This thursday through Sunday we are going on retreat. Please pray that we will be refreshed:
1. Physically. We are getting busier and consequently more tired. The retreat will be a great time for rest. Also, Abby has a burn that is seriously infected and might keep her from participating in some of the retreat. Pray that it will be healed quickly.
2. Emotionally. We are all missing home, as expected. Thank you for all of your encouragement.
3. Spiritually. We need to make sure we are seeking God's will for our time here and not our own. Pray that he will show us and that we will be open to it and the challenges that it might bring.
Monday, November 17, 2008
American Satisfaction
Surprisingly enough, one can get tired of red beans and rice after a while. Red beans and rice has been one of my favorite dishes for a long time but eating it about five times a week (minus all of the flavor that made me love it in the first place) has made me reconsider my top meals.
I was surprised upon arriving in Uganda that I liked a lot of the food they served; I was told that I wouldn't want to eat much of it. Lots of rice, spaghetti (without the sauce), potatoes, and chapat, an African tortilla of sorts, along with matooke, a signature dish made from unripened bananas. It's served like mashed potatoes and is savory, which just confuses me because when I eat it I know it is made from bananas, but it just doesn't taste like it. I have managed to solve that problem by not eating it at all. Another starchy base we tend to avoid is posho, which is ground up maize. I don't mind it that much but my team doesn't like it, so people just stopped serving it to us. This also means that in this particular instance I am the least picky eater, and considering my eating habits of the past, I deserve a gold medal. My grandfather would be proud.
Along with these heavy sides we are served either beans (quickly becoming my vice), cabbage, fish, pork, or beef. I really liked the pork and the beef when we first got into Kampala, but once we arrived in Namaliri I realized that it became increasingly harder to find a good piece of meat. Their favorite part is the fatty part, and they chop up the bones and serve them in the meat for flavoring. Knowing this I began to understand the mystery of the meat--in giving us all of the fatty bits they were just trying to serve us, most likely with the intention of making us fat in the end, which I could use a bit of, but I'm not quite sure eating pure fat is the best way to go about it.
Our Mondays in Kampala have been an oasis from the food that has become routine. We often get load ourselves with guilty pleasures and wish that we could eat for the entire week on that very day. And if the average Kampala Monday is an oasis for our stomachs, last Monday was heaven. My mother connected me with the International Mission Board missionaries in Kampala, and they invited my team to eat dinner with them and stay the night at their house (which also involved toilets and a shower. What luxury!). They overwhelmed us with grilled chicken, steak, potato salad, and green beans, along with lemonade and homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert. I felt like it was summertime in America and I was at a backyard BBQ. (This feeling was also helped by the fact that I was finally surrounded by other Americans and my British teammates had become the minority).
That night I ate to the point of sickness, knowing that if I didn't eat more I would be dreaming about that plate full of chicken and steak for the entire week. I woke up the next morning, forgetting that I was in the middle of Kampala, full and relaxed, to another amazing meal. Breakfast just so happens to be my favorite, and the biscuits and gravy we were served reminded me of my last meal at Cracker Barrel before I flew overseas for the second time this year. Our hosts had fixed biscuits and gravy in particular because my teammates just couldn't fathom what it actually was--they call cookies biscuits and they only have brown gravy--so it's obvious why they didn't think it was a good plan. They also served us smoothies, fresh fruit, and coffee cake, which wasn't a good idea on their part because after that it was difficult to make us leave.
We had finally seen the light and didn't know how we were going to survive the rest of our time with age-old red beans and rice, but thankfully a package from my mother arrived that day full of goldfish, peanut m&ms, skittles, and enough lemonade to last weeks. So no need to worry, we're going to make it, but if you feel so inclined to send a piece of what has made America so overweight in my direction, I couldn't refuse:
Lacy Clark
c/o Maree Hanford
Oasis Team
PO Box 3518
KAMPALA
UGANDA
I was surprised upon arriving in Uganda that I liked a lot of the food they served; I was told that I wouldn't want to eat much of it. Lots of rice, spaghetti (without the sauce), potatoes, and chapat, an African tortilla of sorts, along with matooke, a signature dish made from unripened bananas. It's served like mashed potatoes and is savory, which just confuses me because when I eat it I know it is made from bananas, but it just doesn't taste like it. I have managed to solve that problem by not eating it at all. Another starchy base we tend to avoid is posho, which is ground up maize. I don't mind it that much but my team doesn't like it, so people just stopped serving it to us. This also means that in this particular instance I am the least picky eater, and considering my eating habits of the past, I deserve a gold medal. My grandfather would be proud.
Along with these heavy sides we are served either beans (quickly becoming my vice), cabbage, fish, pork, or beef. I really liked the pork and the beef when we first got into Kampala, but once we arrived in Namaliri I realized that it became increasingly harder to find a good piece of meat. Their favorite part is the fatty part, and they chop up the bones and serve them in the meat for flavoring. Knowing this I began to understand the mystery of the meat--in giving us all of the fatty bits they were just trying to serve us, most likely with the intention of making us fat in the end, which I could use a bit of, but I'm not quite sure eating pure fat is the best way to go about it.
Our Mondays in Kampala have been an oasis from the food that has become routine. We often get load ourselves with guilty pleasures and wish that we could eat for the entire week on that very day. And if the average Kampala Monday is an oasis for our stomachs, last Monday was heaven. My mother connected me with the International Mission Board missionaries in Kampala, and they invited my team to eat dinner with them and stay the night at their house (which also involved toilets and a shower. What luxury!). They overwhelmed us with grilled chicken, steak, potato salad, and green beans, along with lemonade and homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert. I felt like it was summertime in America and I was at a backyard BBQ. (This feeling was also helped by the fact that I was finally surrounded by other Americans and my British teammates had become the minority).
That night I ate to the point of sickness, knowing that if I didn't eat more I would be dreaming about that plate full of chicken and steak for the entire week. I woke up the next morning, forgetting that I was in the middle of Kampala, full and relaxed, to another amazing meal. Breakfast just so happens to be my favorite, and the biscuits and gravy we were served reminded me of my last meal at Cracker Barrel before I flew overseas for the second time this year. Our hosts had fixed biscuits and gravy in particular because my teammates just couldn't fathom what it actually was--they call cookies biscuits and they only have brown gravy--so it's obvious why they didn't think it was a good plan. They also served us smoothies, fresh fruit, and coffee cake, which wasn't a good idea on their part because after that it was difficult to make us leave.
We had finally seen the light and didn't know how we were going to survive the rest of our time with age-old red beans and rice, but thankfully a package from my mother arrived that day full of goldfish, peanut m&ms, skittles, and enough lemonade to last weeks. So no need to worry, we're going to make it, but if you feel so inclined to send a piece of what has made America so overweight in my direction, I couldn't refuse:
Lacy Clark
c/o Maree Hanford
Oasis Team
PO Box 3518
KAMPALA
UGANDA
Monday, November 10, 2008
Prayer Requests
I have been asking God to challenge me, and he's been doing just that. Please pray for:
1. Humility. Christians in Uganda see things differently than I do. And in those moments of seeking understanding, sometimes I get prideful and would rather just do things my way. I need the humility to seek God's truth and to recognize that it is His truth, not mine, that matters.
2. Discernment. Seeking understanding and God's truth is requiring a lot more discernment than I thought.
3. Peace. I am really experiencing God's peace here in many aspects of my life. Please pray that it will continue to grow as He is taking me on this journey.
1. Humility. Christians in Uganda see things differently than I do. And in those moments of seeking understanding, sometimes I get prideful and would rather just do things my way. I need the humility to seek God's truth and to recognize that it is His truth, not mine, that matters.
2. Discernment. Seeking understanding and God's truth is requiring a lot more discernment than I thought.
3. Peace. I am really experiencing God's peace here in many aspects of my life. Please pray that it will continue to grow as He is taking me on this journey.
Thursdays
It's been five weeks, and each one has flown by. At this point Namaliri has become home (for now) and teaching Gospel lessons has become my profession. We go to the same schools, on the same days, give the same amount of energy. Usually two hours is all we can bear--all of the singing and games, sometimes seven times in a row, and we often return home prepared for an afternoon nap.
But this past Thursday was different. We were told we were going to be in schools all day, and not only that--we needed to hire a vehicle to get there as well. Thursday morning we were a bit nervous--how were we supposed to entertain kids for nine hours who don't even speak English? Our car arrived late, because it's Africa, with a flat tire to boot. As the driver was airing up his tire, my team stared at the small Toyota Camry, which was likely just as old as me if not older, and wondered just how the seven of us--the four members of my team, Racheal, whom we stay with and who would be translating for us, the pastor who had arranged our visits to the school, and our driver, who spoke little English--would fit inside. But if there's one thing Ugandans are good at, it's stuffing people in vehicles in the most illegal of ways, and we were soon on our way to our first school and our first venture into the African Bush. We had never gone that far off of the main road before, and it was likely that we, being Mzungu's, were a rare occurrence to these parts. We had to drive slowly because of the holes in the road--holes that would be more appropriately called canyons--and as we screamed for our dear lives (because let's be honest, a Toyota Camry is not meant for this kind of driving), the villagers laughed at us passing by, as if the seven of us crammed into a compact car that was continually bottoming out had nothing to fear. We missed a turn as we were nearing the school, and as the driver reversed to try again for a second time, I realized that our experience bouncing over the holes of Ugandan dirt roads was a smooth ride compared to what was about to happen. We were turning left into the bush. No road, no tire tracks, no clearing. Just bush. As limbs smacked my face through the open window (it was broken)as we went full speed ahead, I pictured God laughing at us at that exact moment, as if saying, "you haven't seen anything yet."
And as we pulled up to the one room school in the middle of nowhere, I knew he was right. As we piled out of the car like clowns at a circus, the children ran out to greet us. We were the first visitors they had ever had. They had prepared songs for us, which they sang before we shared our lesson and sent us away with their finest crops as gifts. The same thing happened at the second school that we visited that day, were we were received as guests of honor and given a performance of song and traditional Buganda dance by the children, hundreds of them crammed into one little room.
It was during these moments on that Thursday, a day that I had dreaded at the start, that I realized that God had brought us to the heart of the matter. He had brought us to the Africa I was longing to see and He was trying to bless us. In settling here, I have become so accustomed to sharing with others and blessing others that I hadn't left much room for God to do some work of His own.
Our lessons were received well that day, but what I cherished most of all was the time I spent watching the children perform and playing with the children after the lesson--not just in sharing the lesson that I had planned, something that was on my agenda, but in turn experiencing His Spirit move and conduct His agenda, one far more magnificent than my own.
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