All our adventures as missionaries, past and present.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 02-26-2014

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Greetings (finally) from Uganda! We have been here three weeks, and the internet has been off for roughly half that time. Every time I would sit down to write a prayer letter, the Internet would be in absentia. Every. Time. So frustrating. Anyway, I will take advantage of this brief foray into the 21st century to finally send an update.

Needless to say, we made it to Uganda. Everything went well. There was a bit of a disagreement getting through Heathrow, but we finally persuaded British Air to allow us to bring our most important carry-on pieces on the flight, and thus not expose our most valuable belongings to the tender mercies of Entebbe baggage handling. All luggage made it through to Uganda. Nothing was missing or tampered with, which was a blessing. Our friend Ssuemko was waiting for us at the airport. We got everything loaded up into his truck, and then drug our weary bodies over to Namuli Suites for the night. We left out the next day for Mbarara and, after over 48 hours of traveling, we were home.

It's not hard to disbelieve Evolution when you enter a house left vacant for nine months. You know something? Things get worse, not better, without an external intelligence acting upon a given system to impose order. It's an entropy thing. The dust was so thick, I thought I was at the beach. Some of our friends had come and done some preliminary cleaning in the main house, or it would have been much worse – thank you! We are, after all this time, finally reaching the point where our house is in order and fully functional.

I am in the middle of getting our work permits and so forth renewed. I made a trip to Kampala to submit those, and to pick up some deep-cycle batteries and solar panels. Umeme is load shedding all day Friday through Sunday every weekend. I have decided that our relationship is irreconcilable, and am preparing to get a divorce. 🙂

The people at Sangano Baptist are very excited about the library project. On their own, they began making the couple thousand bricks needed, and purchased the poles necessary to begin raising the structure for the library building. Jeff kicked in the funds for sand, cement, and iron sheets for a roof. Our library is taking shape. It lacks only the books. As of this letter, our container still sits in St. Louis, unshipped. Would you pray about helping us? Many of you contributed books, for which we are very grateful. Now we need to finish the journey and get them to Uganda. If all of you contribute some, together, it will be enough to ship. A library building, however well constructed, is no good to anybody without books to fill it. Please help us finish this worthy project and bring a library to the refugees at Nakivale.

Pray for us as we complete our transition back to the field. I have to get our solar system installed. I have to get our work permits and driving permits renewed. I need to pay our landlady three months' rent next month. Feburary is usually a low month for support. Pray I can get it all done.

Pray for the works. I had to deal with some interpersonal problems out at one of the churches. The people are working through it, but it has affected attendance. Pray they can learn how to get along, and restore their testimony in the community (you folks in America never have these problems, right? 😉 )

It is so great to be home, preaching the Gospel, and working with God's people in Uganda!

God bless you!

 

Some pictures of the library building:

Library 01

Library 02

Library 03

Library 04

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-28-2014

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Well, here we are again. We are STILL in Chicago. We actually made it to the airport on Sunday. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but then we find out that the flight to London has been delayed and now we’re going to miss our connecting flight to Entebbe. ARRRGGHHHH!!! Each time, we keep getting closer to the airport. So, because they only have two flights a week to Entebbe, we have to wait until Wednesday, January 29 to attempt, for the third time, to make our flight. 

Brennah Travel

We at least got our tubs to the airport, and weighed everything, and zip tied all the bins with steel cable ties, so they are ready for transport. The airline graciously offered to store our bags at the airport, so all we have to take tomorrow is our carry-on luggage. They put us up at the Hyatt Regency Sunday night, and paid for all our meals. Meanwhile, we have been camped out in Elgin once again. Our supporting church here, Northwest Bible Baptist Church, has gone above and beyond the call of duty, housing and feeding us, and supplying us with laundry access so we can keep washing our two changes of clothes over and over while we wait to depart (again). Pray all goes well on Wednesday. We truly want to get back to Uganda, and all this waiting, however relaxing it might be, is starting to be a pain, as it delays us from getting back into our usual ministry routine.

Lord willing, my next communication will be from Uganda, where the term negative has never been used in conjunction with any temperature designation ever.

God bless you!

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-23-2014

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Remember my promise that serving the LORD will be an adventure, never boring? Yesterday, that promise was once again fully realized. We got off to a rocky start preparing to leave because our junky van wouldn’t start in the cold. That made me late getting to UHaul to pick up the trailer I had reserved to get our luggage and us to Chicago. We finally got our last arrangements made, got our van and trailer loaded, said our last goodbyes, and launched forth into the frigid North American landscape en route to Chicago to catch our flight that evening to Uganda. As the trip progressed, we got into 40-50 mph winds with full whiteout conditions. The road surface wasn’t too bad, but visibility was down to about 100ft. I pulled off in Dwight, IL to fuel up so we wouldn’t get stranded and freeze in the 15 degree temperatures. As I rolled forward, I happened to look back and notice that the trailer tire on my side was wobbling badly. I got out to take a look, and saw this:

Rusted Tire

The rim was so rusted it had separated from the hub and was resting on the axle. We couldn’t move the trailer without the tire falling off completely. What’s more, when we looked underneath, we saw that the axle was coming apart and the bearings were exposed. God spared our lives. Had that thing come off at highway speeds, we could easily have all been killed. We got ahold of the breakdown service with UHaul, but they were unable to get us a new trailer, and the damage was too severe for the service station working with them to fix it right there. Long story shorter – we missed our flight to Uganda.

We are presently staying at a hotel in Pontiac, IL, 20 miles back down I-55, waiting for either a new trailer or a repaired old trailer. We will be staying at a prophet’s chamber near O’Hare until Sunday night, where I have gotten our flight to Uganda rescheduled. The great folks at MTS Travel took care of everything. There is no extra charges or penalties. Fogarty’s Garage in Pontiac, IL went above and beyond the call of duty. Their man stayed with us the whole time, in the blistering cold, until arrangements could be made with UHaul to get a flatbed to us to pick up our trailer. They kept our trailer and belongings in a secure, heated garage all night, and got to work on fixing it straight away this morning. They have sent someone to fetch a new trailer from another UHaul place 50 miles away while they got to work cutting off the rusted-out axle and replacing it. Also, the people at the Circle K in Dwight did everything they could to help us. God just brought several really great people along to help us in our stranded situation.

Nobody died. We had a warm safe place to wait while matters were resolved. We got into a comfortable hotel to stay the night. Plans were successfully changed at no extra expense. All that was lost was time. God was very gracious to us. My deepest thanks to all the many people who have worked to help us get back to Uganda, like my sisters-in-law who swooped in to help Anna finish the packing, or my brothers-in-law who helped with loading and last minute errands, and my mother and father-in-law who are stranded with us in all this and helping us still to reach our destination. Pray for our continued safety in our journeys. Pray for good weather on Sunday in the greater Chicago area. Pray Pastor and Mrs. Spilger will have a safe and uneventful trip back to St. Louis today.

All we want to do is get back to Uganda!

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-13-2014

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Happy New Year! Our final days in America are finally upon us. Our plane tickets are bought. Now commences the hectic race to our travel deadline as we finish up packing and final preparations for departure. Pray for us as we work to get everything done. We are on target so far, but there are an awful lot of details to keep track of. 

Right now, I’m working on getting the shipping container shipped to us this week. We have all the books, more than enough to fill it. Our people in Uganda are already making bricks for the building we’re going to construct for the library. 

At the moment, we are able to get the shipping container and have done so, but do not have the money sufficient for shipping it to Uganda. That is going to be around $11,000. I will know the total cost for sure once we load the container – I have to estimate the gross shipping weight, which requires weighing an average sized box and then counting all the boxes to get an estimated weight. Ugh. Please pray about this project. At the moment, I can load the container and prepare it for shipping, but it will just sit here in Saint Louis until God supplies the money to ship. Ideally, I’d like that to happen before we leave the country.

Pray for our return trip. I do not dread going back to Uganda – far from it! I do, however, dread being confined to a slender metal tube for 22 hours with God knows what all pathogens, in seats designed to comfortably house African pygmies or Oompa-Loompas. Pray we’ll stay healthy. We don’t have time to be sick!

Also, I have to renew our paperwork when we return to Uganda. We tried to have this done while we were away, but immigration said I had to submit the paperwork myself. So, my work permit and everybody else’s documents are three months expired. It shouldn’t make problems about entering the country, but they MAY insist on us paying the $400 for tourist visas, which is rather silly because we are residents, NOT tourists. I have to have the cash with me just in case though. Pray the folks working the airport that night are reasonable.

God bless you all! Next stop Uganda!!

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 12-12-2013

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Merry Christmas! We are finished with our travels and are home (blessed relief) for the holidays while simultaneously trying to wrap up our furlough and make tracks back to Uganda.

Anna and I had a great 2-week trip to Hawaii. We visited six churches there. We like Hawaii a lot because it reminds us so much of Uganda. The pace of life is similar. You have similar distance of travel getting there. You have the same isolation. Cost of living is high because everything has to be imported. Land and buildings are expensive. So you see, you can get the full missionary experience without leaving America. 35 different ethnic groups live there, so your ministry can be quite diverse. Pray for the churches in Hawaii. They have to raise support like the rest of us, trying to reach the people of Hawaii with the gospel, but then they have to get Pastors on the mainland to take them seriously. It’s a hard place to live, and a lot of people come there, and then leave later because they can’t hack it. Pray for these men who have labored there for so long, ministering in a culture where Christianity is viewed as “foreign religion”, where so many cults are vying for the souls of men, and where drug-addiction and alcoholism is rampant.

Our time in America is drawing to a close. It’s been a great furlough. We’ve enjoyed seeing family and visiting our friends and our churches. I was able to get meetings in around 2/3 of our supporting churches, and 25 new ones. Pray we’ll be able to get more support, which we need. We’re tired, though, and are all looking forward to getting home to Uganda. I miss my people, and our ministry there.

Project Libris has been very successful. I have gathered enough books to fill a 20 foot shipping container. Right now, I am exploring various means of shipping. I may need to buy a 20’ shipping container if nothing else turns up. If any of you have any contacts in the shipping industry who can get a bead on a cheap (but still good) 20’ shipping container, please have them contact me. Better yet, if anyone has a shipping container they would like to donate to help a missionary start a library in a refugee camp in Uganda, by all means, let me know. We have received $2000, which could cover the cost of the container, but we still need the money to ship. If everybody pitched in and gave some, we could raise the funds without too much difficulty. We are going to need those soon. Just pray about it. I need to get the books God has provided back to Uganda, and international shipping is just plain expensive no matter what you try.

I heard from my fellow missionary in Uganda that the ministries are doing well. The Juru church is thriving, but the Ngarama church is still struggling. I know what I need to do. I’m going to get a copy of the Jesus movie in the most common East African languages and use my little projector (bought it for this exact purpose) to have some special meetings out there. Video anything will bring in the folks, and we will show the video and give out the gospel. Pray for them. There are some serious jealousies that are hindering them and stunting their growth. Some people are going to need to repent if God is going to bless.

God bless you all!