Are you sure this is how you do celebrations in Africa?

OR

I Think Someone Is Trying to Tell Me Something

Internet down?  Check.

Power off for two days?  Check.

Water off?  Check.

Both computer batteries dead?  Check.

Phone almost dead?  Check.

Ah, yes, it must be my six-month anniversary!  

That's right, I have officially been in Uganda for six months.  We celebrated by having our Internet go down for a while, and then losing power for two days.  Well, you know how it is. You hate to do the same old thing.  Besides, I've always wanted to learn the meaning of "cascade failure."  It goes something like this:

1. Power goes off Monday evening.  Make dinner in the dark.  
2. Wake up Tuesday.  Power is still off.  That's okay.  Face the day with cheerful determination.   
3. Take lukewarm shower to conserve hot water.  Contemplate Revelation 3:16.  
4. Try to use computer as little as possible, but use up one computer battery for office day.
5. Keep refrigerator door closed as much as possible.
   
6. Talk yourself into using second computer battery so you can get some more work done.  The power won't stay off THAT long. 
   
7. Use half of second battery.  Feel guilty, even though your job requires using a computer.
   
8. Realize cell phone is less than half charged.  No worries.  Power will probably come on after 24 hours off.
   
9. Make dinner in the dark again.  Eat a candlelight dinner with Heidi.  You don't mind, but you get the feeling she kind of wishes you were someone else.  Preferably male.
10. Try to read by the light of two candles.  Wonder how Abraham Lincoln did it.
    
11. Go to bed early because, quite frankly, you can't think of anything else to do.
    
12. Wake up Wednesday morning.  Still no power.  Work on the cheerful determination thing.  Settle for getting out of bed instead of pulling the covers over your head and going back to sleep. 
    
13. Take a cold sponge bath because you can't face a cold shower.  Discover there's very little difference.
    
14. Check cell phone battery.  Only one bar left.  Power must be about to come back on.
    
15. Do Bible study.  Look through Psalms for prayers for power.
    
16. Water pressure drops.  Now there's no water in the kitchen.
    
17. Try to open refrigerator door as little as possible.
18. On impulse, check refrigerator.  Discover that inside the fridge is warmer than outside.
19. Use most of second computer battery for work.  Wonder what you're going to do when the second battery goes dead.  Contemplate a nice vacation.  Somewhere with electricity.  And hot showers.  Ahhh...  
20. Heidi sweetly offers use of her spare battery.  oh.
21. Go to MCC leaders meeting with white computer battery on your black computer.
22. Come home.  Still no power. 
23. Check your phone.  Almost no charge left.
24. Check computer.  Almost no charge left.
25. Take stock:  Water off in kitchen, no power, no internet, computer and phone almost dead, refrigerator now a steam bath.  Start to laugh.  What better way to commemorate being in Africa for six months!

But I'm still trying to figure out what Someone is trying to tell me...

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program to Bring You This:

In Praise of Jenni

Jenni is the most beautiful young woman in the whole world.  She is beautiful first and foremost because she loves the Lord.  Have you ever noticed that people who really love the Lord have a beauty about them?  They have a sweetness and a gentleness and, well, a glow about them.  Jenni has that.

Jenni is also beautiful because she loves people.  When she was little (and not so little), she was the peacemaker in her family.  She would give hugs and tell people she loved them.  As an adult, Jenni has a kind, caring nature.  If you ever read her blog, she often uses that forum to say something nice about someone.  

Jenni is beautiful because she is intelligent and fun and interesting and has a wonderful sense of humor.  She's fun just to get to hang around with.

Most of all, Jenni is beautiful because she endeavors to work out the concept of agape in her life and in the lives of the people she loves.  Agape:  Not just love, but unselfish love that desires God's greatest good for the person loved. You see, Jenni has gone through the pain of losing both her brother and her father.  So when Jenni's mommi said she wanted to go to Uganda for a year to serve the Lord, Jenni would have had every reason to say no, please stay at home.  But Jenni did not hesitate.  She knew that it was a deep desire of her mommi's heart to get to serve the Lord overseas.  So Jenni gave, not just her blessing, but her wholehearted support - support that has never wavered in the past year.  That's agape love.

Jenni will turn 29 on Wednesday, October 29, 2008.  If you happen to see her, will you give her a big hug and tell her that her mommi loves her more than life itself?

NUMB3RS TO FACES

I just read the Harvest Weekend brochure online.  I cried for joy -- naturally! -- as I realized anew what an incredible vision God has given us and how He is inviting us to join him in his work worldwide. I was humbled to see my name there.  I don't deserve to be named alongside such heroes of the faith as the Crowsons and Charles of Rwanda and Sara Holland and, of course, Phillip Shero and Dennis Okoth, whom I am so blessed to work with.  

And yet, my name on that little piece of paper sends a clear message to everyone:  

God wants to use you.  

God wants to grant the deep desire of your heart to live a life that matters.  For years, God granted that desire in my life by allowing me to faithfully take my children to church. For years he quietly granted that desire by allowing me to work at a steady job and give financially.  Right now, He is amazingly granting that desire by allowing me to serve Him here in Uganda.  Who knows how He is going to grant that desire in the future?

It doesn't matter who you are, what your education level is, what YOU think your skills are.  God knows you.  God loves you.  God wants you to have the joy of participating in His work.  And what greater work is there than that which the Creator of the Universe is doing?

And how is your work going? ...what is it you do, anyway?

Some of you have actually asked me about my work here.  Thanks!  To be honest, I haven't talked much about it because, um, well, I'm basically a bookkeeper, and how fascinating is that?  I mean, at the end of the day, my roomie, Heidi, talks about her trip to the village, and how her teaching went, and how one of the women actually named her new baby girl Heidi.  (She also talks about driving past the remains of the goat that the village just fed her for lunch, but that's another story.)  I talk about the cool new spreadsheet I'm working on that tracks every budget category for the team.  Okay, now, show of hands.  Who has the more interesting story?  Heidi? or MB?  I rest my case.    

Now, don't get me wrong - I enjoy what I do, and I am quite happy to serve the Lord by serving the team as their bookkeeper.  I just don't have any illusions as to how engrossing the topic is to most other people.  But for those of you who asked, here goes.  For those of you who didn't ask, you have my permission to skip this blog.  If you hang on to the end of the blog, though, I'll throw in a freebie photo.

The concept is fairly simple:  I handle the money for most of the various projects of the team.  I won't bore you with a list, but so far I have taken over tracking for ten different projects.  Quite a lot for the team to have been keeping up with on their own, you say?  You're absolutely right, and thank you very much for sending me over here to help them.  Here's what I've done so far:  I have set up Quickbooks accounts to track the funds in a way that I can run accounting reports, if necessary, for any of the ministries.  I have also set up tracking spreadsheets in Excel, because that seems to present the information in a way that is more helpful to the missionaries.  So basically I do two things:  take the money-handling burden off the missionaries to free them to do their work, AND track the money under accepted accounting principles. (Kind of got my fingers crossed on that second item!)  

However, there is one little wrinkle:  When I say I handle the money, I mean I HANDLE the money.  You see, everything here is done on a cash basis - EVERYTHING.  There's no way to tell you how that complicates life.  For starters, every bill, every payroll (of which I handle five), must be paid in cash, so I must get receipts and have people sign for their cash.  Two, when I'm trying to reconcile the accounts, I'm actually counting piles of shillings, which takes ten times as long as just adding columns of numbers.  (And you would not believe how yucky and stinky Ugandan money is.  Since Uganda is a cash society, money changes hands constantly.  If you want to get an idea, take the oldest, dirtiest dollar bill you can find, throw it in a mud puddle, and then rub it in the dirt.  Okay, Ugandan money is worse than that.  Really.) Last but not least, there are 1,580 shillings to the dollar - today, at least - which means, if I'm counting $3,000, I'm counting 4,740,000 Ugandan shillings, and that's a lot of shillings.  Thank goodness, Uganda's lowest paper currency is a 1,000 shilling note.  But still, Ugandan money takes up quite a bit of space.  Sometimes when I'm counting out money for something and there's twenty piles of shilling notes and coins sitting in front of me, I feel remarkably like Scrooge before his reformation.  

So that's what I do for the team.  Don't you think it is quite cool that the Lord found a way for me to get to serve Him overseas with what we shall loosely call my skill set?  Me too.

Okay, for those of you who hung on this long, here is the photo I promised you.  Remember, I mentioned that one of the village women actually named her baby girl after Heidi?  Here is a photo of Heidi, Heidi, and (little) Heidi's mom. 

Heidi with her namesake, Heidi, and Mom

So, mb, what have you been doing lately?

I have actually been quite busy, thank you for asking. Here's a little peek at a few fun things I've gotten to do in the past six weeks.

First of all:

I HAVE CROSSED THE NILE!

Okay, I've actually crossed the Nile several times now, because you have to cross the Nile to get to Kampala (or back).  But still, it's an adventure I hadn't had until I came to Uganda, so it definitely counts as a fun thing.  By the way, please admire the photo.  I didn't know it at the time, but it's illegal to take photos on the bridge across the Nile, so I was unwittingly breaking the law when I snapped this.  oops.

Second fun thing:

I HAVE CROSSED THE EQUATOR!

IS THAT NOT THE COOLEST THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD?

(That's my roommate, Heidi, with me.)

I have officially spent time on the south side of the Equator.  The water swirled the wrong way down the sink!  I was chattering on about how excited I was to be in the southern hemisphere, and the missionary I was talking to (who grew up an MK in Africa) mentioned that he had had trouble getting used to the fact that he now lived permanently in the northern hemisphere.  oh.

On to the third fun thing I've done in the past few weeks:

I HAVE STOOD BAREFOOT ON THE SHORE

OF LAKE VICTORIA!

This one is my personal favorite.  Why?  Well, look at a map of Africa.  What jumps out at you?  That big, beautiful blue spot in the middle of the continent.  I have thought of Africa and Lake Victoria as truly on the other side of the world since I was a little girl in missions class, spinning a globe and watching the countries go by under my fingers.  To stand on the shore of that big beautiful blue spot and realize - again! - that I am getting to have such fun serving the Lord in Africa -- well, it just doesn't get any better than that.

THANKS, EVERYONE!  If you're reading this, you have had a part in making this trip possible, and there's no way to tell you how much I love and appreciate you all.  

Where's the Beef? There's the Beef! Ewww...

I was reading over past blogs, and realized that I had promised to show you pictures of how you buy beef here.  So I will!

Let me set the stage for my first beef-shopping trip.  It's May 6, 2008, my first full day in Mbale, Uganda.  I've just spent several hours at Messiah Theological Institute.  Well, probably just one or two, but it feels like several hours.  I'm suffering from exhaustion, jet lag, missing-luggage worries, rumpled-clothing-and-no-makeup embarrassment, plus, of the two hundred or so people I've just met, only ten speak English in a way that this Mzungu girl from Fort Worth, Texas, can understand.  To make matters worse, I'm pretty sure I'm not shaking hands the right way and I'm wondering if that's like a fatal cultural faux pas here.  So when Heidi finally asks if I'd like to do some grocery shopping and then go back to Welldone Cottage, I gratefully head for the car.

Heidi shops at "Happy Supermarket,"  which is considered to be, if not the Cadillac, at least the Plymouth of grocery stores here.  It's about the size of a small 7-Eleven, only a lot dustier and no ATM machine.  It has exactly four aisles:  two are for food, and two are for everything else.  I must admit, though, I'm quite impressed with how much inventory they can squeeze onto the shelves in those four aisles.  Heidi picks out most of the groceries since I'm having trouble reading the labels (I discover that my French, Italian, Hindi, and Arabic are a bit rusty), but I do comment on the fact that there's hardly any perishables sold there.  Heidi smiles and says, "Oh, you buy most of your meat at the market."  This isn't the market?  Oh.

So now we head a couple blocks away to the market. As we walk down the sidewalk, we go past all these little stalls with goods laid out on their counter, pavement sellers with various foodstuffs spread out on a tarp, and even people wandering around holding wooden rods with hundreds of items attached somehow.  Now we're at the market?  But no.  Heidi suddenly turns in to this dark doorway that really makes me think Black Hole of Calcutta, and voila!, now we're at the market.  The market covers a large area of ground (and I do mean ground), but I feel a little claustrophobic because the market is so packed with stalls and people, there's not much room to maneuver, and there's some sort of tin roof just a foot or so overhead.  I walk up and down between rows of tables and stalls (being careful not to trip because it's rocky ground) filled with every possible kind of food: carrots and beans and cucumbers and tomatoes and onions and maize and eggs and huge bags of flour and huger bags of rice (who knew there were so many different kinds of rice?) and several unidentifiable root-type substances.  I think it all looks very interesting, and evidently the flies agree with me.  Heidi winds her way to the what is apparently the meat aisle.  She stops at a stall, behind which stands a local butcher surrounded by hanging sides of beef.  A turkey is proudly on display at the very front of the stall, where you have a great view of the flies munching down.  I make a mental note: tuna fish for Thanksgiving this year.  Heidi dickers with the man on the price of a kilo or two of beef, then he grabs a side of beef with one hand and a machete with the other, and whacks off a piece -- after first shaking off the flies, naturally.  I watch fascinatedly as he skillfully and securely wraps it in a banana leaf (probably suffocating the last fly or two), and hands us the beef in its eco-friendly packaging.  Heidi smiles and thanks the man, we turn to leave, and I wonder where I go to join the local vegetarian group.  

When we get home, Heidi opens the banana parcel, after first allowing me to take a photo:

Now really, could YOU do as good a job wrapping a squashy hunk of beef in a banana leaf?  I doubt it.

And here's the beef!

Note:  Heidi -- after washing the beef in everything but bleach -- made some scrumptious Chinese-style sesame beef, and, yes, I ate it.  Yes, I have continued to eat local beef and chicken ever since.  I'm trying to get up my courage to eat goat.  But no, don't expect to see a photo of a turkey being unwrapped in our kitchen sink on Thanksgiving Day.  I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere.

Good-bye from Mbale, Uganda, where I'm blessed to be having the grandest of grand adventures!

Reality Sets In

"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart." (Ps. 37:4) 

Being allowed to serve the Lord overseas has long been a desire of my heart, and I began rejoicing the moment I found out that I was going to have the privilege of going to Mbale, Uganda, to serve the Mbale Mission Team.  That sense of joy never really left me, even as I began packing up -- and even giving away -- my life back in the States.  I smiled as I gave my favorite dishes to a good friend.  I laughed when I handed over the guest room bed and some household stuff to a halfway house.  I laughed -- okay, and cried a little -- when I left the law firm I had worked at for eight and a half years.  

Yes, there were moments that I clutched a little, and wondered if I were doing the right thing.  Did I really want to wake up on Saturday morning and NOT go shopping with my best friend before I went to church and then babysat Noah?  Could I bear being away from my daughter for a year?  But the answer was always the same:  The joy of the Lord will be my strength.  God had given me a great gift.  I am going to rejoice in it.  I cried at the airport and held Jenni and Jonathan and Noah as close as I could as we said good-bye, but two hours later I was smiling through my tears and almost laughing for joy as I boarded the plane to head off to Uganda. 

That sense of wonder and joy stayed with me during my first few months in Uganda.  I knew I was in the "honeymoon stage," but to be honest, that was okay with me.  If I was in the honeymoon stage, great!  I fell in love with the country, which is easy to do, as eastern Uganda is incredibly beautiful.  I fell in love with people, who are so gracious and polite. (mostly).  I laughed every time we drove somewhere and had to stop for a herd of cows meandering along the road.  I chuckled as I carried buckets of water to our washing machine so that it would take less than an hour to fill.  I did my best to begin to get to know the local people I work with and worship with and was very excited when they would respond with overtures of friendship.  

Last Sunday, I was greeting people after church, and turned to greet Margaret, a new friend of mine whom I see only at church.  Sometimes I sit with her, and she helps translate the songs for me, which is wonderful indeed.  For the past couple weeks she had been asking me to pray for her daughter, but I wasn't sure why because, quite honestly, I can't always understand everything she says. This Sunday when she saw me, she immediately grabbed my arm and led me to the front of the church, saying, "My daughter is here today.  Please come pray for her."  Her daughter Catherine was sitting there, a young girl of about eight years old, very quiet, and obviously not in good health.  I was quite touched that Margaret wanted me to pray for Catherine.  I asked Phillip to come pray as well, mostly because he understands the local people much better than I do. He talked to Margaret for a minute or two, with me still not understanding more than every third word, and then both Phillip and I prayed for Catherine. Margaret and Catherine left, and it was then, as I talked to the other members of the team, that they explained to me that Catherine has sickle cell anemia.  She will probably not live to adulthood.  The little girl I had just so happily prayed over is almost certainly going to die in the next few years.  Reality Setting In Lesson No. 1:  Uganda is a real place with real people.  It is a third-world country. This is where I live and work and make friends, and people I care about are going to have very hard things happen to them that I can do nothing about.

Two days later I was still trying to come to terms with this reality, when I opened an e-mail from my best friend (Yes, the one I went shopping with every Saturday), whom I had not heard from in a while.  As I read the e-mail, I gradually realized that she was telling me that her husband had been rushed to the hospital with bacterial spinal meningitis about two weeks earlier, and he had almost died.  He had been put on life support, and his condition worsened to the point that they finally made the decision to take him off.  Praise God, when they took him off life support, he began to breathe on his own, and by the time my friend wrote me, her husband was definitely on the road to recovery.  But she had had to go through the experience of almost losing her husband, and I was not there for her. She needed me, and I wasn't there.  Reality Setting In Lesson No. 2:  The US is a real place with real people, and life is not holding still for a year while I am here.  Bad things are going to happen to people that I love and care about, and I can do nothing about it.

What is the answer?  Or perhaps, more properly, if these are "reality lessons," what did I learn?  Did I expect anything different?

The answer:  No, I didn't expect anything different.  And what I learned is a continuation of the lesson God has been teaching me since I was eleven years old, that He is sovereign, and I am not.  I am heartbroken that bad things are happening to people I love, whether here or in the US.  I pray fervently that God works his perfect will in their lives. I am glad, quite honestly, to be out of the honeymoon stage, so that I can get on with learning to love and rejoice in the reality in which God has placed me - the good parts and the bad parts.

As you read over this blog, you will notice the word "I" happens way too often.  You can see that I had way selfish reactions to what should have been just care and concern for other people.  Please pray that I become a better servant, that there will be less of me and more of what God wants in my life.  I want to care more about Margaret and Catherine.  And please pray for Margaret and Catherine, that God will work a miracle in their lives.  Thanks.