Laura and the kids :)

Laura is awesome! She brought so many creative things and activities for the kids to do! I’m excited because I’m kinda obsessed with doing activities with the kids also! When I was here alone I did about two each day! So I’m happy that we share a love of activities! And her kindergarten teacher skills are much appreciated! I think she’s really bringing balance to our team and she has a wonderfully creative mind! Pray for her and thank God for her love of kids and her willingness to come here and serve.

This is uncle Moses is the Mets shirt and baby
Emma playing the part of Moses in the Bible.
Hes sitting in our banana basket and I think
Bianca is suppose to be Miriam. Haha Good
times during Kids Devotional!

 

Evening devotional is always an event! Especially if Uncle Moses is translating. We are going through a big book with a bunch of bible stories in it with pictures. Each of the Aunties take turns reading the book and someone else translates it into Luganda to make sure they understand it. What’s great is Uncle Moses goes all out when telling these stories. He uses props and the kids as characters and it’s just fun to get them involved. And it works! These kids really are learning and remembering what’s being told even if at the time it looks like everyone’s just laughing or picking their noses. Before story time Moses and Godfrey get out the drums and we dance and sing really loud for 20 mins or so! It gets really hot in that small living room. Yesterday during dance time little Esther clung to my body! She had both arms around me and one leg curling around mine while I tried to dance! Haha I leaned down and told her to dance you need both legs but she would not stop. She kept looking up at me smiling and struggling to put the one free leg around me! I couldn’t help but laugh out loud! Sometimes she just makes my day! It’s so nice to see those beautiful moments! Also during the actual story time Auntie Jen was reading and everyone was quiet and I hear “Auntie Jess-ka! Auntie Jess-ka” in a loud whisper. I look up and Brenda has huge genuine smile at me and waving a huge happy wave my way as if she just noticed I was in the room! All this in the middle of story time! I feel so loved! It made my night! Everyday God gives us things to laugh about and things to marvel at. I think in Africa it’s not that God gives me more but that I’ve just become more aware of them. I pray my awareness of these moments won’t lessen when I go home. And I pray God gives you eyes to see and ears to hear them wherever you are too! Sorry if that is cheesy! But life is so miraculous! I hope you see it too.

Pictures of last weeks Chicken adventures!

Chicken fun before!
(Shes in the bushes)

During
(Jen, Taylor, Bianca plucking
the feathers)

After!
That's my tiny piece of chicken
on the left.

 Bianca says she will never look at a chicken the same ever again. But I thought it was delicious!

Jerom...you gotta love him.

Momma Esther lining up the kids for races across the driveway!

Don and little Esther pretending her sock is
a cake!

We taught them duck duck goose! They absolutely love it!

Joel and Carol! Joel claims he's just itching his
nose...but I have my doubts. Haha I love Joel.

Jen and Bianca with Don and Cocus!

Me and Brenda

Carol kissing Jen!  sigh...I'm gonna miss those kisses so much!

The girls love to draw in the sand pile. Esther was drawing me and my family with Jesus the other
day! she is so sweet!

Laura reading to the kids! She is so great!! They actually listen when she reads!
How does she do it!!!?!

 

Off to church with 20 in our 8 passenger van! The funny thing is that this wasn’t even the time we got pulled over. A week before we had 9 in the van and the police gave Moses a ticket and took his license. We were afraid Moses wouldn’t get his license back because when they actually follow protocol and take the persons permit it usually gets lost and its really hard to get another. But luckily the next day it was still there!

Project day this week was so amazing! We went to a small church and orphanage called Living Grace in Naabingo. We did manual labor for the first time. It was nice to do something different. I believe that relationships are the most important thing but sometimes fulfilling a physical need first opens the doors for a relational need someone has. That’s a lot of the reason I want to be a nurse. Anyway we hauled concrete from one area to the top of this roof to build an extension onto the side of the orphanage and we moved bricks to make an oven thing outside. Before they were cooking over an open flame and losing a lot of energy. The man in charge of the project, Herman, was so thankful for us he kept saying that if we get nothing from this trip, if nothing makes sense the whole time we are in Africa just know that today we have blessed his heart by being there. He was so thankful and really kind hearted! And his wife Anne was so happy and thankful too! It was great to get a chance to help these guys with some hard work that needed to be done. If we weren’t there it would’ve taken so much longer! After that day my shoulders were so sore it was difficult to write on the chalkboard at the New Creation school.

We filled the jerry cans with cement and passed them down our assembly line and up to the roof! Hard work!

the view from the Living Grace orphanage

People here are so thankful. It’s something you notice really fast. The first night I was here we went around and said payer requests and everyone was just thanking God for life, for protection, for jobs. And even now all the Ugandans say thanks to God rather than ask for things. It’s so awesome. That reminds me today Godfrey saw me cleaning his windows and said “OH MY GOD! Auntie Jess-ka…Oh my goodness!” and I was really confused thinking I wasn’t supposed to be doing this or something. Was I breaking some cultural rule?! And then he said “may God suffocate you with blessings!” I never heard it quite like that before but he was so thankful! I love having people around me who are continually thankful for others and for God. It is such an example for me!

 

Anyway when we were done with construction work we split into groups and went into the village door to door telling the people about Christ and asking if we could pray for them. I was in a group with Saidel and Richie. Godfrey and another guy from the church were our translators. We prayed for so many families. They were so welcoming to our prayers and when the village found out we were praying many came up to us and asked us to pray. We met a 68 year old woman who was so joyous and loving to us. She told us of how thankful she was that we were doing this because God had been so faithful in her life and she wanted more people to know about Him. She told us her story that her son had died but that if it hadn’t been for God she wouldn’t have been able to get through it. We also prayed/talked to a family whose Father was in Sudan and they were worried about him getting home safe. We prayed over many teens in the village all stressed and looking for jobs to support their families. The other teams had some awesome stories to tell too. Taylor and Jen got to pray over a Muslim woman. How cool is that? Not many Muslims would let a couple of Christian girls pray for them! Bianca and Laura talked to a witch doctor. They said he was really knowledgeable about the bible and were challenging them with questions like “well if Jesus’ own followers betrayed him then why would we trust him?” and he claimed Jesus was a witch doctor himself because he turned water into wine. They said the Holy Spirit really spoke through them and in the end they got to pray over him which is also unbelievable.  And they said they spoke to some women who wanted to put their faith in Jesus but their husbands weren’t Christian and they were afraid it would ruin their marriage or beak up their families. I just wanted to tell you all this so you can be praying for each person we met and that God will reach them. With a witchdoctor in the village I know there are a lot of barriers up against the Spirit and the word reaching these people. It will be hard but God is stronger and prayer works so please keep paying for them.

There was a man working with us hauling concrete whose name was Shane. He is 36 and from Australia and he spends his winters in Uganda volunteering anywhere he is needed. He doesn’t know the Lord and later Mamma Esther brought up that there are so many people who come and volunteer and do good things and give and give...but they just won’t receive Jesus. She thought it was so peculiar. But I think Taylor’s Devotional the other night explained a lot. She read the passage in John 12 about Mary washing Jesus’ feet with the expensive perfume. Mary’s motivation for serving Christ in this way was out of pure thankfulness and love for him. She knew Jesus was worth more and she wanted to honor him with all she had. Taylor’s BSM director said there are 3 motivations for serving others. 1) Self-you serve others because it makes you feel good. 2) Good-if you do good something else good will happen. Kinda like a karma thing. Or 3) the cross-you serve others because there are needs you can meet for someone but there are also needs only Jesus can meet and then you tell them His message. Please pray for every one of us who came to Uganda this summer, myself included, that we would serve being motivated by the cross alone and not selfish reasons. It’s hard to separate our self from the picture sometimes because when you are helping people it does feel good. And a lot of times good things do follow. But our only motivation for being here should be Christ, who first served us. Pray for Shane also. Thank the Lord for his servant heart and pray that he can know Jesus.