It’s funny how God’s timing is so perfect for every situation. Like I mentioned in my last blog, we met an Australian couple named Brian and Jan that are missionaries living in Uganda and helping the community of Lwamata. They told us about a project at the beginning of the week that they needed help with. The area where they are going to build an orphanage is a very small community with mostly mud huts. Brian and Jan met this older lady whose house was just falling apart (the walls are made of old corn husks and her roof leaks everywhere inside). So we wanted to build her a new house to help her and her family. We are building a traditional mud house and it has definitely been something I have never done before.
The community we are working in is so neat too because there is a church and school there that is thriving so much. The school is a primary school and the children are just amazing. We went into one class where the kids were singing a song about shaking the mango tree and it was just precious (something about shaking the monkey out too)…really had to be there to see how awesome it was. I can see why Brian and Jan have liked this community so much. We will be working on this project for the next week as well so we will have a lot of time to meet the community and get to spread the “action Gospel” with them more (i.e. loving on people to meet there needs because Christ loves them).
The first few days working on this project were some hardest and most interesting. We got all the poles we needed to build the house early in the morning. We cut them and got them ready to start building the house after lunch on the first day. As soon as we started putting the poles in the ground, it start down pouring so hard that it was painful to be outside while it was raining. We took refuge inside the lady’s house that we are trying to replace and that was a certainly a wakeup call of how much she needed a new house. It’s probably smaller than a basic tool shed (picture below). Water was leaking everywhere and there was no way to keep warm in a house like this. There was definitely a need in this situation. Christ calls us to love others above ourselves and I think the best way we could love her and show her Christ’s love was to build her a house to protect her from the rain and keep her warm.
I have definitely been adding a lot of new skills to my resume this year: building mud houses (Uganda), cooking for 80+ people (Nicaragua), and learning how to get a car started in any place (Cambodia)…just to name a few. It’s funny how lessons tend to repeat themselves on the race or just in life. As we were leaving the lady’s house, the car that had all of us in it got stuck in the mud and slid between two trees. The road was extremely slippery after the rain that afternoon so it was that much harder to try to push the car out of the mud. Long story short, after almost two hours of cutting down trees and pushing the car, we finally got it out of the mud and were able to finally go home. God gave us just enough sunlight to get the car unstuck and get us home safely too, which was such a blessing.
I also love how it was such a divine appointment to meet Brian and Jan because we would have never been involved with this project if we had never met them. We really weren’t planning on doing any contraction this month, but I love seeing how God has orchestrated this whole race to prepare us for the road ahead. I truly believe a lot of the skills I have learned this year will be put to good use when I get back home (communication with different types of people, resolving conflict, how to share Christ’s love with others, etc). This year has truly been amazing so far and I can’t wait to what God has in store for these last 2.5 months!
