A New Leaf

This week a friend invited me to go with her to an "Evening with Women Writers" at her church, featuring Shauna Niequist, author of Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet. I agreed to go, mainly because I suffer from that dreaded disease, FOMO, or fear of missing out, and because I love my friend and look for any excuse to spend more time with her.

And as I listened to these women speak, I was struck by a thought. They seemed normal. I tend to picture authors as some sort of mythic creative beings whose brilliant ideas are constantly bubbling at the surface, struggling to be put to paper. I don't often think of writing as a discipline, to be cultivated like any other.

It's easy to think that our opinions only matter to the people closest to us. My husband, my friends, my family, they are obligated to listen to me, but does anyone else really care? So here's my resolution. This year I am going to write not because I care whether people out there are interested in what I have to say, but rather because I want to be better. I want to be informed. I want to learn to finish what I start.

If you want to learn along with me, you are always welcome in my virtual home. 

Things That Keep Me Sane

Iced mochas at Cafe Pap in Kampala...my weekend treat :)

Beautiful sunrises...

Monkeys!
The Ugandan boys I get to meet Tuesday nights in Kampala at Off-tu mission (this is soccer night last Tuesday...)

Getting to make good food occasionally...yes that is a calzone :)

Laughing at the absurdity of my friends...

Playing with babies...

My daily morning runs...

Too Much for Words

I'm sorry for how long this post is in coming! I have been essentially busy out of my mind the past three weeks or so, plus when you are unable to get any internet at all it presents some serious problems in updating your blog...oh well, I'm here now and that's what matters. Let me tell you what has been going on in my life and in my head...
Well here we are about to leave for our rural home stays in the district of Soroti at the end of October. Cramming 26 people into a small coaster was probably not the most amazing experience of my life, but we definitely survived...After 6 hours we reached Soroti and camped out overnight in the backyard of one of the Ugandan staff members who has a home in that village. Sitting around the campfire, telling embarrassing stories and playing mafia, it was great to see how close we have all become. We even did a little "star gazing" - Brystal will know what I'm talking about if she reads this :)

The next morning we got dropped off at our home stays. Honestly I wasn't overly worried, mostly because I was coming into the experience with the expectation that it would probably be awkward a good amount of the time and that I would most likely be frustrated with many aspects of rural culture.
Here is my Papa and Toto! (Toto is Ateso for mom). My Papa was a chaplain at a boys secondary school near where their house was. He would talk to me for hours about pretty much everything. He was one of the most gentle human being I have ever met. When he would take me to visit people in the village who wanted to see the "visitor" he was concerned that I might "bruise my feet" so he would always take me on his piki (motorcycle) so that I didn't have to walk...Let me tell you, riding through dirt roads in the bush of Uganda on the back of a motorcycle with a live chicken strapped to the handlebars and a massive thing of coke and a container of g-nuts in my lap was probably one of the best experiences of my life.

My Toto was...well...bossy. But I loved her despite that - especially since that is just a part of the culture here (there really is no word for please. Instead of "can I borrow your bucket" it is always "give me your bucket"...I've kinda just learned to deal with it). But she genuinely wanted me to have the experience of a rural African woman. Although she would boss me around, it gave me so many new experiences and she always was very intentional about making sure she didn't overwork me.

One of the most difficult things about being in Soroti was that I felt so completely incompetent most of the time I was there. Honestly, I am not cut out for the life of a village woman. Every time I tried to do something I failed miserably. My 75 year old Tata could pick cow peas in the fields for more than twice as long as I could! I learned many things about my own pride and was finally able to realize that every person has a different type of strength. It was important for me to experience being the weak one for a change...Here's Tata! She's probably the cutest old African woman ever - spreading cow peas onto the mat to dry in the sun.

Most mornings we would wake up and do some sort of work - usually outside in the garden. When I was there, the cow peas were ready to be picked so that is what we would do most of the time. Let me tell you, now I know why African women when they get old are permanently stooped over. They do absolutely everything bent over double! - washing clothes, gardening, cooking, washing dishes. There was also a lot of time to just relax and sit and talk. They really value community so oftentimes we would just chill on a mat on the front stoop and talk or shell g-nuts. They tried to teach me as many Ateso words as they possibly could, although there were way too many for me to remember in such a short period of time...

Here's some other things that I did...
Serving tea...Peeling plantains...



Trying to make g-nut paste for dinner...I'm not very good at it.
Oh and planning with Katharine...or trying to anyway. She was still pretty afraid of me by the end of the week, but she would still smile at me and be adorable :)

Life in the village was a lot simpler than here...in some ways I was reluctant to come back. There's so much less pollution and dirtiness. They live their lives day to day, growing the food that they need to eat and living off the land. That was a new experience for me and one that I really grew to cherish the week that I was there. The hospitality that I experienced was incredible - I can't imagine coming into a more welcoming environment.

And yet...there were things that were difficult and frustrating. Gender roles here are so different than in America and often times I chafed from what I thought were oppressive gender roles. The women always sit on a mat on the floor to eat while the men sit in chairs. Toto even made me kneel twice to men who came to visit - something that I almost refused to do in protest, but ended up swallowing my pride and doing anyway. I learned a lot about humility. If Christ humbled himself in obedience, becoming a man and dying on the cross, why is it so hard for me to forsake my pride in order to show respect for a culture in which I am a visitor?

In his book Compassion, Henri Nouwen labels obedience and servanthood as key characteristics of God and two of the important ways he chooses to reveal himself. As I was reading that book I kept wondering why if the Bible portrays obedience in such a positive light, I have a difficult time with the idea of "submission" in gender roles. Obviously I'm not saying that the gender roles I see her are Biblical - in fact I think that in some ways they are morally wrong - but I am more convicted of my own pride and I can objectively say that there are some things about American gender roles which are a pollution of what God intended as well. Josh knows that I am not the type of girl who "submits" easily...but I think that I am more willing to admit now that obedience when done right does not have to be demeaning or oppressive.

Moving on...
This is Sipi Falls...possibly the most amazing place I have ever been to in my life. After our rural home stays this is where we traveled for debrief. It is in the mountains on the border of Uganda and Kenya and filled with all sorts of waterfalls just like this one. I honestly cannot even describe to you the feeling of being there...it was so unpolluted and a totally pure example of the majesty of God. I would sit out on this amazing wooden swing outside my room at night and look across the entire huge valley below with the waterfalls in the distance and I got chills some times considering how perfect God's creation is - and how horribly we have screwed it up.
On the second day we were there we made this hike which can only be described with one word: EPIC. It took us almost all day but we hiked to three waterfalls - both the top and the bottom of each. My friends described it using the Sigur Ros song Saeglopur - listen to it and try to imagine hiking up this massive mountain, through banana plantations and cabbage fields and then reaching this ridge looking over hundreds of miles of land right next to a waterfall...then going downhill and traveling to the bottom looking up and this mass of water cascading down hundreds of feet...ridiculous.

Here's my group at the bottom of the biggest waterfall I had ever seen in my life.

Honestly I didn't want to come back to Mukono. It is really dirty here, polluted and life in the mountains and in the village was so peaceful and calm. Here I am getting called mzungu all the time and getting hit on by random strangers on the street - in the village this never happened. Sure, people stared sometimes, but they treated me with so much respect and they all wanted to talk to me and spend time with me. I felt connected to them in a way that I don't necessarily feel connected here.

Well I don't want to bore you with too long of a blog post, I'll try to write another one soon because I have plenty more to talk about!! That's it for now though. Thanks for your patience with me!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

In the spirit of the Wheaton record which for every edition publishes a "the good, the bad and the ugly" I figured I would do the same and share some of my experiences from being in Uganda...Enjoy!

THE GOOD

1) Spending Sunday afternoon with my host family - got there and had tea with three, count 'em three, pieces of white bread...then a huge lunch a couple hours later...good thing I'm not there the whole semester or I would be massive!

2) Going to an international craft fair in Kampala last Friday. There were way way too many people there and I had to clutch my bag tightly to my chest to prevent it from being snatched, but hey it's a good African experience :)

3) Playing dancing games with street children in Kampala - they didn't quite get the point of the game but boy can African children dance! Way more rhythm than me, but hey they also almost all sing off tune, so I guess we're even...

4) Planning to make breakfast for my Ugandan politics class tomorrow...french toast and scrambled eggs yum :) Then going to drop off the materials to make breakfast at my prof's house for tomorrow morning and being invited to have dinner with them - quiche and tomato cucumber salad - double yum!

5) Mom and Dad coming to see me this Sunday!

6) Going rolling (translation: walking outside the university gates to get a rolex around 9 or 10 with UCU students - rolex = chapatti with fried egg + cabbage + tomato) - however I usually opt for the fake, but still delicious ice cream which is sold right next to the stands :)

7) Playing with the children at Off-tu, the home for street kids which I am working with on Tuesday...normally I don't get to go to their place in Mukono (I usually go Kampala) - now I am "Auntie Meghan" and they invite me to come back any time

THE BAD

1) My eyes getting a slight infection from all the pollution/dust in the air - got eye drops though so now "I'm ok" (this is what Ugandans say every time you ask them how they are)

2) The UNBEARABLE heat the past couple days...I have resorted to a shower in the morning after my run and another half shower (without washing my hair) in the evenings before bed...and I am soaked all day with sweat

3) Fearing for my life when I am in a car on the roads in Kampala...especially with Uncle Julius from Off-tu - after riding with him I will never complain about a driver in the US ever again...add in being in a car with nonexistent seat belts and you have a recipe for disaster

4) Internet which is either really really slow or goes out randomly - unless you get up at 5:30 in the morning...

THE UGLY

1) My Ugandan "friend" Bob walking me back from the dining hall with his arm around my shoulder...even though he knows I'm engaged, but told me to "not get married and wait for him instead" - afterward my shoulder smelled like BO (gonna call him BO Bob from now on...and no, most Africans do not wear deodorant)

2) Begging children on the streets of Kampala...

3) Not paying attention to where I was going and stepping right into a gutter on campus...luckily Ugandans ALWAYS say "sorry" in response to every mishap and rarely if ever laugh, so it wasn't as embarrassing as it could have been...

4) 64 days till I get to see Josh again...ugh that seems like an eternity...

Thanks for reading my blog! I am almost to the halfway point of my time here which is crazy! At the end of next week I leave for my rural home stay and then it will be November...pray for continued guidance and perseverance as I continue to learn and gain understanding of this culture.

What Does the African Jesus Look Like?

It's funny but I don't even know how to start writing this post. Perhaps I am slightly jaded towards missionaries who come in with their own cultural preconceptions about Christianity and attempt to impose them upon the culture to which they are attempting to "witness." So often throughout African history, Western Christians have created more havoc than good when attempting to "bring Christianity" to the African continent. Why is AIDS much more common in areas where missionaries evangelized?...because they came in without understanding the sexual practices of Africans and only preached against what was the most obvious sin, polygamy. Without prior knowledge of a culture, Christian evangelism does very little good at all...so I guess this is the basis from which I am starting. My being in Africa is NOT about missions...and it is frustrating when people think I am here because I have something to offer. In fact, I have very little to offer in the circumstances I encounter here. I am more often a burden than I am a help...

Although I am not here to "evangelize" so to speak, I am here to begin to understand a culture which is very different from my own. This is an attitude which is severely lacking to our superior Western attitude. In a class I am taking here in Uganda, I just finished reading John Taylor's The Primal Vision. As a disclaimer I do not agree with all that he lays out in this book and in fact if my USP friends knew I was writing a blog post about this they would cringe, since we have beaten this dead horse over and over in class...but it is still something to think about. In his book, Taylor attempts to lay out the basic tenets of African Christianity and ask some both profound and confusing questions, such as the one above. I'll attempt, even with inadequate words, to give you some of my thoughts about this...

Western Christianity is often completely irrelevant in the African context. An African proverb says when the leopard comes to you, the club at your neighbors won't drive him off, meaning that bringing our own cultural expectations to this context is ridiculous - Africans must think of Christianity IN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT. We must enter into this with an attitude of humility, recognizing how little we truly understand...a period of learning about a culture is essential before you even think about "evangelizing" in the traditional sense. As long as we continue to look on African culture with a patriarchal and superior attitude, we won't understand what the culture has to offer our own, sometimes impoverished faith. God is already here, we are not bringing him as though he is dependent on us to spread Christianity to the rest of the world...

Africa is a communal society, not dependent on individual interests. 'I participate, therefore I am' as opposed to the Western 'I think, therefore I am' is essential to understanding how this culture operates. As a human being, your life is intricately tied to the lives of all those around you, whether living or dead (and yes, ancestors are hugely important here). As examples, to an African, the concept of guilt is irrelevant because it is based upon an individual feeling of wrongdoing, but the concept of shame is hugely important because it implies judgment from the community for an act of sin. An emotions which is bottled up inside is better to an African than one that is expressed. In America, we are taught that if an emotion is kept bottled up inside it becomes dangerous to our own wellbeing. In Africa, if expressed, an emotion becomes an entity that you can no longer control, and it can even act back upon you (I'm sorry if this concept is confusing...) Our cultural views of the self in turn affect our view of salvation..."what does death-of-self mean for a self that is dispersed into many centers of consciousness far beyond the narrow circle of the skull and precincts of the flesh?..." Maybe the sinners prayer is not relevant...

Ok here comes the most important part of what Taylor lays out (I think anyway)...

From the African perspective, God is not necessarily a God who is personally involved with his creation. This is in essence why they so often pray to ancestors, etc. - because they are doubtful whether so high a diety as God would even care about their own petty affairs. Everything is nature and the world is connected, but God is essentially outside the sphere of human connectedness. This is why Christ is so important! To an African, the concept of God's omnipotence is not as important - as Bonhoeffer says "that is no genuine experience of God, but a bit of extended world." You do not have to "know" God to come up with this concept. We simply take a human attribute and and extend it to the highest level...we have some level of power, so God must be all powerful. What is important about Jesus is rather his PRESENCE in the physical world, bringing God into the circle of human life. God responded to the suffering of the world NOT by using his power to reverse it, but by subjecting himself to it through Christ. Africans do not see a God that intervenes for them in times of suffering (how could they when they see so much destruction around them...) but a God who placed himself in their shoes legitimizes his call for them to persevere through times of suffering. Jesus is the reversal of all that is human - we live for ourselves, but he lived completely for others.

I work at a home for street children once a week and a few weeks ago some of the young girls sang a song for us which started out saying "I see the Son of Man, suffering home alone, nothing for them to eat..." They know what suffering is but they take comfort in the fact that Christ was and still is present with them in their situation. Christ's triumph over sin and death, although still important, is not as relevant as his presence among us...

Hopefully that wasn't as rambling and confusing at it sounded...

Turn Down the Music

It's hard to sum up my emotions a month into my semester here in Uganda...

Jaded...
Confused...
Frustrated...
Joyful....

You name the emotion I have probably felt it. Sometimes it feels like my life is an emotional roller coaster. One minute I will feel so completely thankful and overwhelmed with joy to be here and then something will happen and my emotions will plummet so quickly that it ruins the day. In order to really be present here, it has become just constant cultural immersion and sometimes I get so overwhelmed. I miss Josh, I miss home, I miss Wheaton desperately and yet I try so hard to not think about going home in December because I truly believe that will be detrimental to my time here.

Being here can be so amazing at times. Sometimes I feel such a genuine fellowship with the people here. I love running on the track every morning with my buddy Charissa (who makes me laugh so hard I sometimes think I'm going to pee myself...), having dance parties with Ugandan students (let me tell you - Ugandan men especially, but all Ugandans too can dance sooooo well...it is extremely intimidating), sitting through classes in the houses of my teachers and feeling like I am at home (especially when they make REAL coffee, not the nasty instant kind they always drink here), going out at night to get a rolex with some friends (rolex = chapatti + egg with cabbage, onion and tomato in it...pretty good although not my favorite), hitting up the canteens for a bowl of fruit (the pineapple here is incredible!)....and yet...

Sometimes I feel so jaded. Any interaction between me and a Ugandan student or male in general that is not initiated by me is worthy of suspicion. I am tired of walking into town and being the center of everyone's attention. Today I went to Mukono and did not see a single other white person the whole time I was there. I get stared at, hit on, asked for money, overcharged for things I'm buying...I now truly know how it feels to be a minority. This culture can be so demeaning to women and occasionally I feel truly oppressed. There are only a few men who can be my friends because I know they are harmless...any other man ultimately just ends up telling you that he has always wanted to date a white woman and that he thinks you are beautiful (and not in a platonic way...)

The poverty here is not so obvious at first glance. No, the people around me, especially on campus, are far from starving. In fact they eat so much food that I can't ever finish what is given to me. Yet when I walk on the streets, especially in Kampala I see how dirty and awful the conditions are and I know that I am helpless to do anything about it. When I am in a car and we are stalled by traffic and children come up to the window and hold out their hands for money, I am crushed and yet I know that the answer is not just to hand out money at every opportunity. And yet I hate it when people stereotype Africa as being needy and poor...because there is so much more to being here than that. Please don't ask me if I will starve while I'm here or if I'm constantly seeing starving children because that is a completely Western perspective...

I guess I am coming to realize more and more that just being present is enough. I can't do much to change the situation but I'm here and I truly want to learn. That's all that I really can ask of myself...What is my responsibility? I really don't know...but I do know that while I'm here I will learn more from those around me than they will learn from me and that is a good thing. "Helping" Africa has become such a fad in the church and being here has helped me understand that in some ways "the world Church is impoverished and incomplete without the insights that the Logos has been preparing for it in Africa" (to quote John Taylor's The Primal Vision). Maybe when my time here is done I'll understand more fully the implications of this idea...

Thanks for reading! I've had this Shane and Shane song running around in my head for the past couple days and in some ways it parallels part of my struggle here...(I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Shane and Shane by the way...if you don't know who they are you need to check them out...www.shaneandshane.com)

They sang this at one of their concerts I went to at the end of last semester and it's a little hard to understand without the story behind it...So one of the Shanes said that he had heard this man speak once and he had told the story of this church in Nazi Germany that was situated right across from a railroad track. Every Sunday the church would come together for their service and one day right in the middle of the service they heard this horrible noise and smelled something that smelled like rotting flesh. They realized that a train was going by full of Jews on the way to concentration camps and it had stopped right in front of their church. The Jews cried out for help and the congregation did not know what to do. This continued for a few Sundays and eventually on one Sunday the church decided to make some changes to their program...When the train came by this time they were ready and when it stopped they started worshiping as loud as they could, trying to drown out the noise of the people crying for help. The preacher kept yelling "Sing louder!" and the congregation worshiped to cover the sound of the suffering Jews. You can take the implications of this story any way you want to...to me it was powerful and challenging.

TURN DOWN THE MUSIC

If you were hungry
Would we give you food
If you were thirsty
Would we give you drink
If you were a stranger
Would we let you in

What would be the song we'd sing to you in everything
Would it be an empty hallelujah to the King

Turn down the music
Turn up the noise
Turn up your voice, oh God, and let us hear the sound
Our people broken
Willing to love
Give us your heart, oh God, a new song rising up

If you were naked
Would we give you clothes
If you were an orphan
Would we give a home
and if you were in prison
Would we visit you

What would be the song we'd sing to you in everything
Would it be an empty hallelujah to the King

Turn down the music
Turn up the noise
Turn up your voice, oh God, and let us hear the sound
Our people broken
Willing to love
Give us your heart, oh God, a new song rising up

Let it be our worship
Let it be our true religion
In this world but not of it
Holding on to our confession

Turn down the music
Turn up the noise
Turn up your voice, oh God, and let us hear the sound
Our people broken
Willing to love
Give us your heart, oh God, a new song rising up...

Meet my family!

A little over a week ago we started our first homestay for the program, so I have been staying with a Ugandan family in Mukono and will be there until this Friday. I am sorry to say that going into this I was somewhat apprehensive - especially because I was just starting to like living in the dorm and I felt like I was connecting with people here and I was sad to have to "leave" in a way. I wasn't sure what my family would be like and I didn't really know what to expect...

I got dropped off at my home on Sunday - and honestly that wasn't even necessary because it turned out that my home is right outside the university gate! I'm actually the closest home to campus. After taking a general look around I could see why the director of my program had said it was "probably the most rustic placement they had." I don't want to give you the impression that my family is "poor" because I feel like that in a way is me trying to get you to feel pity for them and that is not what I want. Our house does not have electricity or running water. We use a pit latrine outside, but it is hard to get to because it is muddy to walk there and it is not very close to the house. There are three small rooms in the house - one is a sitting room, one where my four siblings sleep and then a room that I share with my host mom. They cook outside over a fire and usually we eat on the floor or sitting on a bed in the second room.

Here's a rundown of my family:
This is my host sister Patience - the most brilliant girl I have ever met. She LOVES speaking English and speaks very very well for a ten year old who's primary language is Luganda and not English. She was so friendly immediately and just wanted to do everything with me and talk to me. She is almost always very happy - only a few times have I seen her get upset. I have had so many conversations with her that you would never be able to have with a normal ten year old...very insightful :)

Then comes Andrew. He is the youngest in the family at eight. He doesn't speak much English but his smile could light up a whole room. He absolutely adores playing futbol (soccer) and he plays all day every day. My favorite anecdote from Andrew: I made them french toast for dinner one night (one of the only things you could possibly make over a wood fire...) and he ate so much he looked ready to throw up. He just kept saying over and over in his broken English "the boy...is going...to burst..."
This is Vivian - yes she is EXTREMELY tall, even taller than this picture makes it seem. She is my host mom Vennah's younger sister (much younger...) and she is in high school. At first she is quiet and shy but opened up to me so much during the time that I was there. Up until a few days ago she had not been able to pay her school fees and so had stayed home from school reading many many novels which she absolutely loves.

Irene is the oldest sibling in the family, but I actually do not have any pictures of her...She is in her first year at Uganda Christian University where I am studying and she is a pretty fantastic girl. Even though she is only 18 I think that her maturity level is off the charts. She is very busy and usually would get home after I had already gone to bed, but then she would just come and plop down on my bed and start talking to me. Half of the time I don't really remember what about because I was half asleep...but I gained so many insights about African culture from talking to her...


Finally here is me and Mama Vennah. She is definitely the matriarch of the family...and works extremely hard. She has a full time job and is going to school to get her degree in Counseling (like me!) Unfortunately she wasn't able to be at home a lot of the time and she would get home late so we did not get a chance to talk a whole lot, but I enjoyed being a part of her family immensely.

Although being a part of a Ugandan family was an awesome experience, there are always cultural barriers to overcome. I have to say that even after being here for a month, I am still in culture shock in some ways. Ugandan culture is extremely hierarchical and it is hard to get used to being treated better simply by virtue of being white. On the flip side, because I am white I get the "mzungu price" at markets (meaning they overcharge because they think I have money) and I get more attention than I really desire from boda boda drivers (motorcycle taxis) and practically anyone that I meet...Thankfully my host family was very relaxed and helped me feel comfortable in their home right away. I am sad to leave them.



Aaaaaand of course anywhere I go there is also a following of children small and large who want to wave at me and touch my hand...the little girl in the pink shirt in the bottom left's name is Lillit and she follows me around sometimes. She has the cutest smile in the world...Here she is again :) Cutie...

Ok well that's all I have for now. I am leaving in two hours to spend the weekend in Jinja which is an hour or so away from Mukono...thanks for reading my blog!!