For anyone that knows me well, you know that I’ve often expressed my dream to travel the Oregon Trail. That dream is dead.
Every day I’m without power, I realize how much I enjoy the modern convenience of having it. Don’t misunderstand me, I still enjoy writing by lantern light, enjoying candlelight dinners with Carolyn and having it absolute dark at night. But, hauling my laptop places to charge it (only to have it die an hour later), cold showers, and rotten vegetables just aren’t floating my boat these days.
As tough as I think I am, I praise God that I’m not in the African bush, and that I’m not living in the days of the great American frontier.
Rumor has it power will be out for a month. I’m not sure how dependable word of mouth is around here, but I don’t think there are other sources to rely on either, so we’ll see. While the power outages we were previously experiencing every other night were due to what is called “load shedding”, this power outage has two possible causes. One rumor going around is that somebody stole a piece of the transformer. Must’ve needed a little extra cash. The other circulating story is that children were throwing rocks at the transformer and broke it. Either one of those makes the situation a little bit more frustrating because both are completely preventable! On the positive side, because it was just the transformer in our area, it has literally affected our home and maybe 10 others. The rest of Mbarara is still up and running. Therefore, other members of our team have power and have been extremely hospitable to those of us without. I’m not sure if there is a “greater purpose” for this experience or not. However, I find it a little bit strange that we have a generator in our backyard that’s main purpose is to tease us. The generator fires up and runs perfectly fine, except that for some reason it isn’t delivering power to our house. I’m hoping whatever lesson I’m supposed to learn from this experience hits me quickly so things can return to “normal”.
Some creatures I haven’t quite adjusted to yet here are the lizards. Despite my attempts to keep my bedroom door closed and the doors in and out of the house closed, the sneaky monsters find a way in. Fortunately for me, I’ve acquired a brotherly relationship with the young man who lives on our compound in a little house of his own. Justus has had to come remove a lizard or two from my room and is no longer shocked to hear my screams due to the unexpected sighting of one. The other night he popped in to talk, and I saw a lizard. “Justus!” I yelled. He went ahead and shooed the lizard out, and then sat me down to talk. He proceeded to tell me that he would commit me to his prayers that I would learn to better appreciate God’s creation. After all, God did create man and told him specifically to look after the rest of creation, including the “cute” lizards. I don’t want to underestimate God, but I think it might take a few more of you praying for this to become a reality.
Other than those minor inconveniences, life in Mbarara is going well. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon, Carolyn and I have the pleasure of spending a couple of hours with our friend Sophie who has become our language teacher. Sophie was one of the first Ugandans we met in Mbarara when she approached us our first Sunday at church. Her smile was contagious then, and keeps me smiling every time I’m with her. Sophie is a patient teacher, and she has to be with my delayed ability to learn language. In the time we’ve been able to spend with her, we have learned much more from her than just language. Last Wednesday, as we were finishing up our language lesson, we were talking about dancing and having a girls’ night where I teach the Ugandans country line dances and they teach me and Carolyn traditional Ugandan dances. That is when Sophie saw the drum in our living room. It didn’t take long for her to fire up her rhythm and begin a traditional beat. It was a fun afternoon trying to catch on and learn a few steps to go along with it. Sophie’s patience prevailed as we can now keep the traditional beat for about ten seconds without her help. One more thing to add to my list of things to continue learning.
While I tend to struggle a bit with language learning in Runyankole, I think it is even more challenging to communicate in English. I think the major contributing factor is that you would think it would be easy to converse in a country that has named English as one of its national languages. However, despite common knowledge there are many variations of my mother tongue. Coming here, I knew that Uganda had been colonized by the British. I expected to come into a culture that used British English, so I was prepared for something a little bit different. Ugandan English is not a little bit different. There is already a cultural gap between me and my British teammates. I’ve had to have a few conversations with them to let them know it is not okay to greet me in the morning with their popular saying, “Are you alright?” It makes me wonder what appears to be wrong with me. Yet, Ugandan English feels like a different language altogether. Many times I wonder what I’ve said that day that was interpreted in a completely different way than I intended. I try to speak slowly, but that only gives the impression that I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s amazing how many people try to explain English words to me as if it isn’t my first language. I feel more self-conscious speaking English than I do Runyankole, and I only know about 15 words in that language.
That being said, this weekend I’m travelling out of town to Kyizoba for a conference at an all girls’ secondary school. It’ll be my first large group speaking engagement, so any prayers you want to devote to it would be very much appreciated! I look forward to updating you all on the experience.
“Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should.” Colossians 4:2-4
That, my friends, is my prayer for this weekend. Feel free to deviate as you feel led :)
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