African Inland Mission

African Inland Mission
"Christ-centered churches among all African peoples"

Monday, March 14, 2016

March 14, 2016

Hello all, Ingrid here greeting everyone from a very hot dry Moroto, Uganda.  Our average temperature since early January has been in the mid to high 90’s with little relief.  This has been the hottest February/March we have experienced in our three years here. We traveled from Moroto to Kampala in early March for a week and traded the dry sauna for a steam bath as Kampala was experiencing high heat as well, just with the added touch of humidity.  It is amazing how little motivation there is for a lot of activity when one is producing a lot of sweat just in sitting. 

One scripture that continues to clearly be an active part of our lives here comes from 1 Thessalonians 2:8 We loved you so much that we shared with you not only God’s Good News but our own lives as well.  We are definitely a part of the community and this continues to be demonstrated in so many ways.  Even in communities several hours away, we meet people we know from Moroto.  On our way back to Moroto last week, we ran into a man we have gotten to know from Moroto who warned us the bridge was out on the road back to here and explained how to go a different way to reach the main road after the broken bridge. 
Ingrid & friend making bracelets at girls home
Without his kindness we would have traveled one hour only to have to turn back and drive one hour back to Soroti and then another hour back another way.  This is one example of the small things that encourage me so much these days.  Another encouragement to me is the generator that we have, purchased for us by our Italian mechanic in Kampala at a price that we could afford.  He bought it and waited months until we had the money to reimburse him and pick it up.  Right now we are going on three days without power and it looks to be many more before it is restored.  All the power lines along our road are being replaced and put into new locations so that roadwork can happen.  Without the generator everything in our freezer and frig would be spoiled by now in this heat.  What kindness God shows us.


Lyle with deaf attendees at recent youth gathering
We experienced our first presidential elections here and hunkered down in our home with other ex-pats for the day.  There was a huge police presence in Moroto and because of that there was very little violence.  We cannot speak a lot about what is happening here with regard to outcomes but our requests for prayer are ongoing.  This isn’t over yet.  Sorry to be so cryptic but have been encouraged to be very subtle.  Because of the elections in mid-February, schools didn’t begin their first term until after the election on the 18th; they should have started the beginning of February.  It is a very different system; you as an adult must be in your own village of origin to vote, even if you work in another part of the country, so many teachers were gone and the schools didn’t really start for a week or so after the elections.

Getting permission from village elder to help a boy in school
We are now up to 18 children, 17 boys and one girl, which was very challenging to get into school.  We had several new boys and the girl as well, which meant purchasing mattresses for boarding, all the supplies they would need to live there such as a metal box which holds all their worldly goods, a cup and plate and spoon, soap for clothes and body, sugar, books, pens, mathematic kits, for secondary students calculators and then we would move with all this to the various schools and register them and move them in when allowed.  This was our first experience enrolling students into secondary schools, and we felt the challenge of a learning curve we don’t understand.  Our first boy in one of these wasn’t even one of ours but we were helping another man who was in the USA.  If this boy hadn’t shown up on the 19th, the school would have given his spot to another student on a waiting list.  No one is guaranteed passage into a secondary school even with top grades.  This school wasn’t in Moroto and we think this boy was the first to register for the year at this school, cause it was with us they figured out that they hadn’t put on the registration paper all the fees and requirements.  Because of this we had to drive back to Moroto, and finish getting all the things including passport photos, for this young man, and then they made him take off his trousers and put on shorts????  I asked the deputy head teacher to help me understand this, and he said it was for disciplines sake, which seems contrary to me that gym shorts reflect more discipline than trousers.

Getting permission at another village. Pastor Noah is helping
Our one young woman is named Miriam, and I first came to meet her over a year ago in a hospital in a village about 45 minutes from here at the Catholic Italian Hospital there.  She had just had her leg amputated above the knee, and was understandably very upset.  What I didn’t know is that she had very little support as her mother is dead and the father remarried and as so often happens in these cases, the children born to a previous mother are not welcome.  She had some distant relatives of her mother taking care of her, while in the hospital. Here in Uganda, the hospital only supplies medicine, the family must supply all food, bedding, water, bathing supplies, etc.  So if a person doesn’t have a family member willing to stay and help them, they often don’t go to the hospital and death usually is the result of serious illness then.  Miriam wouldn’t engage with me at the hospital and I didn’t think about her until I saw her walking with her crutches down the street in Moroto.  I would always try to greet her and finally she would greet me back instead of ignoring me.  Then I started seeing her at the church we attend and I would go out of my way to greet her, as the culture would have her be invisible because of her handicap.  She finally got up the courage to approach me and ask if she could come see me.  Of course I said yes, and through getting to know her found out her story.  She is staying with a family from another tribe on the same grounds as her father and stepmother, and has been supported by this other Christian family who could not afford to help her with secondary school. 
Reading to a friend's child (no glasses - big squint)
So after prayer, with the Holy Spirit’s confirmation, we agreed to help her go to school.  By a miracle, she was accepted into Moroto Secondary School, as her grades were not up to their levels, and together Lyle, Miriam and I have learned the process for enrolling in this particular school.  Please keep her in your prayers, she has been extremely appreciative and shared with me that she now has hope where as before she felt hopeless and couldn’t understand why God had allowed her life to go the way it did.  I have no concrete answer for her, but was able to confidently share with her, that God loves her, hears her prayers and finds her so valuable that He sent His Son Jesus to die in her place so that she could have a complete relationship with God the Father. 

Tapac Primary School (where our friends a moving to)
We also helped another organization get their 12 boys settled into school as the driving force of that organization was out of the country at the beginning of the term.  It has been a challenging few weeks, but everyone is settled now and we have come to know many more people as a result.  Another interesting thing about schools in this country is that teachers can be transferred to other places without warning.  Two of our good friends here, from a different tribe, found out on the 19th of Feb. that they were being transferred to a school in the bush about an hour from here on extremely rough roads.  We took them out to see the school, they became excited as they are now viewing this as God’s will for a people to hear about Jesus and that God is sending them to do this work as well as teach.  It was a privilege to watch the Holy Spirit move in them as we visited this very isolated place.  How they are to get their belonging out there still remains to be seen.  They will have to leave children back here in Moroto which is difficult for them to do, and difficult for me to think about, as they are one of few couples who actually live as a family.

Ingrid with friend and Shalom 
Ministry wise, we continue to see the Lord moving in the Bible study with the prison guards, taking cultural truths such as women can only be saved by bearing children (1 Tim 2:15) being taking out of context, and all of us together examining many scriptures to see what is truth.  Another one is that women are spiritually weaker, because of Eve’s being deceived by satan, and together as a group wrestling with Adam’s sin since he wasn’t deceived and still ate the fruit and was punished as well.  For the men in this group, I felt I got to see sacred work taking place in minds, and for the women in this group, watching them see men’s eyes opened to their own deception was an amazing honor for Lyle and me.  I also minister to the female prisoners, both on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I would ask for prayer for some of these prisoners as the charges against them are ones that can only be seen by the high court, and the high court never comes to Moroto, I am told it is too expensive.  They have been held for over two years without seeing a judge and no one outside seems to care that they say they are innocent but are losing years of their lives waiting for a court that will not come.  They have been told, and I have been told, that they should just plead guilty and then they would get a sentence and know there is an end.  Please pray for a miracle that the court would come to Moroto!!!  Justice isn’t a reality here, in sooooo many ways.

At a workshop (Thomas is on the left and closest to the front)
We have been blessed to have a young man join us here for ministry for a few months.  His name is Thomas and he is a third year Bible college student from Alberta, Canada.  We cannot tell you what a breath of fresh air he is to us, as he really loves Jesus and wants to serve Him.  He will be here through May and we will be sad to see him go.  We also are getting a young woman from the UK here for two and a half months, to work with us in ministry.  She arrives the first part of April.  Her name is Suzanne, so a prayer for these two precious people is appreciated as well as continuing to pray for us.  We treasure this!!

Getting ready to cook up an ostrich egg with friends
God continues to remind us that it is He that brought us to the Karimojong and it is He that sustains us and surrender to Him and His plan for these precious people is never to leave our minds.  We believe that it is His will for a Moroto Focus Team to join us here in 2017 and we have the privilege of watching Him organize and put together a group of people who love Him and are willing to serve Him as a team.  What a privilege and honor it is to be where we are: both in relationship with our Lord God and with others.  He demonstrates and affirms this in so many ways, not the least of these are the gifts flowing in to our compound.  We have received the gift of two guinea fowl (male and female) via a general in the Uganda military, a pair of turkeys, (male and female), and another female which just flew in and we are waiting for the owner to come claim her, and most recently two tortoises.  Lyle was thinking maybe this was a Karimojong type of the ark.   



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