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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!!
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| 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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