Easter in Gulu & Moving to Kampala

Happy Easter! We spent Easter weekend up in Gulu. We drove up on Friday and stopped by the Cornerstone Ranch in Ekitangaala (about 2 hrs out of Kampala) on the way up to Gulu because there was a big reunion for all the Cornerstone Leadership Academy graduates over the weekend. Cornerstone is an organization that's going to start showing up a little more in our posts, more about them below.

When we got to Gulu we went over to the Youth Corps home that is near the Restore office to spend time with some of the girls that had not been able to go home for the holiday. The Youth Corps homes are homes that house groups of girls or boys that either do not have parents or family that will support them or their parents/family is not a positive environment. The kids ranging in ages from elementary to high school live in the home together. 1-3 mentors live in the homes with the kids and take them through a discipleship curriculum and love them like a big brother or sister. Them mentors are usually university students that have graduated from the Cornerstone Leadership Academy (CLA--mentioned above and elaborated upon below). There was a raging storm outside where about an inch of rain dropped in an hour and was accompanied by constant lighening and thunder. The power had been out in gulu for 6 days and so we spent the evening playing cards by the light of a single candle on linolium(sp?) and concrete floor. The girls served us king-sized portions of posho and beans for dinner and we just had a great time playing cards and teasing each other about losing. "Cards" is the only game that is played in Uganda and is similar to our Uno except everyone plays with slighly different rules, ie: sometimes a jack reverses the direction, sometimes its a wild card, etc.

On Saturday we went to the Restore Academy and spent time with the kids that were studying for their exams (equivalent to our finals week) which started on Tuesday of this week. We played some more cards and then went into town to buy food for the Easter Feast. That night we had several of the students over the the restore house and played more cards.

The Easter Feast: So on Saturday on the way home from town we stopped by the live goat shop on the side of the road and picked out a nice fat little she-goat for Easter. We tied her up (against her will) and threw her in the back of the SUV. She ran around the yard of the Restore Office all that afternoon and night crying for her fellow goats--I think maybe she knew it would be her last night.

So on Easter Sunday we assembled in a small African hut amidst a deluge that was dripping a little through the ceiling making little cups of mud on the floor. There was the sound of beating drums and singing in the background from some of the students holding a "fellowship" in one of the classrooms. The boys tied the goat up and laid it down on a bed a leaves and that was it for the goat. I'd never seen an animal that large get slaughtered right in front of me. Growing up in Orange County I tended to buy my meat nicely packaged from Trader Joes, it didn't come with fur coat, brown eyes and four hooves. On a little bit deeper level it struck me as powerful to witness the killing of a goat on Easter. I thought about how goats were sacrificed as a sin offering long before Jesus was offered as the final offering. To see something actually die for you is powerful--in a practical sense this goat gave her life to feed us, but in a symbolic sense it takes a blood offering to atone for sin. It was an experience I will not soon forget. And, BTW, I did eat some of the goat later and it wasn't bad, really a greasy meat, but I'd try it again.

We also got to go out to lunch with the boys and girls Youth Corps homes from Gulu on Easter. What a great experience. The restraunt was a buffet of local indiginous foods and we all served ourselves mounds of it. It was an incredible treat for many of the kids, as restaurants are not usually part of the weekly (or monthly or yearly) agenda.

On Tuesday we took the bus from Gulu to Kampala. If you've never taken a bus in a third-world country your really missing out on an experience. Live chickens flapping around, goats standing in the aisles and relieving themselves at will--its a real treat. Not to mention the shear terror you experience when you come withing 6 inches of other passing buses at 120 kph. Our bus ride, thankfully our bus ride did not have these usually standard elements. We rode the Post Office bus which delivers mail to all the passing towns and we had a phonomenally careful and slow driver, something we'd prayed for the night before. We sat in the very front seat for the 7 hour trek which was not a bad place to sit. The biggest inconvenience was that on top of the 90+ degree heat outside and almost negligable ventilation in the bus, we were sitting on top of the engine compartment and the floor was rusted through in a few spots so blazing hot air was pouring onto our feet the entire time. Picture yourself sitting in a bus in ridiculous heat and humidity, not airflow and you're sitting on a furnace that is so hot that after the first hour the bus driver put a tarp over the floor to block some of the hot air. I had had to put my feet up the whole time otherwise they would have been pretty burned. With the tarp down it was bearable.

So we made it to Kampala yesterday. We're actually going to be spending the majority of our time in Kampala over the next three months because of the shifting of needs and opportunities. We're really excited to be in the city, where we feel like we can use our gifts to minister more effectively. After losing our place to stay in Gulu (I think I had a blog post about that--the landlord tripled the rent and we got the boot) we were really confused and searching for what we should be doing. Some doors opened to help out an organization called Cornerstone in addition to our continued work with Restore. Cornerstone is an organization that runs dozens of schools across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, & Tanzania. They also run a network of Youth Corps homes described above. One of the things Cornerstone runs is the Cornerstone Leadership Academy which is a very intensive leadership training and discipleship school for 25 outstanding students to be a part of for the Junior/Senior years of high school. The kids that CLA graduates are phoenomenal, the cream-of-the-crop and we had gotten to spend time with many of them. One CLA graduate is the headmaster of Restore Academy.

There was a couple from Seattle that had been working and living in Kampala for 8 months focusing on creating a professional development curriculum to go along with the spiritual development curriculum that cornerstone offers. This couple was leaving Uganda today and leaving a need for someone to maintain, implement, and add to their work here and Crystal and I are so excited to jump into this need. Everything seemed to be pointing to Kampala so we made the decision to move here and continue our work with Restore by taking care of logistics and meetings for Restore in Kampala and also living at the Cornerstone headquarters and working at Cornerstone as well. There are also some additional ministries we would like to get involved in that are here in Kampala. Stay tuned for more specifics~

We hope you are all well, thank you for reading these long-winded blogs! We miss you all tremendously!