colleagues and neighbours from Bundi by visits and counsel and meeting financial needs . . . AND we celebrated another return to the home where the most significant joys of our lives have occurred. A life of only service sounds like drudgery in a world so brimming with beauty, a life of only celebration sounds unrealistic in a world that hurts. As is usually the case, we don't blend the two for a lukewarm steady state. We step right into the places of need and right into the places of wonder. Both-and.
Yesterday those two threads braided in a supervisory visit to the Mabere Water Project, the gravity-flow clean water scheme that Josh worked tirelessly to create over the last few years. The bulk of the work was done by May when we last hiked up, before Josh left. But over the summer, floods and a landslide damaged the intake, and slowed down the last steps of installing taps and meters. Our mission engineer Tembo has been working the last few months to tie up many of the loose ends, and since we have pretty much used up all the funding, we were hopeful that the project would be functional even if not quite finished. Service, for sure, in the many steep and strenuous miles we've climbed only a handful of times but Josh, Tembo and team had repeatedly scaled with bags of cement, massive wrenches, rolls of pipe. I felt every minute of my years and every deficit of my brain trying to balance and breathe on the narrow uneven paths. Generally these days, when people are unreached by a basic life service like clean water, there is a reason. It's hard to get there. And yet celebration, too. While we watched, Tembo opened the gate valve that lets water flow into the four rock-and-sand filtration tanks and then into the main holding tank, from which it flows down hill to 9 small tanks and 13 taps, to serve 1500 people, homes and schools. It worked. Yes, we had a thunderstorm break out in fury as we started back down, and lost footing in the mud several times, and it's taken hours to clean up and recover. But service and celebration in Mabere joined, as Psalm 85 so poetically puts it, righteousness and peace have kissed. A few crucial community responsibility and maintenance steps should lead to the final completion by December.
Today, heavy on the service and not much celebration yet. We are gathering documents for a meeting tomorrow, a bit of an organised protest of a sudden levy of massive tax burden on our school and mission. Though we have been recognised as a charitable non-profit here in Uganda for decades, Uganda needs revenue, and is squeezing left and right. We were reflecting that between thorough financial audits, reporting to our local government and the NGO board, a month-long interminably obscure re-certification of decades of documents with the bank, and now an out-of-the-blue attempt by the Uganda Revenue Authority to demand tens of thousands of dollars of tax from what was spent years ago to build things at school . . . we've spent nearly a quarter of our lives this year in administrative bureaucratic tangles. It's the hard result of being betrayed by our former administrator, and being left by almost all our team. We are weary, and we've only been home 6 days. If you read to the end, pray for a miracle of logic and justice to shine at the meeting tomorrow.
Looking forward to being able to celebrate that!
And for anyone who has read this blog for many years, today Ruth Ann Batstone celebrates a life of service to Jesus and the world in Heaven. She has been a stalwart friend, wise counsellor, joyful host, dedicated truth-teller, prayerful labourer in our lives and so so so many others in Serge. Yesterday she died in the arms of her husband, surrounded by her children, a solemn passage from years of debilitating lung disease into an realm beyond time and oxygen, the embrace of God. We feel the weight of missing her, along with the gratefulness of having been on this journey together.
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