Blog 10 - Pastoral Visit
Door: John
29 Januari 2017 | Oeganda, Jinja
It was time for our pastoral visit with Mirjam. During Mirjam’s visits we all have personal one-on-ones with her so we have the chance to open up about our time during the outreach and highlights and low points of it. We also get the opportunity to talk about our plans after DTS and she is just here to be a listening ear and to provide some wisdom and insight to any questions or concerns we might have. She is also here to encourage us and unify the team, strengthen us, and have some fun with us. On top of that she brought some necessities such as contact solution, vitamins, and most importantly stroopwafels, sweets, and mail from family. It definitely was one of the highlights of the outreach and we shared some crazy experiences with Mirjam and can’t wait to see her again on the other side in Holland.
We woke up Sunday morning with Mirjam feeling a lot better so that was a great and encouraging start. We had a delicious breakfast of pancakes and had some time to take our rest before heading to church for 10 AM. Steven was supposed to be giving a message in church, but God really convicted Sarah to do it, much to her dismay. We also were going to perform our drama for the church. Now, the church, which is just down the street, has two services. The first is supposed to start at 8 and be finished at 10 and is followed immediately after by a second service starting at 10. We left 5 minutes early because we weren’t used to the culture shock of people being early in Jinja and didn’t want to let them down. It also was nice because Mirjam could accompany us to our first ministry for the church. When we arrived, the pastor was still preaching his first sermon and the second service didn’t begin until 10:30 am, half an hour late, that’s more like what we’re used to. When it did start, there was 4 songs done by the choir, 2 solo songs, 25 minutes of testimonies, and then a final 20 minutes of announcements before we got to share our drama at 11:30. Keep in mind the service is supposed to end at 12 and there was still an hour preaching to come at minimum. We got to perform our drama and Josh did a really good job explaining it and it was nice that Miriam was there to record and experience the drama for herself. After that, the pastor, Pastor George, asked us to help out with the kid’s ministry. So Stevie, John and Josh took on the challenge since Sarah was preaching. The boys walked over to the classroom where the kids were and found out they weren’t just helping out with the kids program but they were expected to RUN a kids ministry. With zero preparation and 100% spontaneity the boys whipped something together. They sang some songs, played some games, and John stalled with his version of Simon Says “John Says” which became quite hilarious with the language barrier but the kids loved it, all while Josh was trying to think of a Bible story. He decided on the classic story of Joshua and Jericho and John became the bad guys inside the city as Steven and Josh surrounded him with their arms and acted as the city walls. The kids became Joshua’s fierce army and we got all 50 kids to march around us screaming until the walls came down and John was free to beat-up. But their version of beating up was just all standing around John shooting pretend guns, not the African dog pile the boys expected, but it was really funny to experience. Even the translator we had was pretending to fire a shotgun at John. Sarah in the meantime was killing her preaching as always and did a really good job with it and was able to encourage the church. It was so good that the pastor had to add another 20 minute message reaffirming it and then another speaker had to follow up again with a 10 minute preaching, repeating the same message. So the 2 hour church service which was expected to be done at 12:00 ended up being 3 hours and was done at 1:30. We stopped by for lunch and then the team had a football ministry while Josh had his one on one with Mirjam at 4:00. We got to the field right at 4:00, waited for a 25 mins and then realized that we had our first experience of miscommunication and that they weren’t going to show-up so we just had a time of intercession instead. It was definitely a day to realize we are still in Africa even within the little bubble of the Hope-builders here in Jinja.
On Monday morning John had his one-on-one while the team went to the Home of Hope. The Home of Hope is another organization run by the Hope Builders and is a house dedicated to children with special needs. The team went there and were not prepared for what they found at the Home of Hope. They were expecting children with minor disabilities like the children at Amecet or kids with down-syndrome but there were close to 50 small children all with very severe mental disabilities such as cerebral palsy. Most of the children couldn’t walk and were all lying or sitting on the floor. They couldn’t perform basic motor functions or have interactions with the team and could only smile or cry. At first the team wasn’t expecting the conditions of the kids and the conditions they lived in, in such dirtiness and so crowded. But it was a really good opportunity for the team to grow and understand God’s love for every human being and how He has to lower Himself to our simple level. It was truly a teaching experience even though it wasn’t the favourite ministry of some of the team members. Just before football ministry in the evening, the Australian team arrived. We were expecting 23 of them and from ages 15-18 but they had a huge grey hound bus and they just kept filing off and they did NOT look 15. We found out later that there was 33 of them and the minimum age was 18, from that moment on things became a lot more hectic at the Suubi house where we were staying. After that surprising encounter we had football ministry while Jonah stayed behind for his one-on-one, and guess what??? The kids showed up this time! It was really nice to have another session with them and be able to build upon the connections we established earlier with our teams. We’re really enjoying the football ministries and having the opportunity to grow a relationship with our own teams. We returned back to a bustling living room filled with a roar of Australian accents and a crowd of people where ever you went. We also found out the team wasn’t Christian which meant that they had some very different values and behavior than we were expecting. We decided to get away from the business of the base and headed to a local hotel to have a separate guys and girls night. The guys played pool and had some cold sodas and found out that John is TERRIBLE at pool. He got about 8 balls in and only 3 of them were supposed to go in. It was a problem as the team he was on always lost, but it was still a really good time. The girls had their girl time and gossiped and chatted and ordered ice cream and did their frilly girly things. And you want to know the difference between guys and girls? The guys talked about pool for the WHOLE 2hours except for one small conversation about ordering French fries, whereas the girls, the boys are sure, discussed everything from cute little puppy dogs to the secret inner workings of the female mind. After that, we headed back after a wild night of fun to get some rest.
On Tuesday we woke up to the realization of a packed house and that we would say good-bye to our quiet meals and break times. It was no longer a meal for 7, but for 40 people now with the appetites of a hungry young Australian who is missing their kangaroo meat from back home. The first ministry we had in the morning was at the slums where the children at the Village of Hope come from. It’s just outside of Jinja and wow, that was one of the craziest places many of us had ever been to. As soon as you drive in you can see the streams of garbage and human feces flowing down the streets, all the alcohol packets strewn about everywhere, and a pretty foul smell hanging in the air. We had the opportunity to visit 5 different families and bless them with a small sac of sugar and to listen to their stories and pray for/encourage them. On the way to the first house we had a crowd of small children all running around trying to grab on to us mzungus and just hold our arm and stroke our hair. The boys ended up trying to prove their strength and seeing which person could hold up the most children at once, and with these small, malnourished children we got up to something ridiculous like 13 in the air just with our arms. The first house visit was really, really deep and powerful. It was a woman who lived in a no bigger than a 5m x 5m mud hut with her 5 children. A family of 7 living amongst garbage and all having to sleep on the ground in a house smaller than some bathrooms which also served as a kitchen. And this lady couldn’t afford anything so her children didn’t go to school and she couldn’t walk well because of a lame leg but was so desperate for food she walked 8+km into town. Once in town she was looking in garbages and dumps for scraps of food and was arrested and thrown in jail for a period of time only for trying to get food for her family to survive. She eventually got back home after a couple days but at home her situation is even worse. Her husband works but doesn’t make enough money so some days they have to go without food and above that he is also a raging alcoholic and comes home every night to beat her and abuse her. She can’t afford rent for the small home the family lives in and hasn’t paid for the last 3 months and her landlord is trying to kick her family out on to the streets. This woman was so down in her life for obvious reasons that the week before we came she tried to hang herself and only survived because some neighbours saw and stopped her. It was the most powerful story most of us had ever heard personally, and it just broke our hearts. We prayed for her and want to firmly believe that God will have mercy on her. We then visited 4 more families with similar stories and that’s when you realize how broken the world is and how sheltered we all are. Everywhere we went we were followed by that mob of children all climbing all over us and it was even a bit distracting at times trying to talk with the families in their homes so our contact person got a large stick and started whipping it around at the children to get them to back away. It is just a completely different world that we don’t experience. Our contact person in the slum runs a ministry to look after some of the families and she sold us little crafts and we could buy one bracelet for 1000 UGX which is like 25 cents, and they take an hour of work to make just 1! And they still have to pay for the supplies and the beads! It gives you an idea of the poverty these people are living in because this was a fundraiser for the more well-off contact person in the slums. We all came back extremely dirty and made sure to wash our hands and clean ourselves before doing anything else. In the afternoon from 2:00-7:00 we had another really cool ministry experience and got to help make dinner in the Village of Hope. It was so crazy to go in the morning and see where these kids came from as orphans and to see the condition they are in now, receiving an education and living a very respectable life while being well cared for. It made us really appreciate the work we were a part of. We all got to make our favourite Ugandan meal, chapatis, beans, and potatoes! We got to eat with the families and share a devotional and fellowship with the families and connect with them on a deeper level. We were randomly interrupted by the Aussie team which wasn’t supposed to be there but joined us for dinner anyways and was not the nicest interruption but it was still an overall amazing day.
Wednesday was our day off but it started out rough for John. He was super sick in the night, throwing up and with terrible stomach pains. It was similar symptoms to the stomach infection he had in Soroti and it was bad enough that he went to the hospital that same morning. When he got to the hospital he had some tests done and he didn’t have a parasite but still had a stomach infection so they hooked him up to an IV and gave him some antibiotics, fluids, and nausea medicine. Now the insane thing was that they asked him to stay in the hospital for 3 days, for a stomach infection! It was insane and then they left the IV in and asked him to inject 4 different kind of antibiotics every day for 5 days, just completely overkill and even Sarah as the nurse didn’t feel comfortable doing it so he asked for prayers back home and sought out more medical advice and decided to hold off on the antibiotics unless things got worse. Happily to say, after that day he felt so much better and it never got worse and only got better with no antibiotics, only prayer, whereas the same symptoms in Soroti took almost a week to get over it fully. It was just such a cool testimony that God answers prayers! During the afternoon, the team made use of their time by going into town to continue their souvenir shopping for their family and friends and then to head to a local pool with a beautiful view over Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile and enjoy a nice swim in a pool and some cold drinks. It was really nice to soak up some sun and just relax as a team and enjoy Mirjam’s last full day here in Jinja. We then headed back for some more rest and to play some cards and then headed to bed.
Thursday was Mirjam’s last day! The time went by so quickly with her being here! It began with a rocky start as Stevie had a really rough night and was up all night with an upset stomach, throwing up and having the runs, the night right after John had been ill. He recovered pretty quick and felt better when it was all out but still didn’t feel 100% but well enough to not go to the hospital. After that excitement, we had a final team time with her to talk about areas where we worked really well as a team and areas we could still improve on. We also had a time of encouragement for each other and it was just a great way to close off our time with Mirjam and we all got to share the deliciousness of the stroopwafels which she had brought! Zo lekker! Delicieux! Stevie stayed back for our kid’s ministry at the Village of Hope in the afternoon. It ended up being a great time and we got to sing a bunch of songs with the kids, play some games and hang out with them. They all know our names now and we have learned most of their names so it’s cool just to build the relationships and hang out with the kids. We said goodbye to Mirjam and wished her well on her journey back to Holland and couldn’t believe that we were already so close to finishing the outreach! Time is just flying by!
We all would welcome your prayers for health as the team has been plagued with health issues. Mirjam was sick her first night, John had a bad stomach infection, and Stevie is still battling sickness. Our mzungu bodies aren’t handling the African atmosphere very well and it has become quite a nuisance. We really, really enjoyed our time with Mirjam and the conversations we could have with her and she just felt like one of the team members, she fit right in! See you soon Mirjam! Love you all!
We woke up Sunday morning with Mirjam feeling a lot better so that was a great and encouraging start. We had a delicious breakfast of pancakes and had some time to take our rest before heading to church for 10 AM. Steven was supposed to be giving a message in church, but God really convicted Sarah to do it, much to her dismay. We also were going to perform our drama for the church. Now, the church, which is just down the street, has two services. The first is supposed to start at 8 and be finished at 10 and is followed immediately after by a second service starting at 10. We left 5 minutes early because we weren’t used to the culture shock of people being early in Jinja and didn’t want to let them down. It also was nice because Mirjam could accompany us to our first ministry for the church. When we arrived, the pastor was still preaching his first sermon and the second service didn’t begin until 10:30 am, half an hour late, that’s more like what we’re used to. When it did start, there was 4 songs done by the choir, 2 solo songs, 25 minutes of testimonies, and then a final 20 minutes of announcements before we got to share our drama at 11:30. Keep in mind the service is supposed to end at 12 and there was still an hour preaching to come at minimum. We got to perform our drama and Josh did a really good job explaining it and it was nice that Miriam was there to record and experience the drama for herself. After that, the pastor, Pastor George, asked us to help out with the kid’s ministry. So Stevie, John and Josh took on the challenge since Sarah was preaching. The boys walked over to the classroom where the kids were and found out they weren’t just helping out with the kids program but they were expected to RUN a kids ministry. With zero preparation and 100% spontaneity the boys whipped something together. They sang some songs, played some games, and John stalled with his version of Simon Says “John Says” which became quite hilarious with the language barrier but the kids loved it, all while Josh was trying to think of a Bible story. He decided on the classic story of Joshua and Jericho and John became the bad guys inside the city as Steven and Josh surrounded him with their arms and acted as the city walls. The kids became Joshua’s fierce army and we got all 50 kids to march around us screaming until the walls came down and John was free to beat-up. But their version of beating up was just all standing around John shooting pretend guns, not the African dog pile the boys expected, but it was really funny to experience. Even the translator we had was pretending to fire a shotgun at John. Sarah in the meantime was killing her preaching as always and did a really good job with it and was able to encourage the church. It was so good that the pastor had to add another 20 minute message reaffirming it and then another speaker had to follow up again with a 10 minute preaching, repeating the same message. So the 2 hour church service which was expected to be done at 12:00 ended up being 3 hours and was done at 1:30. We stopped by for lunch and then the team had a football ministry while Josh had his one on one with Mirjam at 4:00. We got to the field right at 4:00, waited for a 25 mins and then realized that we had our first experience of miscommunication and that they weren’t going to show-up so we just had a time of intercession instead. It was definitely a day to realize we are still in Africa even within the little bubble of the Hope-builders here in Jinja.
On Monday morning John had his one-on-one while the team went to the Home of Hope. The Home of Hope is another organization run by the Hope Builders and is a house dedicated to children with special needs. The team went there and were not prepared for what they found at the Home of Hope. They were expecting children with minor disabilities like the children at Amecet or kids with down-syndrome but there were close to 50 small children all with very severe mental disabilities such as cerebral palsy. Most of the children couldn’t walk and were all lying or sitting on the floor. They couldn’t perform basic motor functions or have interactions with the team and could only smile or cry. At first the team wasn’t expecting the conditions of the kids and the conditions they lived in, in such dirtiness and so crowded. But it was a really good opportunity for the team to grow and understand God’s love for every human being and how He has to lower Himself to our simple level. It was truly a teaching experience even though it wasn’t the favourite ministry of some of the team members. Just before football ministry in the evening, the Australian team arrived. We were expecting 23 of them and from ages 15-18 but they had a huge grey hound bus and they just kept filing off and they did NOT look 15. We found out later that there was 33 of them and the minimum age was 18, from that moment on things became a lot more hectic at the Suubi house where we were staying. After that surprising encounter we had football ministry while Jonah stayed behind for his one-on-one, and guess what??? The kids showed up this time! It was really nice to have another session with them and be able to build upon the connections we established earlier with our teams. We’re really enjoying the football ministries and having the opportunity to grow a relationship with our own teams. We returned back to a bustling living room filled with a roar of Australian accents and a crowd of people where ever you went. We also found out the team wasn’t Christian which meant that they had some very different values and behavior than we were expecting. We decided to get away from the business of the base and headed to a local hotel to have a separate guys and girls night. The guys played pool and had some cold sodas and found out that John is TERRIBLE at pool. He got about 8 balls in and only 3 of them were supposed to go in. It was a problem as the team he was on always lost, but it was still a really good time. The girls had their girl time and gossiped and chatted and ordered ice cream and did their frilly girly things. And you want to know the difference between guys and girls? The guys talked about pool for the WHOLE 2hours except for one small conversation about ordering French fries, whereas the girls, the boys are sure, discussed everything from cute little puppy dogs to the secret inner workings of the female mind. After that, we headed back after a wild night of fun to get some rest.
On Tuesday we woke up to the realization of a packed house and that we would say good-bye to our quiet meals and break times. It was no longer a meal for 7, but for 40 people now with the appetites of a hungry young Australian who is missing their kangaroo meat from back home. The first ministry we had in the morning was at the slums where the children at the Village of Hope come from. It’s just outside of Jinja and wow, that was one of the craziest places many of us had ever been to. As soon as you drive in you can see the streams of garbage and human feces flowing down the streets, all the alcohol packets strewn about everywhere, and a pretty foul smell hanging in the air. We had the opportunity to visit 5 different families and bless them with a small sac of sugar and to listen to their stories and pray for/encourage them. On the way to the first house we had a crowd of small children all running around trying to grab on to us mzungus and just hold our arm and stroke our hair. The boys ended up trying to prove their strength and seeing which person could hold up the most children at once, and with these small, malnourished children we got up to something ridiculous like 13 in the air just with our arms. The first house visit was really, really deep and powerful. It was a woman who lived in a no bigger than a 5m x 5m mud hut with her 5 children. A family of 7 living amongst garbage and all having to sleep on the ground in a house smaller than some bathrooms which also served as a kitchen. And this lady couldn’t afford anything so her children didn’t go to school and she couldn’t walk well because of a lame leg but was so desperate for food she walked 8+km into town. Once in town she was looking in garbages and dumps for scraps of food and was arrested and thrown in jail for a period of time only for trying to get food for her family to survive. She eventually got back home after a couple days but at home her situation is even worse. Her husband works but doesn’t make enough money so some days they have to go without food and above that he is also a raging alcoholic and comes home every night to beat her and abuse her. She can’t afford rent for the small home the family lives in and hasn’t paid for the last 3 months and her landlord is trying to kick her family out on to the streets. This woman was so down in her life for obvious reasons that the week before we came she tried to hang herself and only survived because some neighbours saw and stopped her. It was the most powerful story most of us had ever heard personally, and it just broke our hearts. We prayed for her and want to firmly believe that God will have mercy on her. We then visited 4 more families with similar stories and that’s when you realize how broken the world is and how sheltered we all are. Everywhere we went we were followed by that mob of children all climbing all over us and it was even a bit distracting at times trying to talk with the families in their homes so our contact person got a large stick and started whipping it around at the children to get them to back away. It is just a completely different world that we don’t experience. Our contact person in the slum runs a ministry to look after some of the families and she sold us little crafts and we could buy one bracelet for 1000 UGX which is like 25 cents, and they take an hour of work to make just 1! And they still have to pay for the supplies and the beads! It gives you an idea of the poverty these people are living in because this was a fundraiser for the more well-off contact person in the slums. We all came back extremely dirty and made sure to wash our hands and clean ourselves before doing anything else. In the afternoon from 2:00-7:00 we had another really cool ministry experience and got to help make dinner in the Village of Hope. It was so crazy to go in the morning and see where these kids came from as orphans and to see the condition they are in now, receiving an education and living a very respectable life while being well cared for. It made us really appreciate the work we were a part of. We all got to make our favourite Ugandan meal, chapatis, beans, and potatoes! We got to eat with the families and share a devotional and fellowship with the families and connect with them on a deeper level. We were randomly interrupted by the Aussie team which wasn’t supposed to be there but joined us for dinner anyways and was not the nicest interruption but it was still an overall amazing day.
Wednesday was our day off but it started out rough for John. He was super sick in the night, throwing up and with terrible stomach pains. It was similar symptoms to the stomach infection he had in Soroti and it was bad enough that he went to the hospital that same morning. When he got to the hospital he had some tests done and he didn’t have a parasite but still had a stomach infection so they hooked him up to an IV and gave him some antibiotics, fluids, and nausea medicine. Now the insane thing was that they asked him to stay in the hospital for 3 days, for a stomach infection! It was insane and then they left the IV in and asked him to inject 4 different kind of antibiotics every day for 5 days, just completely overkill and even Sarah as the nurse didn’t feel comfortable doing it so he asked for prayers back home and sought out more medical advice and decided to hold off on the antibiotics unless things got worse. Happily to say, after that day he felt so much better and it never got worse and only got better with no antibiotics, only prayer, whereas the same symptoms in Soroti took almost a week to get over it fully. It was just such a cool testimony that God answers prayers! During the afternoon, the team made use of their time by going into town to continue their souvenir shopping for their family and friends and then to head to a local pool with a beautiful view over Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile and enjoy a nice swim in a pool and some cold drinks. It was really nice to soak up some sun and just relax as a team and enjoy Mirjam’s last full day here in Jinja. We then headed back for some more rest and to play some cards and then headed to bed.
Thursday was Mirjam’s last day! The time went by so quickly with her being here! It began with a rocky start as Stevie had a really rough night and was up all night with an upset stomach, throwing up and having the runs, the night right after John had been ill. He recovered pretty quick and felt better when it was all out but still didn’t feel 100% but well enough to not go to the hospital. After that excitement, we had a final team time with her to talk about areas where we worked really well as a team and areas we could still improve on. We also had a time of encouragement for each other and it was just a great way to close off our time with Mirjam and we all got to share the deliciousness of the stroopwafels which she had brought! Zo lekker! Delicieux! Stevie stayed back for our kid’s ministry at the Village of Hope in the afternoon. It ended up being a great time and we got to sing a bunch of songs with the kids, play some games and hang out with them. They all know our names now and we have learned most of their names so it’s cool just to build the relationships and hang out with the kids. We said goodbye to Mirjam and wished her well on her journey back to Holland and couldn’t believe that we were already so close to finishing the outreach! Time is just flying by!
We all would welcome your prayers for health as the team has been plagued with health issues. Mirjam was sick her first night, John had a bad stomach infection, and Stevie is still battling sickness. Our mzungu bodies aren’t handling the African atmosphere very well and it has become quite a nuisance. We really, really enjoyed our time with Mirjam and the conversations we could have with her and she just felt like one of the team members, she fit right in! See you soon Mirjam! Love you all!
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