Uganda has been a month of so much blessing and provision from the Lord. One of those blessings came in the form of Nelson, a teenage boy in the Senior 4 class at Makobore High School for Boys. One day after morning devotions I sat down next to him in Literature class. We started chatting and I ended up staying with him for History, Geometry, and Trig as well. If you know anything about my math skills (or lack there of), you know that equations and I don’t get along so well. After my first failed attempt at discovering the distance of line A –B I gave up and just sat and observed Nelson. This kid is smart. Not only is he smart, he’s kind. He’s kind and thoughtful and generous and many things that 16 year old boys usually aren’t.
(Note: when Nelson saw I couldn’t solve the equation he asked me why we didn’t learn Math in America. Oops.)
Through the next couple weeks Nelson and I had many opportunities to hang out and build our friendship. We went to church, watched football games and talked about our families.
And then Nelson came to school with a present for me – a bag of ‘Yellows.’
(that's ugandan for bananas)
I’m sure I have a tendency toward emotionalism to begin with, but this precious gift really pushed me over the edge. You see, Makobore is a boarding school. So the boys go class, eat and sleep there. This means they also have to pay. Their parents work an enormous amount of hours each day just to try and make enough money to pay for schooling and have enough left over to feed themselves. The boys don’t have any extra money to buy anything other than the bare necessities (cue jungle book song here). They can’t even afford to buy school books so instead the teacher reads the book verbatim and they write the entire thing into notebooks. They put everything they have towards school because they believe getting an education is the most important thing they can do for themselves and their families.
Nelson’s gift wasn’t just a sweet gesture to thank me for being his friend. It was a gift of sacrifice. Knowing this I tried to refuse it. He insisted so then I tried to take only half so he could save the rest for himself. Again he said no. He had bought them for me and wanted me to have them all. So I tamed the internal desire to force him to take them back and instead accepted his gift.
As I was walking down the dirt road back to my house, swinging my bag of Yellows, I kept thinking how much Nelson’s gift to me was like the widow’s offering Jesus tells about in Mark.
“Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. many rich peole threw in large amounts. but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.
Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on.”
Mark 12:41-44
There is something so beautiful found when we give out of our poverty.
For the giver, it shows undeniable trust in the Father. For the receiver it is incredibly humbling and ignites a desire to be as selfless to someone else as the giver was to you.
You can change someone’s life by giving them something as simple as a bag of Yellows.
Thank you Nelson for being such an encouragement to me and living your life as the type of person I hope to become.
