June 26

It is Friday - The last day before we head off to Gulu. In a somewhat strange thought process this morning, I started wondering whether it feels like time has been flying or dragging. I came to the conclusion that it has been neither. It’s almost like for the first time ever in any of my experiences time is moving at the pace that it is supposed to move.

As you know from yesterday’s post, I missed all of the activities so this post is going to be communicating what the team related last night during an extensive debrief session.

The usual morning routine – load everyone up, head to The Palace to pick up the other half of the team. The next destination was back to the Omega Healing Center. At Omega, they were again split up into teams for food distribution in the slum adjacent to the property.

The difficulty, however, is that there was a very limited number of Omega people, and those were the people who pretty much held the key – they were the only ones who knew which homes were the ones intended to receive the food. They were also basically the only ones who spoke Lugandan. After delivery of the food, the teams out of necessity coalesced back into a couple of large groups. Most felt that once this happened it became a pretty significant obstacle to talking with people. While the Lord can and will bless and use any of our efforts, it didn’t seem to be as impactful as the trips into Texas.

From the team’s description, I heard the story of a woman with AIDS. 2 of her 5 children had AIDS. Her husband had already died of the disease. Katie asked Kennedy about the whole topic. He said that it is obviously a huge problem, but for whatever reason people don’t like to talk about it. Maybe this is the theme for my whole trip – “I’m still processing” – but I wonder if there doesn’t need to be a much stronger push to bring it out from under the rocks, to try to push the discussions on it. How that would be accomplished, I don’t know.

After the gourmet peanut butter & jelly sandwich lunch at The Palace, they headed out to the first school assembly. This one was apparently in the most cramped room we’ve seen to date, which I have a hard time wrapping my brain around when I think about how cramped the room was on our very first school in Gaba.

The highlight of this school was the soccer and basketballs. The Headmistress here explained to the team that they had been praying for a long time to acquire a playing field, and those prayers had been answered. As in Wednesday – they had just made the purchase of a piece of land for sports on Wednesday. Up to this point they did not have any athletic equipment whatsoever. So now they have a field on Wednesday, and our team comes waltzing in on Thursday and gives them some soccer & basketballs. No, take that back. GOD comes waltzing in on Thursday and provides these! He’s the only one who knew the timing.

The atmosphere was cramped, but everyone feels like the students at this school were some of the most engaging that we have encountered to date. They were talking to our people, asking for prayer, genuinely appreciative of everything.

Then the second school. This one had probably the most expansive venue we’ve had to date since it was held in outside in a courtyard. The courtyard apparently had 3 story buildings beside it and there were students watching from outdoor walkways all the way up. Branden & Lance were guessing that there was somewhere around 500 kids in attendance.

And most agree that they were among the least responsive. The Headmaster came up to Lance beforehand to introduce himself and immediately starts dropping some pretty strong hints that they want money. He asked where in the US we are from, and Lance told him that Oregon is just north of California. “Is there much wealth there?” While our kids felt like the assembly was the smoothest one to date, they also felt like few were paying attention. Nick got up to tell his story, and was talking over a bunch of crowd noise. In the interactions afterwards, there was little interest in asking for prayer or acceptance of Christ, but much interest in acquiring contact information from the mzungus. The team seemed pretty disappointed by the experience – like it was something they would expect at a high school in the US.

We’re not always going to hit home runs.

To give everyone a heads up, we’ll be heading out fairly early tomorrow morning for Gulu. It is apparently about a 6 hour drive, and I’m not sure what kind of access I’ll have to the internet, so the posts for the next couple of days may be a little sporadic. I’ll keep it as current as I can, but if we miss a day, don’t panic!

Kam’s Comments:
Yesterday was an impactful day on not only the people our team ministered to, but also me. The day started out as we headed down to Omega Healing Center, which is a very large church here in the Kampala area. We were put into teams to evangelize and give food and other goods to the needy people of the area. I was moved when we came across a woman who had AIDS along with two of her five children. I could see the gratitude in her eyes when we presented her with our bag of goods. She was “born again” and we could see the love of Christ in her. That was the highlight of the day. In the afternoon we traveled to two different schools. The first school we arrived at loved the drama we performed and had a great response to our testimonies. I personally gave my testimony to that school. We really felt like we connected with the kids. The next school, however, was not as fired up for Jesus. On top of that, we were having all kinds of sounds system failures during worship. This was one of the wealthier schools, or so it seemed, that we had come to. When we shared our testimonies, Branden’s message, and drama with them, it felt like they had heard these kinds of stories a thousand times. It felt like they were American high school teenagers. They were easily distracted and after the message all they would ask for is contact information or money. It was a little discouraging and disappointing, but we knew that the team was going to run into at least one school like this. All in all, I believe yesterday was a great day.