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.