Ministry site 1: Mmanze Center for Rural Development; Mmanze, Uganda
What we did: Painting and construction
Spent time with local school children
Ministry site 2: Jesus Celebration Church; Nateete, Kampala, Uganda
What we did: Helped rebuild a church
Prayed over a dying man and saw him healed through prayer
Door to door ministry
Preached sermons
Spent time with church members and local children
Taught Sunday school
Other teams’ ministries:
Raising Hope- Team Selavie- Slum ministry and teaching. My team was invited by their host to come eat with them. Meeting Patrick and hearing about his ministry was amazing. He’s doing great things and is truly a man of God who lives out love. This is a ministry I plan on supporting financially.
World Bridge Ministries- Team SurrendeR 121- School/community ministry
Cherished life ministries and North Kigezi Diocese- Team Liora- working with teen moms, high school girls, and adults with disabilities and hospital ministry
Local language: English and tribal language.
Bugandan is the biggest tribal language and what was spoken where we were.
Terms: Ndibulungi- I am fine
Olyotya- How are you?
Webale- Thank you
Webale Nnyo- Thank you so much
Welaba Sula- Goodbye
Bulungi- good night
They value twins in Uganda and each twin has a special name. We happen to have three twins on our team and they taught us the name for their birth order: Waswa- Oldest male, Kato- Oldest female, Nakato- Youngest female
Muzungu- white people (or some tell us it’s also used to mean rich people). This was yelled at us everywhere we went. Amanda (our team member of Chinese descent) had it yelled at her as well, but she sometimes also had “mu-china” yelled.
Chapati- A type of flat bread made from oil, flour, baking soda, garlic and onions; shaped like a tortilla.
Rolex- chapati with a fried egg(s) and vegetables (depending on vendor, tomatoes being the most common, but we’ve also seen cabbage, peppers and onions). This was probably most of our teams favorite thing to eat; we liked adding hot sauce to them. They cost 1500 shillings (so about 50 cents).
Bouda Boudas- ie border borders. Motorcycles that take you around for a fee. The fastest mode of transportation. Name comes from their use to cross between Ugandan and Kenyan border because of immigration rules (vans couldn’t go through so you walked or took a motorcycle), the name spread across the country from there.
Matatu- taxi, but more of passenger vans than American taxis. Typically built to hold 14 adults, our team record was 22 adults. You can hire private owns to take you to specific places with just your people, but it’s more expensive. If you take a public one, you take routes and hope up at various stops to get to your next location.
Other things of note:
-Any time you tripped, dropped something, or did anything else that might be negative, locals would say “sorry sorry,” they also said this if they did something by accident to you.
-Whenever you entered a room you were greeted with “welcome” or “welcome back” and a handshake. The Ugandan handshake begins with the same one we have in America, then a slide to grasp the wrist and then another standard (to us) handshake. Sometimes this pattern is repeated until someone takes there hand away.
-Livestock wanders pretty freely. Goats are particularly common. When we asked if people might steal them they said no because everyone knows who the goats belong to and if you weren’t its owner it’d be hard to catch.
-We saw a lot of “property not for sale” written on fences and even houses. When we asked about it, Pastor said that sometimes people will “sell” property to others and leave with the money. Once people realizing that’s happening, a sign will go up so that people don’t get scammed.
-I was surprised to hear nothing about the LRA in the part of Uganda we were in. Two of our teams were in Northern Uganda and they heard a lot about it and met and worked with victims of the violence. Uganda is a fairly large country and it seems that the part we were in wasn’t directly affected by the LRA violence.
Once again, internet is too slow to get pictures up. I promise I’ll get some up as soon as I can! Thank you all for your support! I am under $1000 away from being fully funded. If you would like to offer financial support, you can do so by clicking the support me button on the top or left side of my blog page. Thank you!
