MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 10-27-2010
Agandi! (How are you!) We are doing well here in Uganda. Our children’s ministry is doing great. Anna is teaching the verses in Swahili. Do we know Swahili? Not yet, but Djuna (the national pastor) translates, and I sit there as raptly as the kids do, learning Swahili along with my wife. We leave the house at 7AM on Sundays, and drive an hour-and-a-half over the most awful dirt roads you can imagine to the first preaching point, where we have an adult service in which I preach, followed by a children’s service, which Anna handles. Then we drive to Sangano for another service, and then head home. It’s great fun. I am enjoying the simple pleasure of being able to preach expositorily through a book of the Bible (working through Ephesians at the moment), something you cannot do on deputation.
A couple weeks ago we had more adventure than normal. The rain here turns the roads into a morass, with predictable results.
As you can see, the one truck got stuck. There’s a team of men on the other side trying to dig it out. The other truck tried to sneak past, and got sucked into the ditch, completely blocking the road. We finally got onto a side path and went around, but we were a bit late for church that morning.
We got a new dog, a female Rottweiller named Samantha. That finishes our complement of guard dogs at three. The six month old puppy, Teal’c, likes her and tries to play with her, but she’s still too small for roughhousing, and I think it wears her out. Our goal is to breed them, and keep ourselves supplied with healthy, big, intelligent dogs suitable for guarding.
Pray for our language study. We are still studying Runyankore, and now that we are going to Nakivale regularly, we will in time need to learn Swahili also. This will greatly expand the number of people we can communicate with to much of East Africa. Even my high school French is turning out to be needed. We are working at it steadily, while also engaging in our ministry, homeschooling kids, and just living life. It keeps us busy, which is always a good thing.
Pray for our car. God supplied the money for tires, which is a blessing, but we also had to get the transmission fixed, and I just found out it is going to need an overhaul – expensive. This is our means of getting to the places where we minister, so we have to keep it running. We can still get around, but it will need to be fixed. I’m praying we’ll be able to get it done in December when we go to the capitol again for Anna’s next checkup. It’s probably not the best car to have, but it was available, and at a price we could afford at the time. My plan is to keep it running this first term, save up to buy a van unless God supplies the money sooner, and then save for another village car (a Toyota next time), while home on furlough. In the meantime though, it has to keep working.