So … how was Africa?
It is the inevitable and elusive question from friends and family in the
States asked after any amount of time spent in any part of Africa. But to give the easy and automatic answer—“it
was okay”—somehow betrays the paradox this place holds. Actually, the answer is quite a sophisticated
one because Africa is surprisingly complicated; a simple existence, perhaps,
but a layered, rugged, alluring, confusing and beautiful place.
Uganda
is a very “physical” place. If one needs
water, it has to be fetched and toted and conserved. If one needs food, it has to be found,
plucked, filleted, or butchered. If one
needs a building of any sort or size, it has to be planned, built, and
maintained. One may conclude, as I did
at various points, that Uganda is inconvenient.
But when the day’s sweaty clothes are rinsed and dried on the line,
there is a salty satisfaction of deliberately stepping away from the
“convenient-at-all-costs” mentality that characterizes and fetters the West; a
deliberate step toward the experience of the Majority World—physical, rugged,
alluring, sometimes confusing, but beautiful and paradoxically simple/complicated. A little inconvenience is a small cost for
the rich life Uganda affords.
Three
weeks spent “being the church to those who are building the church in Uganda”
(our team’s purpose statement) took us down many roads—literally. We tallied 142 hours in 20 days on every kind
of road imaginable and unimaginable. But our primary destination was the New
Hope Uganda retreat center called Musana Camps, which our friends and fellow
church members—Nathan and Kendra Jackson—are actually, one square at a time, carving
out of the African bush for the refreshment and spiritual renewal of the orphans
and their care-givers at the other New Hope Uganda campuses scattered around
Uganda.
Musana
is situated on the remote, north rim of Lake Victoria between Kampala and Jinja. There Seth and I found our temporary home in
a canvas tent with foam mattresses and a gorgeous view of the lake that stretched
180 miles across the equator at 4000-feet above sea-level. We helped to roof a brand new health clinic
built for the benefit of the local villages, inaugurated by a two-day community
health event with an American physican.
While the doctor treated 250 children and adults with otherwise inaccessible
health care, our Fellowship Bible Church team provided gospel-presentations and
prayer for those who received this rare medical care. We also helped around the camp by building
wooden shelves, organizing storerooms, fighting flying bats and biting ants in
an attic, hanging dry-wall, washing dishes, playing with children, and preaching/testifying
at church of the Lord’s faithfulness.
But our main objective and principle ministry was to encourage the
missionaries by reminding and demonstrating to them that “out of sight” is not
“out of mind”; that they are loved and significant and remembered even when
isolated and largely silenced by distance and lack of technology.
In
between our bursts of work and encouragement at Musana we traveled seven hours
north-east to another New Hope Uganda fixture called “Kobwin Children’s Centre”
which was several more “clicks” removed from technology and accessibility and
opportunity. However, Kobwin provided—what
I personally concluded as—the defining moment of the entire trip in Uganda.
Everyone
at Kobwin was directly or indirectly impacted by Joseph Kony’s infamous “Lord’s
Resistance Army”—orphans, surrogate families who now care for orphans, teachers
who instruct orphans, and a community just on the southern edge of territory
that the LRA reached with their brutal gang-violence, incoherent ideology, and demonic
terrorism. The wake of such destruction devastated
many lives, many families, and many communities there. But we could detect none of that pain or
oppression in the smiles of the Kobwin people as we worked together, worshipped
together, and lived together for almost a week.
None of the acrimony that one might expect was present in their
conversations. What was undeniably present,
instead, was singing. Drums and voices, harmonies
with an intermittent whistle, the collective thumping of jumping and dancing,
the haunting Ateso language with the occasion ululation and English phrase
dropped in: “God is good, God is good.”
It was almost dark when they started singing. It was fully night when they finally finished. As we lay in our tent eavesdropping on the
impromptu worship service going on in the banda-hut
just twenty feet away, I clearly formed a thought that froze me that hot
evening. “What do they have to sing
about?”
They
were not performing for the mzungu
(foreign) visitors; not attempting to butter up the potential donors
nearby. They were just singing. But by just singing, in that place under
those circumstances with that history, they became my teachers and I their
student. God was already there. We didn’t bring Him with us; we found Him
there among the Ugandans. True, I taught
this same group of people the next morning at church, but they were already upperclassmen
in the school of Christ in many ways.
“What do they have to sing about?”
They have Christ, and He is enough to stimulate genuine praise … singing
deep into the night … when no one else is looking … even when tomorrow they
will have to walk or ride a bike two miles for the water to make a simple
breakfast.
If
poverty is primarily measured along relational lines instead of material goods
(and it is), then who is really the impoverished one here? I have more money in my pockets than they,
but I have less song in my soul—far more aware of my insect bites and sunburn
than Christ’s dear presence. I spend an
embarrassingly high percentage of daily energy on “getting a clue” and nursing
a reputation as one who “has a clue.” Africa
strips all that away. There is no clue. There is only Christ, active in love and
grace, redeeming and reclaiming that which was corrupted by sin.
Simon,
Julius, Charles, and the fifty other people whose names I never learned remind
me from afar that Christ is enough.
Christ is more than enough … in every place, under every circumstance,
with any history. So, let the singing
continue deep into the night … and let the glory of Christ among the nations
swell.
