Struggling With Poverty

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'" -Matthew 25:31-45

There is not a day that goes by where this passage does not pass through me head, for there is not a day that goes by without being surrounded by those who are hungry, thirsty, needing clothes, or sick. It's easy to live your life in the States in a way that you're never really confronted with poverty, where you never see how much you have in comparison to how much others lack, where your conscience is never really challenged about how much help you provide for those in need, about how little you sacrifice for others.

But not here. Not here where having electricity every other day is a luxury. Not here where kids play on your street all day with dirty, ragged clothes and bellies more full of worms than food, not at school because their parents can't afford to pay their school fees. Not here where people struggle to pay rent for a 5x10 mud shack with dirt floors and a tin roof. Not here where AIDS and malaria run rampant and where people die every day because doctors lack the resources to save them. Not here where people line the streets of town just sitting and waiting all day, hoping that a truck will stop to unload some goods, or where they'll push several hundred pounds of bananas for miles uphill and down on a bicycle, because that's the only hope they have of making a few shillings that day. Not here where people come to your gate asking for help with school fees, with medical bills, with rent, with jobs, with food almost every day.

And what do you do? How do you discern between those really in need and those just trying to make a little money off the muzungu? Heck even those just trying to make a little money probably need that money more than I do. How do you help without creating dependency, making someone's longterm situation even worse than it was before you helped? How do you balance wise stewardship of your finances with sacrificing for the good of others, and where does that balance lie?

These are just some of the issues that tear at my heart, mind and soul on a daily basis here, and the only thing I know to do is to pray, to ask for wisdom, and to handle each situation individually as I feel led, never doubting the wisdom God has provided, even when that means saying "no" or saying "not today" or saying "not as much." And that is one of the greatest challenges of living in a place like Uganda.

Election Time

It's election time in Uganda. For the first time in 26 years multi-party elections are being held and they're being hotly contested. President Yoweri Museveni is running for a third 5-year term (he's been in power now 20 years but his rise wasn't exactly democratic) courtesy of Parliament eradicating term limits from the Constitution. His main opposition is Kizza Besigye, who went into self exile after losing the last election but returned to run again. Interesting things have happened on all sides.

It's especially interesting for me coming out of a political communication background to see how different the campaigns are run here than back in the States. American political mudslinging, for example, is tame compared to here. If you aren't saying something bad about another candidate, then you're probably taking a break to make up something bad to say about the other candidate, or maybe making up a lie that the other candidate said about you so you can portray him/her as dishonest. Much of campaigning is having supporters drive through town in a van covered in your political posters, handing out shirts and hats and posters and such while honking their horn and blowing whistles and everyone who supports running up and taking stuff and honking their horns and blowing whistles. Sometimes they'll load a big truck with speakers and crank them too loud and play music. I'm not sure what all goes on at rallies but I do know that Museveni bussed in half the country for the one in Mbarara so it'd look like he has more support. And then there's the posters. They're everywhere (the following samples having all been taken during a 5-minute walk in town)...

...on cars and store fronts...



...on petrol station signs...



...on walls...



...on "billboards"...



...and even on the cow statue in the famous cow roundabout...



...right smack dab on his face.

Byafura

Every Thursday a group meets in Byafura, a rough part of town not far from where the Wilks live (for more background on the Byafura group, click here). Every week they do worship, testimonies, prayer and preaching in the shade of a couple of buildings right in the middle of Byafura. One day we took the volunteer team to this meeting.


The lady on the far right is Jolly. She got clearance from the local political leaders to have the group meet and is more or less the leadership of the group.


Joseph ran the meeting and interpreted for the bazungu. He's the Wilks housekeeper/interpreter/electrician/language teacher. I have also done some language with him and he wired the generator into my house.


Chuck preached at this particular meeting and used balloons for illustrations. Certainly a unique method but it certainly worked.


Once again salvation/powerbead bracelets were handed out. This time even some of the adults wanted in on the action.

Poodles for Jesus

Later Wednesday, after having returned from Nakivale, we went and showed the Jesus film at Katete, a nearby village where a group has been going for some time now. While Barry was setting up (and then running back home to get some equipment he had forgot), Chuck and Andy made balloon animals and hats for the kids. We finally got set up right before dark and started the film. Just about the entire village came out to see it. Hopefully some people will start coming to the Katete group as a result and some lives will have been changed.

God at Work in Amazing Ways: Nakivale Refugee Settlement

Wednesday morning we headed out down a long, dusty, bumpy road towards Tanzania to visit the refugee settlement at Nakivale, home to 17,000 Rwandan and Congolese refugees, some of whom have lived there for 12 years. As the residents are only supposed to be there temporarily, they are not allowed to have jobs and are not allowed to build permanent structures (as such all homes are mud buildings with tarp roofs weighted down by large branches...if they were to put up the typical iron sheets then the homes would be considered permanent). And yet God is at work here in amazing ways.

Several years ago a Journeyman started a Bible study here. A Congolese refugee took over the study and formed it into a church. He then proceeded to start 2 other churches in the camp and is now working on a fourth. And he has no formal theological, missiological, or ecclesiastical training. Yet God is seriously at work through this man.

The church worships with serious passion, which, while something you find frequently amongst African churches, you don't expect from people who have received about as poor a hand of cards as can be dealt. Yet the praise God mightily. Their choirs, one youth and one adult, are exceptional. They even have a keyboard, which may not seem like much unless you consider the circumstances.

These people have no money. How can they when they can't work? Yet they decided to buy themselves a keyboard (THE instrument in Ugandan worship). They collected 890,000 shillings and sent some people to Kampala to buy the keyboard, only to realize that it would cost 1.4 million. So they came back and the pastor decided to pray for three days and then come back together and see what money they could muster. After three days of prayer these people who have nothing managed to pool together another 1.1 million shillings. They now have a keyboard, speakers, and a generator (the only source of electricity in the camp). These people have nothing and yet the gave all they could and raised far more money than one would ever have expected.

Furthermore, when they fed us lunch, they fed us well. Rice, bananas, beef, chips (french fries), and Coca Cola. And we didn't even get sick from the meat. It may not sound like much, but for village food this was high class. Cokes don't grow on trees.

Though they may lack in material wealth they are richer than most all of us in determination and dedication to God. If we, with as much as we have, would give as sacrificially as these refugees, imagine what a difference we could make in reaching the lost, fighting poverty, and otherwise changing the world.

We showed the Jesus film at the church in Nakivale and people showed up in droves to see it. There were people lined up out the door, looking in the windows, and even setting up benches in rows outside to look in. Afterwards Vicki gave her testimony and 6 people accepted Christ.


There were lots of kids in the camp, most of whom have never known life outside of Nakivale. Pretty soon some of the first kids who were born in the settlement will be teenagers!


Few if any of the kids spoke Runyankore or English; instead they spoke either French, Kinyarwanda, or a Congolese language. I think this frustrated Jared Wilks (Barry's son), who tried every language he knew even a small fraction of (including Kiswahili) to communicate with the kids but couldn't get a reply to save his life.


The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have made it to Uganda. Amen.


In the foreground is Aloysius, the pastor of the Runyankore service at University Baptist Church, Mbarara. Beside him drinking the coke is the Congolese pastor through whom God has made such a huge impact at the camp.


Here's Niki teaching the children the meanings of the different color beads in the salvation/powerbead bracelets. Pulling off the teaching through interpretation was a miracle in of itself. The Congolese pastor who translated spoke French (being from a Francophone country) and very, very little English. Niki knew a few French words from many years ago. I knew what ended up being some key Ugandan English ways of saying things. Throw in some hand signals and a lot of rephrasing and somehow we got across the message. The real fun part, though, would be handing out the bracelets.


The kids were pressing in so hard and grabbing with such vigor that I had to eventually climb up on the bumper of my truck to get enough room to actually hand out the bracelets. Two of the pastors eventually helped form the kids into line, hitting kids over the head with a stick if they tried to cut or take more than one.


Some women in traditional dress.

Rubaya Medical Clinic

On Monday (Feb 7) we held a medical clinic in Rubaya, a village about 20-30 minutes away from Mbarara. There has been a very successful group meeting there and the intention was to meet human needs, share the gospel and help the potential church. Registration was done entirely by the two guys who are the strongest leaders in the group, one a younger man and the other an older gentleman who is also the LC (local political leader). In a matter of ony a few days they had registered 250 families.

There were supposed to be 5 groups of 50 families each, but pretty much everyone came at once. May have made things a little crazy at times but fortunately everything worked out anyway (which is good, not only because it's good for things to work out well, but also because you could plan on people all coming at once more than coming at designated hours anyway). This particular circus had four rings: health education, Bible storying, medication distribution, and kids games.

For the women who attended, Kari and Vicki (with Evas, a Words of Hope counselor, translating) taught health information sessions, providing insight into how to better take care of themselves and their families. Such sessions can be even more beneficial than just providing treatment as one of the greatest health issues in Africa is a lack of knowledge. One of the medical students, Achilles (pronounced phonetically), told me that one of the hardest things for him when he's on ward at the hospital is that most of the people dying there are dying of things that they could have prevented.

For the few men who came (by far the smallest group in attendance) Jim, with Naboth (also a Words of Hope counselor and a local Bible Baptist pastor) translating (and holding the shade umbrella...for himself, not so much for Jim), did Bible storying and evangelism. They also provided some counseling and prayer for those who accepted Christ.

As for the kids, Andy and Niki provided games and salvation bracelets/powerbeads (whichever name you happen to prefer). There were tons of kids, saddening in that for there to be so many kids there meant that their families could not afford their school fees. Fortunately these kids were able to hear how Christ died for their sins (which, quite frankly, is better than anything they'd be learning in school anyway) and have some fun with a few bazungu.

After the first health information session Mike and Chuck handed out some medications, including multivitamins and worm pills, to the individuals who had preregistered. Each person was given enough medication for their entire family. Though everyone had come at once, the medications were handed out by registration groups and so utter chaos was at least slightly abated. There were over 100 families represented who had not preregistered, and medications were left with the younger of the two group leaders mentioned earlier.

While clinics like these may not fit fully into CPM missiology, they certainly have their benefits. They allow us to live out our mandate to care for those in need (if you aren't familiar with Matthew 25:31-46, get familiar...it goes through my mind constantly here). People hear the gospel and get saved. Legitimacy is added to the group that is meeting there. In another village, Nakinombe (pronounced Nachinombe..."ki" is pronounced "chi"), a medical clinic and a food distribution garnered so much favor for the church in the local community that when the church decided to build a building the community came together and helped them. I pray that the clinic will do much to help further the work in Rubaya.


Some of the kids listening to Niki and Andy explain games. What Andy and Niki discovered, much as I did a few years back teaching baseball in Ukraine, is that sometimes it's easier just to start playing and help the kids through the rules as you go.


Some unexpected entertainment. This guy had these little wooden figures on strings and he'd sing a song and make them dance by moving his toes. Kinda different.


Some more kids. They were everywhere, especially when the nearby school let out for lunch.

Worship in Nakivale

Today we visited Nakivale (nach-ee-VAHL-ay), a Rwandan and Congolese refugee camp near Tanzania. Here's a short clip of one of their choirs worshipping in Kinyarwanda. This church is absolutely amazing, and there'll be more to come about it and our trip sometime in the next few days.

Mario Kart Meets Weirdness

This Friday I went to Kampala to help pick (in Ugandan English you don't "pick up" things, you just "pick" them) a volunteer team coming to work with the Wilks (Barry, Scarlett, Emily, Jared, Sarah, Anna). It was an experience for sure. I was following Kari as she knew where she was going and I didn't. Though she had driven with Emily from Mbarara to the edge of Kampala, I picked up Emily on the outskirts of the city just in case we got separated, hoping that in the event of such she'd remember how to get to where we were going.

Courtesy of my mad driving skills, however, the switch was unnecessary. I defied the odds and managed to stay stuck to Kari the whole way, and even later when following her or Barry around town I had no problems. Did I have to cut off some people, be rude to taxis trying to squeeze in, and follow so close as to almost bump her? Yes. But that's Kampala driving even if you AREN'T trying to stick to someone like super glue coated duct tape. It's an experience for sure. I kept the right mindset about me, though, because handling the traffic is all about how you look at it. See you can easily get stressed out because there's so many cars and seemingly no rules, but I looked at it like a game. Granted, there's no extra lives or reset buttons, and if you hit a boda (motorcycle taxis that I only THOUGHT didn't know how to drive in Mbarara...the Mbarara bodas look like the safest drivers you've ever seen compared to the ones in Kampala), as much as they may play the role of the bad guys in the game it's not a good thing, but that gave me an objective (stay right behind, never let anyone cut in, and don't get hit) and eased the tension.

It felt weird being there, though. The traffic, the relative modernity of things, going into a real supermarket (Shoprite) and an almost (seriously) WalMart (Game) (both South African chains)...I've become so used to Mbarara that things which seem more like home felt strange. The most bizarre thing though was seeing lots of bazungu (white people), especially as we were in the stores that cater to expats in a part of town (right near the American Embassy) that caters to expats. Certainly never felt weird to see white people back home, and it has never felt weird to be surrounded by almost nothing but black people (as different as it may be from home), but seeing so many bazungu just felt strange. In town I might see one that's not on our team maybe once every 3 or 4 days, but there were lots in Kampala. And it felt weird. I don't know why, but it did. In fact, I'd say being in Kampala was about the worst culture shock I've experienced yet. And I just flat out don't get that.

On The Middle

On the way back from Kampala we stopped at the equator for pictures. Not much there, just a few souvenir shacks, some funnels where you can pay 5000 shillings to see how water spins differently north of, on, and south of the equator, and the Equation Cafe (I guess they thought EQUATor EQUATion...I guess) which sells drinks, food and souvenirs to benefit children orphaned by AIDS. All that and a fun little circle deal where you can take pictures to prove that you were actually at the equator.

Front, L-R: Niki, Vicki, Sarah, Emily, Jared, Mike
Back, L-R: Andy, Chuck (both of whom are staying with me)
Not Pictured But Present Somewhere Nearby: Myself, Kari, Barry, Jim

Me (photograph courtesy of Kari)

Words of Hope

A few weeks back I went on Words of Hope visits with Dr. Larry Pepper (the muzungu ... aka white person ... in the pictures and my supervisor), Naboth and Enoch. Words of Hope is a medical and spiritual counseling and outreach program for HIV/AIDS patients from the clinic in Mbarara and is run by K-Nob. We loaded up the Words of Hope van and headed out to Rubindi, a town a little over 25km away from Mbarara.

Our first visit was with a midwife in town. Though she had patients lined up out the door, she still took the time to sit in the van and talk with us. She also helped us find our next visit. We walked back through a narrow alley to a small dirt building with a tin roof and a curtain for a door. Inside this probably 5x10 structure with dirt floors lived the next patient. I couldn't believe that someone could live in such a place, yet here she lived with her kids, day in and day out, no where else to go. And believe me, there's people who have it worse. I thought I had seen poverty in East Austin and South Dallas and horrible living conditions at the Hurricane Katrina shelters at Reunion Arena and the Dallas Convention Center, but American poverty is well off by Ugandan standards and I'd take that crowded arena floor any day over a dirt-floor shack with a leaky roof. I can't imagine how bad it must be in places like Kiberia (Nairobi slums) or the South African townships. It's amazing just how much we have, and even more amazing how much we take for granted.

For our last visit we broke the rules and visited someone who wasn't on the list. Naboth had received a call saying we should visit this lady outside of town and so we went. Followed a dirt road for a ways and then turned off onto a bush path that wound around the hillsides for some distance. At times the path was so narrow through matoke plantations that the van barely squeezed through. How Naboth had ever found this place before is beyond me.

Eventually we passed a ruin of a house and came upon where the lady lived. The view was incredible: had this been West Austin there'd have been multi-million dollar mansions where her mud and dung house sits. We went inside and sat down and she began to tell us her story. She had been living in the house we had passed earlier when her husband died. Not long thereafter the giant tree out front began to drop huge branches on the roof, which you could imagine would do some damage. However she was very fortunate. Instead of taking everything from her and making her leave (which they very well could have and in general most likely would have done), her husband's mother and brother helped her. They let her keep all her belongings and even assisted in building her new house. Though she at times had been very sick her four kids worked hard to take care of her. She had resisted the temptation to visit witch doctors and traditional healers and instead had stuck to the Mbarara clinic and to TASO, a Ugandan HIV/AIDS NGO. She had stuck to her faith and it had carried her through many hard times.

When we first came upon the house all I could think of was how unfortunate this woman was to have to live in a small building made of mud, dung, sticks and tin, with kids without shoes and covered in dirt from working outside. And true, it's certainly unfortunate; however, had I kept focused on that tragedy I would never have seen the incredible way in which God had blessed this woman. And a blessing she certainly saw it to be.