Update from Dave in Uganda #4

September 1 - Day 8

Today is the day I most dread of my trip in Uganda. It is the day we venture out over 100km from Kampala out to the village of Kassanda. I was blessed to be part of planting a church in that area six years ago. The church is self-sufficient and growing and Crosspointe played a big part in helping them construct their church building. Don't misunderstand me. I love Kassanda and it's people. I dislike very much the arduous journey required to get there!

Jim was under the weather today so Grace, Robert and I loaded up early and headed out on the over three hour journey to get there. I held out some hope that this trip's version might be a bit smoother since the last time I was here, they were paving huge sections of the road. Sadly, the contractor simply laid blacktop over the dirt roads and it has cracked and fallen apart. The new contractor is digging the roads back up to fix them properly. Needless to say it was a bone-jarring

journey!

I was able to pay the fees for 4 children today and visit each of them at their school or home. These children are in a very remote part of Uganda and yet are performing very well. One of them is preparing to complete his A levels and prepare for University. We began with over 12 children in Kassanda but one by one they have either dropped from the program or moved into Kampala.

On the return trip to Kampala we drove straight into one of the most severe storms I have ever experienced in Uganda. I experienced hail for the first time! The hail has knocked out power to a good portion of the city. Thank God for generators! After pulling off the road several times due to lack of visibility, we finally made it back to the guest house.

We had new guests arrive today from Canada. They are a beautiful older couple from Vancouver Island, Canada who are here working with the Anglican church doing discipleship ministries. Over dinner we learned that they spent thirty years as missionaries to the Inuit in the Arctic Circle! What a change! From the Arctic Circle to the Equator. They told stories of weather in the Arctic with wind chill temps at minus 100. Today the mercury rose to about 90 degrees. Imagine that, a 190 degree difference. It doesn't even compute for me.

Tomorrow the Leadership Training Seminar begins. I will be teaching 50 Ugandan pastors and leaders through The Whole Story and then into leadership topics. I'm exicted about the possibilities and the influence God is allowing me to have in the churches represented by these pastors. Say a prayer for me, please.

Day 8 Recap - 1 bank. 3 schools. 4 students. Only a dozen or so remaining!

Update from Dave in Uganda #3

Day 5 & 6 – The Weekend

Weekends are a special time here in Uganda. The banks are closed, as are most of the schools. Fee payments grind to a halt and we are able to focus our attention on the children themselves. For the past nine years, Kiwatule EPC has hosted a Saturday school for all the kids in the project. Students begin arriving just after 8 am and things wrap up somewhere around noon. It’s a great time to hear the students sing, watch traditional Ugandan dance and have an hour or so for instruction. This week, I was the guest lecturer. I found out late Friday night that they wished for me to teach for an hour on the “perils and pitfalls of fornication.”

I had apparently volunteered for the task, albeit accidentally. I made a passing comment after visiting one of our students who has been chased from the project after her second pregnancy that we should do some group teaching on the subject of pre-marital sex. Next thing I know, I am before 75 teenage boys and girls teaching through some scriptural guidelines for proper sexual expression and then answering questions. Elder Jim spent the same time teaching the little children the story of David and Goliath. Who got the short stick on this one?

Sunday means church…all day. It’s hard to describe what a worship gathering is like. It’s part dance, part singing, part testimony and a whole lot of preaching. As the guest of honor, I was given the task of preaching. I spoke for just over an hour on “Forming and Fashioning God into Our Image.” As I was coming to the end of my message, I looked up at the clock and asked my interpreter if there was enough time for me to look at one more passage. Before he could reply, Jim spoke up from the front row and said, “That’s enough!” I took that as my cue to close in prayer. We returned to the guest house just after 2 pm and I slept soundly for nearly 4 hours. I guess I was more exhausted than I thought. Week two begins tomorrow.

Day 7 - August 30

After a restless night of sleep in which my lower legs were a buffet for a mosquito who got trapped inside my mosquito net, I headed out with Jim and the rest of the team for the long trek to Mokono. Mokono lies northeast of Kampala on the road to Jinja. We have several students in St. Joseph Secondary School. Most of these students are orphaned or from single-parent households and have been with the project since it’s beginning. It has been a joy to watch them grow as I have watched my own children grow. It’s hard to believe that many of them will soon sit for their O-Level exams (the equivalent of completing 10th grade). The results of those tests and their cumulative scores during their O-Levels will determine their future. Those who test high and have accumulated 12 or more credits are eligible to go on and study in A-Levels. Those who fail to meet those standards have come to the end of their sponsorship with the Project.

With the exception of three boys, these students have not been performing up to their potential. They have a long track record of good scores but somehow in the last year they have let their grades slip and they are now in danger of not passing their exit exams. We gathered the 12 together and tried to determine what the issues were that were causing their grades to plummet. After some serious barking at them mixed with expressions of loving concern, we were able to put together a strategy that can put them on the road to success in their upcoming exams. Chastising students for a lackadaisical approach to studies is not our favorite thing to do but a necessary one nonetheless.

In the process of talking with each of the kids about their struggles, I was called over by one of our team members to talk with a young girl about her recurring sickness. The head teacher was nearby and joined the conversation sharing that the young girl would often miss classes because she had “the demons.” As I investigated further, she told me that she would often stay in the dorms for the entire day in a “coma.” I’ve yet to determine exactly what she means but it was clear that the girl was very troubled. I asked her to tell me what was going on and she began to share how her nights were filled with bad dreams and that she would awake and be short of breath and feel pains in her heart. She went on to say that she would hear voices in her head telling her to do terrible things. She feared that an evil spirit was possessing her. I shared with her that with the Holy Spirit living within her that there was no need to fear Satan or his demons. I talked with her about how to speak boldly to these voice and tell them to leave in Jesus’ name. The team gathered around her and prayed for her. You could sense a powerful move of the spirit as we lifted her up. The peace that came over her as we hugged her and said our goodbyes was amazing. It is days like today that remind me of why I am a pastor and why a part of my heart will always be here in Africa.

Day 7 Recap: 1 bank 19 students and creeping closer to having all the fees paid!

Update from Dave in Uganda #2

August 27 - Day Four

The overnight rains have cooled the temperatures and helped keep the dust and the smog in the city down a bit this day. After a quiet breakfast of western omlettes and lovely ugandan coffee, we made our way into crowded downtown to exchange money and make a withdrawl from the bank. This is a nearly daily process here in Uganda as we do not like to carry more than a few million shillings at any one time. The exchange rate is 2200 Uganda Shillings per American dollar.

Our journey took us north today as we visited with and paid fees for 21 boarding students at one of my favorite schools. It is one of my favorites because of how well they treat us and how much they appreciate all that we do to have these kids sponsored. There are some schools that we visit where we feel as though we are annoying them by having our kids in their school. Perhaps we will one day be able to fulfill my personal dream of having our own school to educate our sponsored children.

All of the students at this school are performing very well. They are older children who have been with the project for upwards of 5 years. They understand the importance of taking maximum advantage of the gift of an education that they are being given. We dropped off three months

worth of school supplies and personal items to last them through the term. Things like laundry soap, toothpaste and sundry other personal items. We also load them up with a kilo of sugar and enough tea and biscuits for a few evening's enjoyment. We also stock them up with the Ugandan version of bug juice. You know, bug juice. That syrupy drink mix in strange colors that we drank as kids. They have a similar product here that the kids just love. We encouraged them in their work and then headed out to locate the one young girl who had not yet reported to school. We had learned from the head teacher that she has not returned to class because she has a punishment remaining from last term that she had, to quote him, "escaped." Now she must return and do a half-day of digging in the fields around the school as a sort of detention for skipping classes. We went to her home only to find out that she was away with friends attending a party. Needless to say, Jim was not happy. I felt badly for the mother because she is caring for a very small baby that has a very severe deformity that has made his head nearly three times normal size and has rendered his legs immobile. If he is not being monitored or held, he may try to drag himself to where he would like to go with his oversized head dragging the ground the entire way. It is a horrible situation and I couldn't help but have compassion on the mother who is trying to care for this boy and chase down an unruley teenager.

We stopped at a few smaller schools on our way back to town to pay fees for primary students whose classes begin on Monday. I even managed one quick trip into a bank to pay for one child after we had visited the school and the bursar refused to accept our payment. I know it sounds crazy but he said that he had no place to keep the 150,000 shillings until the bank opened on Monday. I got there just as they were closing. They were kind enough to take my payment after I played the poor, pitiful Muzunga card - that is, looking down, speaking very softly and begging their forgiveness for not following procedure because I do not understand all things about the fee-payment process. It has worked before and worked like a charm again! That and a 2000 shilling bonus payment for the bank usually does the trick.

The last stop of the day was to meet with a group of 17 students at a secondary school who have been placed on probation for their poor performance in school. In a nutshell, the students are graded on a scale of 1-100 just as in the states. Points are accumulated through classwork, homework, quizzes and exams. Students then receive credits for every class in which they score 50 or above. Those credits are then converted to a secondary point scale that places them in one of nine classes in their grade. Grade one is the best and grade nine is the worst. The more points you accumulate for each semester, the lower your class placement. The ideas is that the best students in each grade will have somewhere around 11 to 13 points for each semester. The lower classes may accumulate as many as 60. High numbers are not good and neither is placement in classes below 4. The UCP requires it's students to remain within the top two classes to retain their scholarships. To be on probation means that you have not performed to that level in your last semester and you are in danger of being chased (thrown out) from the project.

When we began to speak to the group of students, they began to give us all kinds of excuses about how the teachers were not teaching them the material and that they were missing some teachers in some classes. I went to the headmaster and asked about this and he went ballistic! He marched outside and immediately began to challenge the students on their stories. We soon found out that they were lying. In fact, the problem was that they were being lazy and not applying themselves to their studies. Some of the kids were smirking while Jim was speaking and when he saw it, he just about went nuts. He raised his voice and threaten to expell them on the spot if they did not think this was a serious matter. Keep in mind, in Uganda, to raise your voice much above a whisper is a very rare occasion. The eyes on these kids bugged like you could not believe. They still had a cavalier attitude about the whole thing but they quit smirking. After nearly an hour of tongue-lashing by Jim, myself and the headmaster, we believe the kids got the message - do your best and improve or be booted from the project.

We celebrated our success with our first meal outside of the guesthouse. We ate Chinese at one of our favorite places near the Embassy. We didn't return to the guest house until nearly ten, exhausted but feeling very satisfied with the day.

Day Four Totals - 1 bank. 42 students. I have no idea how many more to go! Got to get some sleep.

Update from Dave in Uganda

August 24 – Day One

I arrived safely in Uganda at 8 am after a grueling 42-hour trip that included a 12-hour layover in London. Blue skies, a gentle breeze and temperatures in the mid-eighties greeted me. What a wonderful change of pace from the 107-degree temperature in Dallas when I left on Sunday!

The very first thing I noticed that had changed since my last visit earlier this year was the increased police and military presence. The bombings that took place during the World Cup Finals last month have resulted in security stops and security screenings both on the roadside and before entering virtually any public building. We stopped at one public market area for bottled water and our van was searched inside and out and then each of us was scanned by a hand-held security device. All this to get a bottle of water!

After a quick breakfast of instant coffee in warm milk, I went to work immediately with Jim and the rest of the UCP team. We made several stops along the route back to Kampala from the airport at Entebbe. It was great to be reunited with the team on the ground and get to visit some of the kids that have been in the project from the beginning. One such young lady – Scovia – literally ran up to the van when she saw us pull up to her school and hugged everyone. Then she told me that I looked very “hard.” In response to my quizzical look she said, “you know, hard as in old!” Jim has had fun with that one! And then Robert, our driver, chimed in “Elder Jim now looks younger than you!” My retort of “Let’s see if you don’t look ‘hard’ after 42 hours of travel across 8 time zones” was drowned out by the laughter in the van. Keep in mind that Jim is 12 years older than me and walks with the aid of two crutches. The rest of the visits were fun but uneventful. I arrived at the guesthouse around 8 pm and sat down to a hot dinner of stewed fish with rice, Matoke, greens and potatoes. Jim tells me that I fell asleep within minutes of my shower.

Day One Recap: 1 bank. 4 schools. 7 students. (17 banks, 82 schools and 267 students to go!

August 25 – Day Two

After a restless night of jet-lagged sleep, Robert, Grace and I set out for the banks at 8 am. Jim had a rough night last night and decided he better stay back at the guesthouse and rest. I began the tedious job of filling out bank slips – in quadruplicate – for each of the students whose fees we would be paying at the banks. Uganda has begun circulation of the their new paper money so I had to learn the new denominations. The currency is beautiful now that it is new. It will not be long before the red dust that coats everything here in Uganda is ground into these beautiful bills. Each bill has original artwork depicting a period of Ugandan history. It’s really kind of cool!

After a quick stop at the bank where we keep the Project funds, it was off to the banks to pay fees. I was surprised at my first bank stop to be one of only three people in line. This is the same bank that had over 200 people in line the last time I paid bank fees in January. Robert barely had time to park the van before I was back having paid for four students in just under 15 minutes! I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I filled out another dozen bank slips and marched over to the next bank around the block. Once again, I was surprised to one of only six people in line for three tellers! This was awesome! Two banks and 16 student fees paid in just over 30 minutes!

The rest of the day went along just about like that. The longest queue in which I stood all day was only twelve people in length! We had all the fees scheduled to be paid today completed just before 1 pm. Incredible! I only hope that tomorrow will be as smooth. I spent the afternoon with Pastor Michael of the EPC church in Kiwatule preparing for the 3-day seminar I am leading later next week. I arrived back at the guest house just before the heavens opened and a monsoon fell upon Kampala heralding the beginning of rainy season (rainy season is from late August through mid October). The rain dropped the temps into the low 70s. It was awesome to need a jacked to sit out on the porch to watch the rain. My joy was short-lived for after the rain came the mosquitoes that chased me inside the guesthouse of the night.

Day Two Recap: 10 banks. 2 schools. 60 students. (7 banks, 80 schools and 207 students to go!)

August 26 -Day Three

Rainy season has arrived with a vengeance here in Kampala. The overnight rains rutted the roads even more deeply turning what is usually a bumpy ride into a bone-jarring, nightmare of a ride. Robert and Grace arrived as if on cue at 8 am for us to begin our day full of further bank payments. We had six banks on the schedule for today and I had visions of flying through fee payments like we did yesterday. The dream evaporated as we hit the outskirts of the business district in Kampala. The Archbishop of Canterbury has arrived in Kampala for a meeting with African Anglican Bishops. That meeting, along with the
assembly of Rotary Clubs International, jammed the streets with pedestrians and vehicles. By the time we arrived at our first bank, the lines were stretching out the doors.

Grace and I took the first big group of students and divided them into two and set off for different branches of the same bank. With nearly 70 student fee payments to make with this particular bank, we thought it wise not to arrive up at the teller with that many payments. I’ve received more than my share of evil-eyes from tellers when they see the number of fee payments I slide under the glass. It’s a big deal because each of the payments is done in quadruplicate and the teller must mark through each of the four pages individually – no carbon paper used here! Each fee payment takes around 3-4 minutes to enter the child’s name and ID number along with the school name and ID number. I arrived at the teller after a 90-minute wait with 17 such payments to make. She was not at all happy but she didn’t turn me away. I arrived back at the van a few minutes before Grace and we trundled off to the next bank.

This bank was located in the midst of Mykongo University. We pulled into the campus and made our way to the branch office and were greeted by a large tent outside the bank with dozens of people seated in plastic chairs. I took a number – 154 – and took a seat. A few moments later, I was summed along with everyone else with a number from 150 through 200 to actually join the queue inside the bank. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the days when I paid my university fees at the bursars office. At Mykongo there are 15000 students all paying their fees this week at this campus bank branch. Needless to say, I was the oldest one in line – old enough to be a parent to all of them! Being the only Mazunga (white man) in line, I garnered many a stare but no preferential treatment. I did my time in line, paid for our sponsored students and then stood in the shade for an hour waiting for Robert and the van to come collect me.

I repeated this basic process another two times before calling it quits for the day. I’m tired, sweaty but happy that we are progressing so nicely in the fee payment process. I’m looking forward to a nice dinner at the guest house and a few more chapters in the latest Bourne!

Day Three Recap: 7 banks. 72 students. (0 banks, 80 schools and 136 students to go!)

The process slows significantly now as we begin going school to school to pay fees.

Surprised by God

This week, PD challenged us to ask God to "surprise us." Have you asked Him to do that? If so, how has God surprised you? Share your stories here?

The Next Leg of the Journey

While traveling in Uganda recently, I asked one of my Ugandan hosts about how long it would take to make the trip from our base guesthouse to a school on the opposite side of town. His reply? "It depends upon what you want to see." What I envisioned as a trip - one such as I make a dozen times each day - he perceived as a journey. Where I expected direct-route GPS trip precision, he saw the twisting, winding possibilities of a journey.

Crosspointe has been on a thirty-month journey - a spiritual odyssey of sorts - that has forced us to challenge the assumptions that have girded our faith-community to this point. We've abandoned certain assumptions that we have always had about how faith and followership are expressed within our church. We've had to leave behind things we thought would be or should be part of the church experience. In the end, we found ourselves well off the map but fully engaged with the Map Maker.

Has it been a difficult journey? Absolutely. Have we become impatient a time or two? Without a doubt. But God has faithfully led us to the next waypoint on our journey.

Recently we acquired 6,000 square feet of space in the Hebron Plaza shopping center located at 2425 West Parker RD in Hebron. We believe this is the next leg of the journey that God is showing us. We hope you are as excited as we are to see what God will do in our lives as well as the lives of the people around us through this new facility. We want you to be apprised of our progress in making this space a great location for Crosspointe. To see what is taking place, you may click through the slideshow below.

Abraham: Treacherous Faith

Genesis 22. My friend and mentor Len Sweet says that speaking about Abraham can be compared to collecting antiques. Some people collect in order to put their prized possessions on display never to be touched. Others collect in order to handle them and put them to use in everyday life. Both people believe they are honoring the antiques. Both consider what the other does as disrespectful.

My aspiration in today's message was to approach this text with respect it deserves yet with an eye toward a deeper understanding of the God who authored the test. I suspect that I left some of you with more questions than answers. That's okay. The God we follow is untamable. His wild ways are often beyond our ability to comprehend. I'd love to see us wrestle with the text some more in this forum.

We also asked for posts on this topic: Have you ever been asked to do something by God that other's thought was crazy? If so, how did you respond and what lessons did you learn?

Glimpse into a Journey Team

Crosspointe meets in smaller groups throughout the week called "Journey Teams." John and I (pictured left) happen to belong to Oxygen which meets every other Friday night in Carrollton.

Last night, we began by talking about Palm Sunday's gathering. David--our pastor--had taught about the passage where Mary breaks open an alabaster jar and pours it on Jesus. Each person in the group shared the unique things they got out of the teaching and we shared different ideas and asked questions.  One of the things that struck all of us was how the scent filled the room as Pastor Dave went around and anointed each person with the oil. (Pastor Dave frequently uses very practical visuals to illustrate.)

We talked about some needs in our congregation and made plans to help. We prayed for our church.

In Oxygen we always share a meal together and last night Holly cooked. Over dinner conversation ranged from the practical (like Sheila's upcoming garage sale and DeAnn sharing aromatherapy tips) to the abstract (like the giraffe that stuck it's head in Vicki's sunroof at Fossil Rim or John suggesting she upload the video of that to YouTube which launched us all watching the Evolution of Dance).

The best part of journey teams is that they create community at a closer level than you can get on a Sunday morning.  And the best part is there are a variety to choose from that meet in different places and times.

The Ignite Kaleide Event

At least once a quarter, Crosspointe cancels regular services and instead of coming to the church to be blessed, we go out and bless the community.   Since David-the-Artist-Pastor has been teaching the past several weeks on the life of John-the-Baptist being a light life that ignites others, Magical-David-and-Kylie came up with the idea to make this Kaleide event about blessing firefighters.

So this morning, we met at the parking lot of Killian Middle School and prayed together, then set out into the community with hams and steaming dishes in hand.

I love this concept of blessing.  In fact, I was trying to think of a different word to use in this post, and just couldn't find one.   So, blessing it is!  Anyway, it was really great to "bless" people with a meal who serve our community. And as it turned out, they blessed us by giving us a glimpse of a life we'd heard about, but never really get to see.

AWA

I've finally connected to the internet again to complete my last entry. I decided that waiting in line for five hours only to have to return the next day did not appeal to me. I asked our driver if there was another branch of the bank nearby. He agreed to take me there. The only challenge is that fees are scheduled to be paid at specific branches and the fee slips I had declared I should pay at the bank I had just left. I decided I could put on my best dumb Mezunga look and get away with paying them somewhere else - especially if I had waited for a long time on line. I stepped into the new branch of the bank to a line of 100 or so but instead of only one teller, there were 4! Awesome. A five hour wait at the last bank was reduced to just under two hours! Great deal to get 8 students paid.

We have a saying among our Uganda trip veterans - africa wins again - AWA for short. Today, AWA. As I've recounted in my earlier posts, our van has been pulled over several times during our stay. In the previous 8 years we have been coming, we've only been stopped 3 or 4 times. Something was definitely up. We began to query some other missionaries about whether they thought this was random or if something was amiss. Their immediate response was that it was school fee payment time for all Ugandans and so the policemen and policewomen are pulling over vans for what are normally inconsequential offenses in an attempt to procure bribes to help them pay fees. A typical policeman would earn approximately 100,000 Uganda Shillings per month (that is roughly equivalent to $48). Even an inexpensive school fee would be in the neighborhood of 29,000 USh plus lunch fees of 10,000 and an enrollment fee of 10,000 for each child. With average families having 4 or more kids, you can see why they would resort to these kinds of tactics.

We had such an attempt this morning. We left our compound and were immediately waived over by a team of three policewomen. One asked for Robert's driving permit while the others perused the van for other possible infractions. They once again suggested that our insurance was expired even though we had paid for a new sticker just two days earlier! Then they got on us for having shoes piled in the back seats for distribution up in the village. The three met together, spoke quietly in Lugandan and then informed us that they would need to impound the van because our driver could not produce the proper permits and we were illegally hauling freight in a passenger vehicle. The process would be that a ticket would be written and that Robert would have to go to a specific precinct to pay the fine. In the mean time, Jim and I would be impounded with the vehicle until he returned with proof of payment.

Then came the shakedown. If we would pay the 40,000 USh fine on the spot, she would let us proceed on our journey. Once Robert heard what they said, he launched into a tirade that we later learned was a threat to them about turning them in to their superiors. Suddenly they gave Robert his keys and told us to drive away. We decided then and there that Robert would need to straighten out the issue with his permit (something to do with applying for a new one after his other expired - a process that takes up to six weeks here) before we try and proceed any further in our program. It cost us half a day. Jim and I used the time to do some other paperwork before heading out to distribute shoes up north toward Gulu.