God's Faithfulness in Uganda.

Hello everyone, welcome to the month of June! We hope you had a great time in May and will have a great time in June too. May was a great month for us ministry-wise. We saw God working in many ways and were busy doing ministry and are excited to share with you all some of the things the Lord counted us faithful to do.

To start off, we were invited by a Pastor's wife who is going through our course to start a sexual purity club in her school. The invitation was too good to turn down since we are both passionate about sexual abstinence. We visited the school to share with the staff and pupils about sexual abstinence and see if it was something they would be willing to embrace and follow. We found all the members of staff and pupils i upper primary gathered to meet us. I, (Ruudy), shared a little bit about the alarming statistics of HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy and abortion and brought forth the need to abstain if single or remain faithful if married. The message was well received with meekness and gladness and we had 6 members of staff volunteer their names to be trained as messengers of sexual purity. As i was about to close, i felt the nudge from the Holy Spirit to share a little bit about Christ and make an altar call and boom; we had 8 students and two teachers receive Christ! This was the first time we saw teachers receiving Christ in the same altar call with their students and the cheering from students and all of us was deafening! We left that place praising and worshiping the Lord. Pray for us as we start going there every Tuesday afternoon to teach and train these young people and their teachers about Christ-Centered Sexual Purity.

     Christ being confessed and welcomed to be Lord and King over these people's lives!

We had two classes in the month of May and "Professor" Beckie got her first taste of teaching this year. She did a great job teaching about the Spiritual and Physical connection of Health and Hygiene as well as a class on Action Plans. I was also involved in teaching three topics in Caring for God's People. We both enjoy being used by The Lord as His Hands and Feet to help train these hungry servants of His; it's a privilege that we don't take lightly and each time we hold classes, we have come to realize that these people trust us so much. Often times we have been contacted for a piece of advice and counsel on their private lives and ministry; which means that they trust us and think we can offer them wise counsel. Keep praying for us to continually receive wisdom and understanding from The Lord who lavishly gives us wisdom so that we can advice these people as best as we could.

Prof. Beckie Teaching a class.

Students learning how to wash hands well.

 








On the 24th of May, we were invited by our night security guard; who is also undertaking the training since he is an associate pastor to share in their church. We drove for about 20 minutes to this village church and i shared about "Running your own race". What struck me most was the liberty and freedom in which they worshiped the Master! Using the local drums, the praises were vigorous, Pure and Holy and you could literally feel the presence of the King in this papyrus walled church. We were both humbled and encouraged and as we ministered to the congregation afterwards through the laying on of hands and prayer, there were several testimonies afterwards. It was encouraging to see first hand and experience what God is doing and how He is worshiped in different ways. We were encouraged and plan for more of such visits in future. God is indeed a good God!

Good Hope Revival Church.

Our ministry in Soroti received a big boost this week. A good teacher friend from the States came to volunteer there for a week. She is going to be encouraging and empowering teachers in the school where we have the child sponsorship program at. She will share with them her teaching experience. She will also participate in Purity Club activities in the three schools we are involved in as well teach in our Bible Study and spend time playing with the kids. Yesterday, we were in Soroti and took her to the school and she already had a blast. Pray for Beth as she serves the Lord, pray that she will be able to minister and be ministered to as well. That her relationship with the Savior will be enhanced through this trip. It's always a joy to receive someone coming over to give some help. May be you could be the next one to come and help, you may want to pray about it!

Beth in a tree shade classroom

Beth and Beckie and a host teacher.

Prayer Requests:
1. Pray for our health. We are battling some health issues and need God's intervention, also pray for wisdom for our doctor and for a peace of mind for us, that we will keep trusting the Lord.

2. Pray for my citizenship process. We haven't heard back from USCIS and our attorneys are getting our Congressman involved. Pray for a speedy handling of this and also for provision for us to be able to come back to the States next month to complete the citizenship process.

3. This month we have three consecutive weeks of ministry starting from next week. We have two classes and a marriage retreat for our students coming up. Pray for strength, wisdom, finances and transformation of lives, marriages and ministries.

4. Pray for the health of our team mates. They are old and need the constant touch and encouragement of the Lord. Pray also that we will learn a lot from them as quickly as we can and that we will be good co-laborous with them.

5. Pray for the different ministries we are involved in, especially the sexual purity ministry; that it will become a national movement as the country fights HIV/AIDS.

Thank you all for your faithfulness. We make mention of you daily in or prayers and we pray that the Lord Himself will bless you, heal you, provide for you and walk with you daily. We hope to see some of you very soon. Blessings and love from both of us.
R&B.

God is at work in Uganda!

Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. We always thank our God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of ours of you all, making requests with joy, for your fellowship and partnership in the spread of the gospel here in Uganda from the first day until now; and we are confident in this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.

From our previous post, we told you about a young waitress we had started walking alongside and ministering to. We have got two exciting updates about her! Last week, she went and met her mom and she said it was a very exciting moment for both of them! We are grateful that we played a small part in encouraging her to forgive her mom for abandoning them when they were still young ad we can see that the journey for forgiveness has started already. She had also not been to church for a very very long time, but yesterday, she was able to join us in church and she even came with her friend and roommate! We went to our house together after church and had a meal and a good fellowship, we hope to make it a Sunday routine to have a meal together and have fellowship with the Father, Son and Spirit and we would appreciate your continued prayers for us in this endeavor.

We are also excited to let you know that we started a new class last month; meaning we now have two classes running every month! After much prayer and waiting, we had expected to have about 16 village pastors and church leaders attend this class. However, on the D-Day, we started off with only 14, but by the end of the day, we had over 22 Students! How the rest appeared, only the Lord knows! From time and again, we have come to realize that the Lord always sends us students on the very class day; and they usually just appear at the gate with their small belongings ready to study. We thank God for entrusting these mighty men and women of His to our care and we continually ask for your prayers for wisdom for us to train these guys in the best way we possibly can and also for them to have soft hearts that can be shaped, moulded and transformed by the Lord for His glory and purpose. We have also noticed that this particular class has more pastors in it than our other class and they just seem to want to learn more; they are asking a lot of questions and you can see the enthusiasm in their eyes and faces! Our other class meets this week from the 13th to the 15th of this month and we would appreciate your prayers once more!

Also, last week, we travelled back to Soroti for the burial of my uncle who took his own life out of annoyance! He was a good man, very generous and a pillar in the house of God, but succumbed to his anger. There were over 6,000 people at the burial and speaker after speaker spoke of how generous, hardworking, honest and faithful my uncle was and this huge crowd was testament of people had loved him. It was a very hard time to come to terms with his demise. However, we were able to have a family time and a family together with my three siblings. We had never had family time before and i am grateful to my wife Beckie for suggesting it to us. We took our first photo with all the four of us and we were able to express our disappointments with each other, wept together, forgave, reconciled and started a new life with a promise of coming together again for Christmas. Death is not a good thing; when both of our parents died when we were young, we got split up with each of us growing up with different relatives and never really had time to meet together as brothers and sisters, but we are hopeful that we have turned a new page and will try to redeem the years that the locusts had eaten.

We still haven't heard back from the USCIS regarding my citizenship interview date even though we are past the expected three months period. Please keep praying for us as wait to hear from them. We  would love for this process to be completed so that we can concentrate on ministry. Besides, i am mandated to return to the States before 6 months in Uganda in order to maintain my immigrant status, so either way, we have to start making plans to return back to the States even though we wouldn't want to. Besides being unnecessary expense for us, we love what we are doing in Jinja and wouldn't want to be interrupted; but hopefully, things will be sorted out soon and quickly and we will be able to settle down and serve the Master fully.

Finally, keep praying for our sexual purity ministry that is on-going in Soroti and soon to start in Jinja as the school term starts next Monday on the 18th. Pray for our volunteers in Soroti who are tirelessly teaching, leading and guiding these students without pay, but for the love of the Lord and His creation. Keep praying for us as we seek ways of how to be able to provide them with a small stipend to help them meet some of their basic needs. Pray also for us as we start a new purity clubs partnership with a church founded primary school in Jinja, that we will find reliable and faithful volunteers who will be able to teach in these clubs.
We want to say thank you so much for your continued financial partnership that enables us to serve the Lord in Jinja, surely without your gifts, we wouldn't be writing about all these wonderful things that the Lord is doing here! We always pray for you and would love to hear from you about what the Lord is doing in your own lives and how we can pray for you. Blessings.
His hands and Feet in Jinja, Uganda,
Ruudy & Beckie Olupot.

 

Speaking Life and Truth

Since we are less than 500 yards from the Nile River we will often take a walk down to the river and sometimes, especially when we have visitors, we go for a short boat ride. There's a restaurant at the end of our road that dead ends into the river where we will go and watch the river or go out on a boat ride. There's a waitress we always see there because she works every day of the week. And one day we were sitting there with some visitors, and we asked her about herself, she told us that she's in a catering training institute and that her uncle is paying for half of the fees as she works to pay for the other half. We asked about the parents and the father had passed on and she didn't talk with the mother anymore.
This is where I want to hit the pause button. Such conversations almost always open up avenues for speaking the truth, and encouraging a brother or sister in the Lord, or leading someone to the love, forgiveness and freedom that the Lord brings. When you take time to ask someone about him or her self it opens the door.  Take time to listen, pray, be hearing what they are saying physically and hear what the Spirit is saying. And I know this doesn't just happen in Uganda, it happens in America too. People like to talk about themselves, and often if you're attentive you will hear also what they are not saying.
Anyway, un-pause, so as we're talking to her, Ruudy asks what happened that she's not talking with the mother anymore, and after she shares more, (the mother left the family when they were young) we both realized that she needs to forgive the mother so there is no place for bitterness in her heart, and we encouraged her to call her mom if she had her number. She said she did so we left her like that.
The next day we had walked back and I asked her as I was passing if she had tried calling her mom. She had a big smile and said yes! She had a nice long talk with her and they were going to keep talking. She also said that soon the mother is moving back to Uganda and she will let her know and then they can meet up. She was so happy. She said she hadn't talked about forgiveness yet with her mom, that she had wanted to do that in person, but they are on their way. Forgiveness always leads to freedom.
People often put missionaries on a christian pedestal, saying that they couldn't do what the missionary is doing, but you don't have to. There are things you can do in every day life, in every day situations that speak life and truth into people's lives. That's pretty much what it comes down to. So this blog isn't to say, look at us, what we've done, but to say, look at you, look at your own lives and the lives that cross with yours everyday. Pray for open eyes and ears to recognize opportunities for speaking life and truth. It may be at the restaurant, the gas station, the gym, or the work place, every person you have interaction with could sure use a little life spoken to them.

On the ministry side, more and more doors keep opening up for us to minister. Next week we are starting a new class and it has been amazing seeing how the Lord brings students to us without us advertising! We are excited for this new class and that means we will be having two classes every month.
Besides that, a pastor's wife who also happens to be our student approached and asked if we could start a purity club in her primary school. Of course we are passionate about sexual purity and our answer was yes and we are already in the planning stages of how we can go about this when the term re-opens next month. We are very grateful that the Lord is counting us worthy of His work.

The ministry in Soroti is going on well with the purity clubs concluding last week for this term and will resume again next month. The children under our sponsorship program will continue meeting for Bible study and Games every Saturday.

We want to say thank you for supporting us, it's because of your generous giving, that we are able to do all these things! keep praying for us and the work that we are doing here. Keep praying for these village pastors and church leaders that through them, there will be revolutionary unveiling of truth throughout Uganda! God bless you, we love you.

Work and Worship

Sometimes this little one distracts the mother, who is a student, and so I get to distract him so that his mom is able to focus. I love this little guy. So cute.

We had a good time in class this past week. The topic was Serving God in Work and Worship. We've divided the class up into 5 small groups and Ruudy and I are each leading a group. In the small group the students report on their action plan that they worked on over the month. One of the students in my group teaches Sunday school in her church. She reported that she taught the kids about creation. One of the obstacles she stated that she faced was that the children could not believe that God created the white people too! They thought maybe they were from like another universe or something. And then once they found out He had indeed created them they wondered then, if man was created in God's image, was God white or brown like them? It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall for that class.

I'm loving our new small groups, and look forward to developing relationships with each of these students.
Ruudy taught a few classes and did well. Please keep praying for us as we study the materials and prepare for teaching. We want to be so sensitive to what the Holy Spirit is saying.

We also added one class on interpreting the scriptures. We often find that people will take a single scripture out of context and then make it a major theological foundational thing. Like the scripture in Deuteronomy that says a woman shall not wear men's clothing. Here they take it to mean that a woman should not wear pants. I try to tell them that men in those days wore something one might consider a like a dress, so that when women wear dresses it's like they are putting on men's clothing, but they don't seem to buy that. :)
Pray with us that there is a shift from just seeking head knowledge, to really allowing truths to enter the hearts of the student, and that they could really grasp God's heart for them.

Ruudy has begun a weekly bible study with the daily staff, Slyvia the cook, George the gardener, Emma the night watchman, and sometimes Daisy who helps clean the place. Please pray for these people and for Ruudy as he leads it. Last week we had to let one of our staff go because he was involved in stealing and lying about said stealing. We don't want to have to let any one else go. We pray for continue transformation for all of us.


My cheese from America is close to getting finished, and we still haven't heard from the American government about when Ruudy's citizenship interview will be. We have enjoyed being back in Uganda, but we also would like to finish all of this immigration stuff too, please pray with us concerning this matter.

The other week we had to go to the police to report some of Ruudy's missing documents (one misplaced by the embassy, and the other was used by someone to pick a package for Ruudy but it was never returned). While in the police office we began chatting with the ladies at the counter since they were from up north. Then Ruudy had the idea, let's see if they can accept baked goods and we could bring them some cookies or something.  The ladies didn't even hesitate, they said, yes please, and held out their hands like they were ready to receive the things which weren't even baked yet. A few days later we made some peanut/sesame butter cookies and dropped them off. They were all smiles as Ruudy handed over the goods. We are hoping to make this into a simple relational ministry as most people complain of the corruptness in the police but don't do much about it. As they come to know and love Jesus corruption should automatically decrease. Please pray for the policemen and women.

And last but not least please keep praying for funding. The ministry we are involved in is by faith. We are so thankful for the people who have already committed to pray for us and to give to support the ministry on a regular basis. We have to build a second toilet block for the students in the near future. Please be praying for funding for that. And of course if you want to give to help it's much appreciated.

Our friends came from Entebbe for a weekend visit. We have a great time teaching them all how to swim and enjoying the lake side.What a blessing good friends are!

At The Father's Service: Being The Feet and Hands of Christ in Jinja and Soroti

Hurray! We are so glad to be back doing what The Father has called us and anointed us to do! We hope His grace has been sufficient for all of you; as it has been for us. This week we thought it would be nice to share with you what we have been unto since we returned from the States. We have been doing quite a lot, very busy catching up stuff from where we left five months ago. Here we go:

First, we want to say thank you to all those who helped us purchase stuff that we needed for our new home in Jinja. It was good to come back and find all our things waiting for us in the house. Our team mates who had returned a week earlier did a lot of work to make our house ready for us! We are still settling in and arranging stuff slowly, but we are so grateful to have such loving supporters and teammates. We are also happy to announce that we ow have enough room for visitors; so, if you ever need to get away for a bit, you are welcome to stay with us at the source of the Nile River. Here are a few pictures of some of the stuff you helped buy for us, praise God.

 
 

One place that we were both itching to go was our orphanage; Welcome Home and we did go there as soon as we had some time and oh boy, what a time we had there with all these cuties! We danced, listened, taught, played, carried babies, etc and by the time we were done, we were sweating and panting, but full of joy and excitement. Nothing on earth beats the giggles and smiles of these little angels. You could go there not happy but you will come out smiling and laughing, you just can't afford to remain unhappy with all these smiling little ones around you. We took tons of pictures and below are just a few of these. Remember most of these kids are still waiting for loving and caring parents and homes.

 

From the 18th to 20th last month, we had our first class of Rural Pastors and Church leaders for this year and we had over 30 in attendance! We taught them about Biblical Preaching and I, Ruudy taught two lessons and Beckie helped with the organization and administration as well as hospitality and some child care. It felt good to finally start to have our feet on the ground and be involved in the deep of things. Our next class is from the 18th to 20th of this month. This month, they are coming to learn about Work and Worship. Please keep praying for these men and women and also for us that we will help them walk into the destinies that the Lord Himself has prepared for them and their ministries. You can have a look at some of the photos of the class.

 

On Saturday the 21st of last month, we embarked on a journey to Soroti for ministry, family and friends there. It was good to see everyone there and we were given a hero's welcome in our local church there with numerous hugs and handshakes, in fact it was goof none of us had worn white clothes otherwise, they would have been dirtied in a short while because of numerous hugs and babies we had to lift up and down. We felt blessed to have such a family in Christ. We were also given a VIP reception in our former Fellowship Group meeting. It was good seeing those we passed the button to still running the race with such excitement! 

The Purity Clubs are healthy and doing well; thanks to our committed volunteers. We were able to teach in all the purity clubs for the week as wells participate in Bible study for kids in our sponsorship program. We gave out scholastic materials to kids in our sponsorship program thanks to a donation of books from our local Indian shop keeper partner! We were also able to add two new Indian shop owners to our sponsorship program bringing the local indian sponsors to 5 and still counting! While in Michigan, some of our supporters donated clothes that their kids didn't need for us to take to Soroti and you should have been there to see the joy in the faces of these kids when we told them they would each get a T-Shirt! My Mom-in-Law also bought some sports vests for the kids and they were so happy to have some sort of Uniforms for games. We had a good game of soccer for the boys and the girls had "first ju" (played by three girls at a time with the two on both side trying to hit the one in the middle with the ball). We are grateful to Marsha Vandersloot for the balls and clothes. We are still in need of Sports uniforms for these kids as well as a laptop, generator, projector and small speakers so that our volunteers can be able to project some purity videos to the students.

The biggest news so far is that after teaching in one of our Purity Clubs, i made an altar call since this was a newer class we were handling and over 70 kids came forward to receive Christ, hallelujah! Please pray for these little ones to keep growing in the Lord with strength and power to resist and overcome all the attempts of the enemy to take them back to bondage. Here are a few pictures that sum up our time in Soroti.

 

Personally, we are doing well and are full of joy and excitement to be back in the field. We are still waiting to hear from the USCIS about my Citizenship Interview appointment; please keep praying for us in this regard. We are also still in need of more financial support, but we are totally at peace about it and keep trusting the Lord to provide for us day by day. At the same time we want to thank you all for supporting us through your prayers, financial gifts, words encouragement, etc, you are the reason we are doing what we are doing right now. Also, could you take time and pray for all our former teammates with International Teams? A lot is happening that we are not at liberty to discuss right now and the best we can all do is to pray especially for wisdom from the Lord and encouragement from the Lord and the Holy Spirit; we believe in prayer and know the power in it that's why we are asking all of you to pray. Finally, keep praying for us too, that we will keep walking in the wisdom of the Lord and that we will have ears to hear and hearts to know and do what He wants us to do at all times. We grieve with those who are grieving and rejoice with those who are rejoicing. Blessings, grace and peace of the Lord be upon you all in the matchless name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

defining normal

“I never knew you could become fat like that.”  Yes, this is a direct quote, and from one of my good friends, and a man none the less.  But people are happy that I am now fat. At least that’s what they tell me. One of my friends even tried to stop me from walking, for fear that maybe I was walking for exercise to reduce the body size. I told her I enjoyed walking from place to place and reassured her I would do my best not to exercise too much and lose all these fats I gained in America. Ha. I am definitely not in america any more. It’s funny the way cultures are often so different and at many times quite opposite. Like take for instant being overweight. Here they were worried about me because I was looking too thin before I left and now that i’ve come back, and i think i’ve gained like 5-10lbs being in the states, they now say I’m healthy. Here being what they call fat, what we might call overweight, shows that you have enough, you are happy in life and you are not in need, which is what most people struggle to attain. So while American’s are busy paying millions at the gym and other methods of reducing weight, most Ugandans are doing their level best to increase.
Another funny opposite is skin color. Most american brides will go tanning before their wedding, and millions of people will lay out in the sun and “bake” (as Ruudy likes to call it) in an effort to become darker. And yet from here a bride is actually hidden away for days before the wedding so that she becomes lighter. And telling someone they are brown rather than black is a compliment. Everyone is looking for ways to get lighter and stay out of the sun. Most ugandans will compare their skin color with others saying, at least I’m not as dark as so and so. Always looking for someone to be lighter than.
Culture has so much influence on the way we see things and our expectations and beliefs. And too often defines our “normal”. And we have been rescued from from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, Jesus (Col 1:13). As christians we live in a different kingdom, which means we live according to a different set of rules and in a different culture, a different normal. So no matter what culture we live in on this earth, we should not allow that culture define our “normal”.
After several months in America I really realize that I am also somehow a foreigner there, and because of my skin color among other reasons I will always be a foreigner here. And because Ruudy and I come from such different cultures our home will never be completely american or ugandan. God is really teaching us about finding our home in Him, and allowing Him to define our “normal” and allowing His kingdom to define our culture.
Whether you are white or black (or brown), or fat or skinny, or whatever, you don’t have to live feeling you are out of place or you don’t fit in because, in the kingdom of God, He delights in His children and each child is celebrated, you are celebrated. His “normal” is unconditional love and that’s the kind of normal we try to live in. Knowing His unconditional love and giving it out. Let’s let God’s kingdom culture define our normal.

A stranger in my own Country!

I have heard people talk about being culture-shocked when they returned to their own countries after being away for a while but i didn't know what that meant; somethings are better experienced first hand. As most of you already know, i am ready to return back home and couldn't wait to be back; in fact sometimes i felt like the plane was being slow. We briefly got delayed in London and this was not going down well with me, i did not want my dear friend to wait for us longer than he was expecting at the airport since we were arriving late.

Finally we touched down at Entebbe and we were all happy to have made it. However, the moment i stepped out of the plane, things started changing. When we left Michigan, i had almost three layers of clothing (these included a heavy sweater and a winter coat!). It felt normal in London to have these layers but now hear, i couldn't bear the heat! I was profusely sweating one could even wonder whether i was a nervous drug smuggler or terrorist! Entebbe is supposed to be one of the cool places in Uganda but it felt like desert. The layers had to come off one after the other. After an hour's drive, we arrived at our friend's house. Even though it was a few minutes to 1am, his wife still had food for us which she warmed up and served (bless her); she had prepared chicken and boiled potatoes. The food was so delicious that i kept eating until i could almost not walk! But we couldn't sleep because it was too hot; we had to take very cold showers in the wee hours of 2am in order to catch some sleep. And even after this, we couldn't cover ourselves. It seemed as though we were being baked in a low heat oven!

The next day we started off for Jinja and i had to wear the lightest clothes possible. It felt strange driving on the "right side of the road" again. However, everything seemed strange. From the dust, to crazy traffic, to meat hanging in the Butchers; everything seemed strange. It dawned on me that slowly and surely, the American life was starting to take its toll on me; my body (without my knowledge) was adjusting to the cold and the comfort there. I was getting used to everything being organized and now here, everyone has to look through their shoulders and be alert all the time because the unexpected always suddenly happen. My wife had to adjust driving in these roads and on a few instances, we had some little scary moments. Somehow, as i thought everything through, i came to appreciate and realize that as Christians, we called into this kind of life; a life of looking though your shoulders and being alert at all times, lest you will drift away and be left behind. Sometimes we need comfort, but we also need these kind of reality checks, moments like these keep us alive and awake all the time to keep praying and be thankful. The drive to Jinja was one of the strangest days i have ever felt. Young people taking every opportunity to sell something to you in slow traffic, to someone knocking on your car window begging for alms was touching.

I did not want to eat anything until we arrived at our new house in Jinja; our home. Our teammates and "parents" had also just made it back from the States and Australia a bout 5 days before we arrived and so, they had done a lot of work preparing the place for us. We made it to a very happy welcome. The hugs were longer and the smiles affectionate. The beds were all ready and the house looked great (hopefully we will be able to furnish you with some pictures once we get everything organized and in place). It felt so good to be in our own house! This is the first time we are living just the two of us in our house since we got married. We have always had people living with us and we hope to keep it this way for sometime so that we can enjoy each other more than before. Of course we welcome short term visitors. And the privacy did help with the heat in that we have had to sometimes barely had clothes on while in our house just to stay cool a little bit from the 100 degrees heat. Imagine transitioning from below 30 to 100 and above degree whether!
Unpacking and organizing the house isn't an easy task. Beckie has been doing most of the arranging of things in places she wants them to be (i am not good at this) and slowly, we are almost there. Our team mates have been a very huge blessing to us, in fact we don't know how we could have been without them. We have been out for dinner a few times already and we all agree that we missed this place and are happy to be back.

Tomorrow we have a class of about 36 rural pastors and church leaders and we have been busy putting things up and organizing for these guys. Buying food, setting the classes and dormitories, preparing training manuals, etc. And this week, i will be teaching two classes and i could do with your prayers for wisdom and ability to do a good job, that i will teach exactly what Father wants me to pass on to His beloved children. Beckie is busy helping with organizing stuff and shopping and helping with some administrative duties. We still feel a little bit jet lagged and are in need of His freshness and grace to accomplish the task ahead.
Hopefully on Saturday after classes, we will head to Soroti to see and do some ministry there as well as see some members of our family there.

One thing i have enjoyed since coming back is being able to have longer conversations. People are always available to talk longer, even though sometimes this is at a big cost. And oh, telephone calls are not that cheap, you have to pay by the minutes you use. I particularly had a very long conversation on phone with my former Pastor (he is the only person who can make laugh until my ribs pain and usually my wife knows straight away that it's him i am talking to). The first 5-10 minutes were just laughing sessions and then the next 20-30 were laughing and talking! He is a great man of God and i look forward to seeing him next week. Now we have to plan our phone calls carefully, otherwise, we could easily end up incurring huge expenses on calls since everyone is eager to talk to us and they usually just hijack our calls and turn them into theirs.

Going to church on Sunday seemed strange too after being away from the routine for 5 months. We had to adjust to 30 minutes of standing prayer sessions and 30 more of praise and worship. It was good to see that our small church in Jinja was growing with a few new faces including a new Pastor. (The old one was transferred) and the current Pastor comes from Soroti. In fact his parents and sister were members of my Fellowship Group in Soroti. It was good to see old friends and we cant't wait for the scenes that await us in Soroti next week!

Finally, i think it's a good thing to visit other cultures, to step out of your comfort zone and venture out, there are lots of things to learn and lots of things to appreciate. I am happy i got the opportunity to go to the States. Now, i look at my own country with new eyes, i see opportunities more than obstacles and i hope, i can help a few people to change their mindset and appreciate this country more and not to want to run away from it.
Keep us in your prayers, we will share the pictures with you soon once we get everything organized. We love you, God bless you.