David has been teaching physics and computers this term, along with his other responsibilities as Director of Development at CSB. He spends lots of time asking questions, exploring possibilities and thinking about issues like jobs and economic development - issues that affect our students lives dramatically but on a more subtle level than the day to day crises.
His physics class has struggled over the last term to accept his teaching style. In a culture that is completely exam driven (and for good reason, good scores are the only way to pass on to the next level and are almost impossible to get unless you memorize all the necessary material), students are none to eager to think. David has spent a lot of time convincing the students that unlike some other subjects, memorization is simply not going to help you in physics. If you are going to be asked so solve physics problems on the UNEB exam than you have to know how to think through a physics problem. You really can’t memorize your way there.
After several peaceful demonstrations of their discomfort with his lack of dictation and notes for memorization, the students and David have both found ways to move towards each other and find a place of comfort. As one student eloquently put it in a parent meeting ” if you have never eaten lion and your father brings it for you to eat you will be intimidated by it until he shows you the way to eat and digest it.” David has been bringing lion for dinner each day in physics class and showing the students how to eat and digest it. They are learning and growing. Perhaps even more importantly they have learned that he is interested in listening to them, hearing them, and responding to them. They have learned that at least in this incidence, peaceful conflict resolution worked.
Today we invited the class to our home for a little party. We played some ultimate frisbee and American football (teaching them was half the fun) and ate some good food - the kind they hanker for; Rice, beans and cooked cabbage. We invited Tim, our film intern, to come and talk about the physics involved in film making and photography, a good jump off from what the students have been learning about lenses and optics. The students loved hearing about cameras, film school and getting to use Tim’s great film equipment. Their worlds opened up in a new way as they experienced this corner of knowledge never before thought of.
I THOUGHT they were heading back to the school with David but they spent nearly the next hour taking turns driving our vehicle around the compound. What smiles and laughter as they got to experience the “big man” feeling of being behind the wheel. David kept a firm grip on the emergency brake as the students navigated around the many kids playing in our yard. What joy to explore the world all over again with these big kids.

Forgive my sporadic and infrequent blogging. I don’t seem to manage much more than life and sleep these days. The summer has been crazy-busy, hectic, intense and both wonderfully and terribly tiring.
Two weeks ago the book of Acts in Lubwisi was dedicated. Our people group’s language, Lubwisi, only recently became a written language through the work of a group of SIL missionaries. After turning an oral language into a written one, they began the work of training translators and literacy workers and beginning to translate and publish the Bible into the heart language of the Babwisi people. Living here among them I can see what value this project has, not just to provide access to Lubwisi Bibles but to evidence to the people that God loves and cares about them uniquely. Imagine being taught to read in your own language for the very first time. Imagine hearing God’s word in your first language and being blown away by what God is actually saying. The Bible translation project is simply cool at every level. I’m so thankful for our great Ugandan team on-site, in fact right in my front yard! They are continuing to translate and SIL is continuing to look for funding to provide for publication of these books of the Bible. So far Jonah, Mark and Acts have been published. We had a day long celebration complete with many speeches, music, dancing and food.
This last week the new Maternity and Pediatric Ward opened in Nyahuka, our little town. Scott has put in an incredible amount of time and energy on this project in the last year. It’s an incredible improvement for the community and hopefully will drastically increase the number of women who choose a hospital birth over a home birth. Sunday night we met as a team along with staff from the health center (Scott and Jennifer have chosen to partner with the Ugandan government health system rather than establish a separate mission program - for sustainability reasons) to pray over each room of the new building. We cried as we prayed for people to feel the love and compassion of Jesus and experience his healing touch. Bundibugyo has one of the highest rates of sickle cell in the world, along with high rates of malaria, cholera, meninghitus, and HIV/AIDS. The next morning we again began celebrating for a full day. The American Ambassador to Uganda flew into our airstrip to cut the ribbon and be our V.I.P. - a big deal to the local people and also to us. Two schools sang, two drama groups performed and there were numerous speeches by dignitaries of all types. It was a real memorial of a day - full of praises for WHM and Scott and Jennifer. It left us all feeling dramatically encouraged by what God is doing here through us.
In other miscellaneous news from the last week or two; Pat, one of our longest term team members (14 years), returned from six months in the States. We got to host a team from David’s former university for a night and a day - feeding, sleeping and moving around a team of 16 is a lot of work here! Our interns are wrapping up their time in the next week and a half. We are all participating in about 6 team birthdays over this month - with just us to celebrate we all join in to find big and small ways to make the day special for each person. Christ School continues to heal and grow.

The fascia of my soul feels torn with ragged edges and many layers of exposed tissue.
Meanwhile David actually did have torn layers and needed four stitches on his eyelid/forehead today.
Praise God for team doctors who stitched him up on their kitchen table in less time than it would have taken to fill in hospital paperwork in America. He is feeling good. His eye is quite purple and swollen but not too painful. Please pray for him to heal infection free - no small issue here where the smallest skin blemish can turn into a huge boil, as recently happened to one of our interns!
Shoestring stress is what they called it in our mission training program. Shoestring stress is what led to David’s mishap - - -running into a blunt object while trying to fix a pump that was overflowing water into our house. Coming directly after a very frustrating encounter with a needy person who wasn’t rational or realistic and after a long week full of encounters with desperate people, the blood dripping down his face was enough to make him want to lose it.
And that’s where my soul’s at too. I feel like I’m losing it this week. At Mission Training International they gave us a frightening statistic about the almost 80% of missionaries that return from the field with a psychological disorder. Apparently the daily stress of life in an unfamiliar culture, compounded by ministry responsibilities, plus all the life stresses that come with living in uncertain circumstances . . . . All can add up to some serious psychological pressure over the long term.

I’m feeling it.

It’s the constant, unrelenting needs around me that have worn me down to ragged edges of soul. There is truly no end to the suffering around me and no end to the absorption of my love, care and concern . . . . Around four today I realized that I had truly reached the end of myself. The end of the end of the end of myself. I made the wise decision to call it a day and start working on dinner, clean up and time with my kids - - abandoning any plans for more interactions with others. Over the next hour as I attempted to cook and shore up my soul with some music, a grand total of about 14 people knocked on my door, 2 with previous appointments to come and talk about major life issues. I turned them all away, simply increasing my heart hurt and guilt feelings.

I’m taking a deep breath, realizing that summer is the busiest time of the year remembering that the last two weeks have been completely FULL of major events, remembering that I’m going a full four months between city visits this time, remembering that I don’t need to figure out how to get through anymore than today. God is sufficient, pray that He would show me how to access His presence.

I am Loving Like Crazy (I adore that song); pray that I don’t go crazy in the process!

Last week, Tim (our summer intern who is here to make a documentary) and I headed off to our nearest primary school for a few hours of observation and filming. I have grown used to the state of primary (or elementary) education here but Tim was wide eyed with shock at the situation. Despite our heads up and request to film a week before we arrived, we found only one teacher on site for several hundred students at the opening of the school. As we sat in classes and watched students write notes on a board for copying down into note books ( a common way to teach in a place with no textbooks) we watched children seated at benches around us cleaning their nails with razor blades, basket weaving with bits of plastic and crocheting with sticks and string as they “learned.”
Most government schools here have a plethora of painted signs warning against the dangers that befall youth; primarily sexual. I have included some of the ones we photographed on our visit. It’s hard to be too inspired by them when the very feel of the place is dangerous (collapsing sheet metal roofs in the photo for example). I see the real solution to these problems of youth as caring relationships and the absolute truth of who God says we are in Jesus. A few more teachers actually showing up might be of some help. Unfortunately once you are on the government salary as a teacher there is a little accountability and you get your money whether you’re there or not, whether you teach or not.
Our primary schools in Bundibugyo are completely inadequate to the task of education. We are praying about building a primary school here that could educate some of the brightest students, especially orphans, provide reasonable schooling for our staff children (most of whom attend primary boarding schools in other parts of Uganda for a reasonable education) and serve as a model for other schools in the area. Please begin praying with us that God would raise up the vision, the people and the funding for this partner project with Christ School.

We are going home for a bit!

In just about two months we will fly over the ocean and back to our homeland; both familiar and unfamiliar now. My heart is a mix of emotions about it, as we plan our itinerary during the visit and anticipate reunions with friends and family as well as great chances to share about our work here.

One of my best friends lives in TN and we are going to spend a few days with her and her family, sharing with their church’s mission board and the group of women who sent out Naomi and Quinn’s update newsletter. I loved her conversation with her daughter and the wisdom for me that came out of it. Here is the quote:

” I told R you were coming. She wanted to know about Naomi - I said she was seven just a bit older than four, like a big sister. She asked how big she was. I said I wasn’t sure. She then said, is she as big as a rock in the desert, and I said, yes, a middle sized one. I love that image you sent of Naomi in a sort of Arizona desert scene, at sunset smiling, with the sun behind her, glinting through her hair. Actually, the FIRST thing Rachel asked with great respect and hope was…”Is her hair still pink?” I think that should be your mantra as you come back. Worrying about sharing the big picture, being pin ups for missions, proving that peoples dollars are winning souls and all the other things that will swirl around - most of us will just be wondering good naturedly about the little things like “Is her hair still pink?”"

Yes! Her hair still has a lot of pink, mine still has a lot of the reddish brownish black that I dyed it back in March. We look forward to seeing your changes too and hearing about your lives. We will need prayer; after one year here I think I have gotten enough accustomed to it that it seems hard to imagine America being much different - that probably means we’ll feel a lot of culture shock. Quinn no longer remembers things like vacuum cleaners and dishwashers. All of us are most looking forward to seeing all of YOU but a close second is the food and restaurants!! It will be strange relating to people as an African missionary. I want to say that we are just ourselves, the people that you knew when we were middle class American Navy folks. But really we’re not. The experiences of the last year have changed us all a lot and yet I know that God has provision for that in our friendships. In some ways I am quite the same, in others quite different . .. . We’ll all get reacquainted and I’ll try to remember that my life here is not nearly as important to anyone else as it is to me!

We spent the larger part of the day at the second parent/student/staff meeting. This meeting was for our most junior students and the tone was noticeably different. At this point in their lives I think most students and staff of the s1 class are just feeling humble and grateful to be a part of a good secondary school.
My favorite parent quote of the day, stated in a long teaching moment to the youth, ” a student is more or less like a prisoner.” Not exactly the most positive, encouraging, or hopeful thought!! The point is taken. And really this point is the same in almost every parent speech: a)you are lucky to be here, you have it way better than we ever did and b) if you don’t want to be here then go away, no one is forcing you to stay.
I think both of these are typical parental points that are, just-as-typically, completely over the heads of the students. Our students DO want to be here, and they know that their generation is better off than any previously in Uganda. But that doesn’t change the things about their lives that don’t feel right or just or good. Our job as staff, I think is to advise and guide their lives as parents would while understanding them more as a friend. We need to find helpful ways to listen to the students well and to teach them how to discuss the issues in a way that will allow them to both hear and be heard. These are life lessons that will serve them well in this place. Our standard is not to provide better for these students than their parents had, or better than other poor schools in the district. Our standard is to effectively communicate the love of Jesus to our students through our words and actions. We want to cultivate an environment of peace, respect, trust and truth. How much easier it is to say than to do. Especially with 350 kids in the family.
When Kevin, our current headmaster, made his closing remarks, he thanked each person for coming and for their time. He explained that the process of peacemaking takes time and that the time is well spent. When I think about the parents who are calling for us to administer a quick caning instead of giving weeks of suspension spent at home within the guidance and confines of the family’s structures, I am reminded that grace too takes time. Punishments can be quick and easy. Dismissing and expelling students can happen in a few minutes. Grace takes time. The Tim Keller lectures I’m currently listening to talk about the Bible’s “love chapter” as teaching that real love is thinking about the other person. He said that the chapter outlines not a set of virtues that we should try to achieve but instead the practical out-flowing of the grace of God displayed in our lives. As we soak in God’s grace towards us, His love for us, we are empowered to extend that love to others in a way that truly is patient, kind and perseverant. Grace takes time.