This goes without saying, but we need to appreciate and thank you anyway. Thank you so much for your financial, emotional, spiritual and prayer support these last six months.
It will be impossible to document all the beauties and challenges we have faced and overcome these past few months, but we will highlight a few.
Truth be told our transition here to Africa has been several years in the making. You see our son-in-law and daughter helped organize the first short term trip to Kiburara in 2008, after a casual conversation between two friends at a pastor training center in Maryland. Our church had sent teams, mainly college kids, to the annual youth conference, ever since.
The point is that God used my retirement as a catalyst to serious conversations about what was next. We had a passion for the work here in Uganda-and our health was good, but we didn’t think that CGM (Covenant Global Ministries) needed our help. In fact, we had already started the application process with another group in the eastern region, when Pastor Moses and his wife approached us and asked if we would work with them instead.
We prayed and sought council, and in March 2023 accepted his offer for a two-year volunteer assignment (working without pay). Our launch date of August 2023 was delayed because of a cycling accident in July when I suffered a hip fracture.
Once I had completed physical therapy, we flew out in mid-September. During the last six months we have attended burials, weddings, baptisms, commissioning’s, births, and other numerous activities.
Our core mission is to simply live out our “Christian Lives” here in this community the same way we would live our core values back in the states. As simplistic as that sounds it’s a pretty radical concept, and a transformative idea in this context. It is no small thing living authentic lives and modeling a stable marriage in a society that has been ravaged by tribal genocide and HIV-AIDs.
The median age here is fifteen years old, so at sixty-eight years old we are considered “elders”, and we are shown a great deal of respect. Our words carry authority not just because we are from the USA but because we have four wonderful daughters, three sons-in-law, six grandkids and a forty-six-year marriage (a LEGACY unheard of in this country).
Contextualization and culture adjustment was just the beginning. English is the official language, but we felt it would be important to learn the local tribal Rukiga language and learn the Ankole regional traditions. We get giggles and hear laughter as we attempt to speak the local dialect, but we also get tons of respect for trying.
In a nutshell here it is: three burials, four weddings, two commissioning’s (with 800-1500 guest), three baptisms (about fifteen participants each time), sixteen leadership training’s in “inductive biblical studies”, fifteen men’s mentorship meetings, and hosting a variety of missionaries and local missions’ workers.
One of our most significant achievements was Mary forming a young girl’s mentoring group to provide counseling services for at risk high school students. This was stressed as one of the most important needs in the community by Pastor Moses. They have also met twenty times in these past few months.
We have found our host country friendly, the people warm and willing to go out of their way for strangers. Reading our Monthly Newsletter has given you some of our funny anecdotes and the peculiarities of life in Uganda.
The abject poverty is difficult to understand in such a rich and fertile country, but once you get your head around the mismanagement and corruption at high levels it all makes sense.
We are not a “money giving organization, we are a people changing organization!” a local NGO Group once shared. Making that clear to the community has been an important step. Not a handout but a hand up.
Demonstrating an example of stability is truly a “paradigm shift” of huge proportions. “Change the way you think, and you change the way you act”, to paraphrase Stephen Covey’s book. Taking personal responsibility for your actions will change your outcomes.
So, as they used to say on the “Prairie Home Companion”, that’s all from Lake Woebegone, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.
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