This past week was one of the hardest but best weeks I’ve had at GSF. Ellie and I got to live in a nearby village called Kikube (pronounced “chickoobey”) with Teacher Alice, who is a teacher at GSF, and her 5-year-old son Jordan. Alice is considered lower middle class in Uganda, and she makes about $100 a month as a teacher here (sugar cane field workers, who are lower class, make $1.75 a day just for a comparison.) Alice’s home is an 8×10 foot room made of clay walls and a tin roof and she rents it for $10 a month. It has 2 twin mattresses that sit caddy-corner along two of the walls, so she and Jordan slept on 1 mattress and Ellie and I slept in the other twin – good thing we like each other because we were very close every night! Along the other walls stacked on top of each other was everything else she owned – a small charcoal stove, 5 metal pots for cooking, a bunch of bananas, a bike tire, a few dishes, some plastic chairs stacked on top of each other, water jugs, a small nightstand, some buckets, 1 pitcher, 2 serving spoons and some silverware, a few outfits that she rotated throughout the week, and 2 pairs of shoes under her bed. Imagine – everything she owned in this one room. As I would sit and look around her little home, I was struck by how consumed we as Americans are with materialism and just having so many things. Just a bunch of stuff that fills up our huge homes, so many clothes we barely have room for them all in our closet, certain dishes we only use for certain occasions, so much food that we often have to throw it out because we can’t eat it fast enough before it goes bad. Not that having things is necessarily bad – I think that having certain things is good and a blessing that we can afford them, but I just learned a lot this week about resourcefulness and the over-abundance of things that I think we need, when I would really be just fine without them.
On Tuesday and Thursday night, we went to “praise and worship” evenings down the road at someone’s home. These reminded me of the home churches that Paul had when he was meeting in groups in Acts so that was cool to kind of understand what that may have been like. We sat in a small living room – which had no electricity so we had little propane candles burning everywhere – and people shared testimonies, or stories of things God had been teaching them or done for them that week. These were really powerful – the faith of these Ugandans that gather together every week is so strong and they know real dependence and reliance on the Lord that based on our experiences we can’t really even get close to. In America we have medicine and money and power that we think we can rely on, but here, God is the great physician, the great provider, and the One who gives strength to the weak and power to the powerless. He wants to be all of those things for us, but I think sometimes we just don’t allow Him to be because we are so focused on other things and people to take care of us. These people also seem to lack the sense of entitlement and independence that defines a lot of Americans, and instead view everything they are given as an undeserved blessing because of the goodness of our God – which is exactly how it should be! We sang a few songs then prayed at the end. The way Ugandans pray is one of my favorite things – they pray so loudly and so passionately. Ugandans are a very meek and mild and humble people, and the loudest I ever hear them speak is during prayer. They raise their hands or kneel or walk around with their eyes closed the whole time claiming Jesus and welcoming Him and thanking Him for His goodness and His provision. It got me thinking about how Americans are so loud and rambunctious in our day-to-day conversations a lot, and yet when we get together to pray we get all quiet and serious and reserved. Ugandans are the opposite – they are most passionate and loud and excited when they are talking with their heavenly Father. Goodness. Just so much we can learn from the people here.
A wake up call from a rooster outside woke us up at 6 am every morning. We then would walk 25 minutes to GSF, which was kind of tiring to be honest! Going back to the village each day was the most challenging part for me because there just isn’t a ton to do there and at first I kind of dreaded the idea of going back and just sitting for the next several hours. In the US it’s activity after activity, and we are used to being busy and fitting as much as we can into our schedules, but here it’s normal to just come home and bathe, make dinner, eat, clean, and go to sleep. I feel like I would get lonely or bored living like that always. But I guess it’s what they know here and I can learn a lot about slowing down my pace of life from them. Alice really taught me a lot about contentment and going through daily trials and mundane tasks with a joyful and thankful spirit.
Saturday morning we were hand-washing clothes and Alice said, “So in America, you just have a machine that you press a button and it does it for you? And the clothes are actually clean when they come out? Like it just takes all the stains away?” And we were like yep! She was amazed by this and asked us how long it took to wash a load and we said around 30 minutes and she just couldn’t get over that! She said it takes hours to wash clothes by hand and she is always so tired by the end of it. We went to get water that morning too, which was about a 10 minute walk down a steep hill to a stream where they filled up 5, 10, and 20 liter jugs with water. What struck me the most were how many little kids we walked with on our way to the stream – 5 and 6 year old kids carrying these heavy water jugs without any parents around. They helped each other fill them up, and when one would get tired another would hold his water can for a little while. It was just a crazy thing to watch and something you would never see in America. Every morning Alice had us iron our clothes and the first time she asked us if we knew how to iron clothes and we were like “Yep we do it at home!” And she was so surprised by that! She said she thought we had people to do that for us. They have a distorted view of Americans in a lot of ways because they base most of their opinions of us off of what they see in movies so it makes for some funny conversations.
Alice actually adopted Jordan a year and a half ago, but it was really different than any adoption in the US would ever happen. Jordan is a student at GSF and one day she saw him and said she thought he looked like a “miserable boy” so she asked about his family and his mom had abandoned him and he lived with his dad who worked so Jordan was all alone during the day. So Alice went to the dad and basically asked if she could have/adopt Jordan and the dad said yes so Jordan has been living with Alice ever since! He still calls her “teacher” which is so funny I think. Jordan is the sweetest and most content little boy. His favorite (and only) toy is a bike tire that he runs around with while he rolls the tire with a stick. He plays with it for hours! We brought Jordan bubbles as a gift and I’ve never seen a kid so excited about something before. He didn’t even want to open them at first – he just wanted to look at the bottle for a while. Once we opened them, it seemed like every kid in the village showed up to play with the bubbles within 5 minutes. Again, this was kind of a striking picture of the abundance of toys and stuff we have in America – half of which only gets played with for 5 minutes – and how the kids here can be entertained all day with very little.
One funny thing – at night Alice would lock the door and the first night she said to us, “We don’t go out at night because of the darkness, so if you need to use the bathroom, here is a bucket next to your bed.” Like I am going to pee in a bucket in a room smaller than my bathroom with 3 other people around me… Ellie and I were dying laughing. Needless to say we never used the bucket.
here & there 