Nyahuka and Kampala

Crazy how fast the last 9 days have flown by... and now only ten more days in Africa!

We spent the last 3 days in the Rwenzori Mountains in western Kenya right along the Congo border (in fact we were able to see the Congo from the Mountain Pass road!) in a town called Nyahuka.  The town has a very small team of missionaries living there as it is pretty isolated and relatively unaccessible.  The only way to get there besides flying in a small airplane is by taking a very bad road which scales about the outskirts of the mountain range. Its quite bumpy but the scenery was beautiful.  One positive fact for the people of Nyahuka in being so isolated is that whereas in other parts of Uganda the HIV infection rate is almost 60% of the population, in Nyahuka it is only about 6%.  It is also quite encouraging that the Bible is currently being translated into their tribal language: Laboise (not sure exactly if that is spelled right!) and should be completed soon! 

Its amazing when you go to places like this where there are very few 'mzungus'... its like you are in a parade... we literally stopped an entire soccer team with hundreds of people in the crowd just by driving by... the little kids at the beginning of the crowd screamed MZUNGUS!! and then the rest of the crowd including a lot of the soccer players turned and stared and waved at us as we drove by.... where else in the world would something like that happen??  I also got some fun pictures of the little kids who chased after our car.  They love to wave and look at us from a distance but some of them get quite scared if we come too close. Apparentely somewhere along the line, the older ones thought it would be a fun joke to tell the little kids that white people will sometimes eat them... we didn't know this at first and Jeannie made the comment "You are just soo cute I could eat you right up." She meant it as a figure of speech of course but learning about their jokes it probably very much scared the kids !!

Now we are in Kampala (the capital of Uganda). This morning we visited a state of the art mission hospital that specializes in orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation as well as plastic surgery to treat things like cleft lips and burns. Patients come from all over Uganda and northern Tanzania to get treatment here. Surgeries are done for free and all the patient needs to come up with is money for their stay in the hospital and their food... in desperate circumstances it is possible for them to get assistance in this too. It was really encouraging to see the clean hospital well stocked with medicines and medical materials and they even had an xray machine which is not always common to see in hospitals in more remote areas. When they have the money this is the kind of thing they are working to create, its pretty cool and obvious that they do make a difference in the community for those they serve. 

We will be in Kampala for 2 more days and then back to Kenya for the final week.  Please pray for safe travels through this busy city and for safety  in general (several of us had money stolen from our purses yesterday). Please pray that God would expand our hearts with love and give us wisdom towards what he wants us to do here in Africa. 

Thoughts on Missions

As American Missionaries, people from the ‘West,’ we often go out with an agenda, we go out hoping to accomplish great things, its often what drives us and I have to admit it has driven me. We want to know that our ‘mission’ and thus our time was productive. How many people were converted? Who was healed? What advances were made medically? What did we teach them? Honestly this is pretty backwards, especially for a short term trip. An an article we read, a Nairobian pastor commented that we ought not to call them ‘short term missions’ but ‘short term learning opportunities’ because the most benefit that is gained is learning about each others cultures, and because everyone knows about American already from news and media, most of the learning happens on the side of the West.  The same pastor also commented that although churches love to send mission groups to other countries to “paint walls”…. They often paint right back over them when the mission teams leave. In the same way, even here in Mbarara where we are currently, a church in northern US decided they really wanted to help the hospital so they sent 2 large bath lifts over here…. This would have been expensive to ship and no doubt there hearts were in the right place but …. Ugandans here don’t take baths like we do in the states, they don’t like to take baths (it is more often showers or sponge baths) and further more it is really the families that are involved in the patient care, not nurses… the bath lifts are never used. Thus the lesson is for me that if a short term team or even a donation is to be sent, especially by a church, it should be in response to an EXPRESSED need of the community to which the team is going.  

Another very important aspect of short term trips, which I think very much applies to this group, is that it opens up our minds and hearts to God’s calling on our lives.  One of the reasons this entire group came here was to see if we felt called to come back with our professions and serve long-term.  And the community here welcomes people who commit long-term, because you become part of the community and you work together as a team… instead of just someone who is coming to ‘impart knowledge’ although they really know nothing about the people or their culture.  

Please pray for us, that God will make it clear during this trip if he would have us spend our lives here or if he has other plans for us.  Please pray that we will maintain a servant like HUMBLE heart, and that we would act as learners in this culture instead of teachers as we are just like babies here, pray that we would be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to judge. Pray that God would give us wisdom and understanding and that he would use us as He wills.

We are learning so much as we travel around, and I feel like I have a much better picture of what it looks like to be a missionary here and what the culture itself is like. If I had not come back I would have though about Africa purely from my experience in Jinja 4 years ago, and although I learned a lot there, Jinja was all I knew and only a little part of the town as we did not have a vehicle. My mindset about Africa is more comprehensive.. from how the younger people are becoming more Western, to the different tribes and their different customs and languages as you travel throughout the country and between countries.  Africa is beautiful, the people here are extremely beautiful and very unique, God did a good job here.  

I've included some pictures.. the first is when we went on a community visit to a couple of schools to do deworming. Then some zebras we saw a long the road... me and and one of the girls who is from Australia posing by the equator statue... what its been like about every other night when the power goes out and we use lanterns and candles... some food we have been eating and a couple of the girls in Tenwek by the dam.

Homestay and more travels!

The home stay turned out to be a really great experience. Church was mostly in Kipsigese/Kiswahili so could not understand a majority of it, but every now and again they would throw in some English for our benefit… and the singing was beautiful.  We were also asked to get up and 'say a word' so we each introduced ourselves and said something small and Jeremy (the only guy of the group) gave a short message which they loved.  Church was a bout 2.5 hours and they seemed to very much enjoy it... although I think in the states most people would get annoyed with that much of their Sunday taken up! After the service we were asked to stand by the pastor so that each member of the church could shake our hands. 

Jeremy, Felicity and I stayed with the Reverend. We also had Kristen and Katie with us for most of the day until their home stay family got back from the next city, so we all had lunch together and had a tour of the land.  They lived about 10km away from Litein in a 'village' environment, but being the director of the hospital as well he had a nice place considering the surroundings. In our tour of his property we saw chickens everywhere, 4 cows, a plot of maize, banana trees, animal feed growing, and of course tea.  Its amazing how self sufficient they are.  Also on his plot of land he is building a house for his mother who is getting very old, in this culture it is the responsibility of the youngest son to stay with his parents and take care of them until they are gone.  The food was very good and they fed us and gave us tea all day, they made us feel very welcome.  The reverend also told us a lot about cultural norms and told us a little about what it was like to be in Kenya with all the last post election violence when many people were killed.... and of course we discussed Obama, as everyone you meet here knows him and is proud of his Kenyan heritage. 

After lunch we dropped off Kristen and Katie (but of course we did not leave without taking a cup of tea and visiting for two hours... this is a very relational oriented culture after all!) We also got a tour of the land where they were staying which was much more traditional with a separate cooking hut and separate little mud/clay buildings where they would sleep.  They had a tremendous amount of tea and also rows and rows of pineapples! Which we had sliced up with our tea and are absolutely amazing... you haven't tried pineapple until you eat it here! We also had guava fruit right off the tree and were shown a number of vegetables they use that I’ve never heard of.  All in all it was a great experience that I'm glad we were able to do.

Yesterday, we left Litein early in the morning and began our journey to Uganda.  It was a drive that should have only taken about 6 hours... but of course DBA (Dis Be Africa) so it took 12.. and due to some unforeseen circumstances the van we were suppose to use fell through... so 9 of us crammed into a sm range rover... after 12 hours we were struggling a little bit and all getting a little delirious! But the landscape was beautiful, we passed over the Nile River and past rolling green hills, we even got to marvel at some baboons with babies on their backs hanging out by the road after passing the border of Uganda.  Finally around 9pm we arrived at Matoki Inn in Kampala, Uganda (the biggest city in Uganda... traffic like L.A. YUCK).  The Matoki Inn is the nicest place we have stayed so far and is a missionary hub here in Uganda, its like a breath of fresh air with actual SOFT pillows, sheets I know are clean and wireless internet! I wish we could stay another night but we are leaving off to Mbarara where we will stay for the next week in a couple of hours.  Only a five hour drive today (so we have been told) and a short training session than more community work starts tomorrow. Pray for safe journeys!!

Litein and things

After a week at Litein, I feel like I have learned much and grown closer to God but am also ready to move on.  This place is absolutely beautiful with rolling hills you've never seen so green, and there's sooooo much tea!!! The custom here includes two tea breaks, one at 10am and one at 4pm... what a life!

We have  had a lot of discussions at night with the team and have had a lot of Bible and prayer time as it is not safe to go out after dark.  I am beginning to feel more and more that as much as my heart was full of a desire to come here and just serve in every corner, that does not seem to be a reality on this trip.  We are serving in a little ways relationionally and in deworming kids in local schools and doing medical exams in orphanges but as a whole I feel like Im getting a lot more out of this trip than I am giving, which is sadly dissapointing. I feel very blessed to be able to shadow nurses and doctors here and its amazing how many times they have asked us to scrub in on a surgery or deliver a baby they are sooo very eager to teach us ( which because of africa inland missions guidelines we have had to refuse except for minor assistnace sorts of things). As a whole, the people here are extremely welcoming and they happily cook food for us and offer us tea and offer to show us things... never in my life have i been able to walk up to a theatre (surgery room) knock on the door and have them greet me although i came unannounced and give me scrubs and then teach me what they were doing.  What a crazy thing!  Please pray that I will be able to ascertain how i can truly serve in the way that God wants me to on this trip.  I am struggling to find any nitch in which I am 'needed,' Kenya in a lot of ways has a good system going (although definately not perfect), but since i have not been to medical school as of yet I have nothing to teach in the medical arena and if i did being a shortermer, it would not be appropriate.  More than anything this is a taste of medical mission life in Africa, it will be extremely helpful in helping me decide if this is something I can do longterm after i get my doctor of medicine... please pray for God to show me this clearly as well.

Tomorrow morning we will go to a church in the village and then meet up with a family in the community who we will be staying with for the next few days...it will be a look at what real life for a kenyan family is here in Litein.  And then on Tuesday.... its off to Uganda!