Hard Times Come Again No More

Around 5am, I awake from the chanting from the mosque nearby.  I escape my mosquito-proof bed and begin to get ready for the new school day ahead.  At 8am, our bus driver arrives to pick us up for a new school-day.  We leave our gated and razor-wired guest house and enter the red dirt street filled with potholes, garbage, chickens, and goats.   We arrive at school at 8:30am and wait on the steps outside our classroom reading our Bibles and watching the Children’s choir rehearse before our classes start at 9am. 

For the past week, we have been in classes at Watoto Central on topics such as “Living in Community”, “Personality types” and “Loving Listening”.  We will mostly be in classes all of this month except for on Saturdays when we are at the Children’s village and on Sunday when we are serving at our district church.  Mine is Watoto Central with a team of ten other individuals. 

Now although this month’s focus is on classes, we have started our street ministry.  Each of the five district groups was assigned a different slum to go to and find a family living in it to adopt for the next five months.  Once we reached the slum we were assigned to, we split into our smaller assigned groups.  My group, Central A, is made of four Ugandans and myself.  We will be doing most ministry things in this group or in our larger district group.  This week we have an assignment to assess the needs of the family and then pool our resources together to meet these needs.  The rules are we are not allowed to ask directly what they need but rather build a relationship with the family and observe the needs as we visit them each time.  Each time we do ministry, we have to assign a team leader to write a report on each daily experience.  Since I was chosen to be team leader for the street ministry and we haven’t yet finished our assignment for the week, I really am not up to writing about everything just yet.  I will write a detailed post at the end of this week about our slum family and what we ended up providing for them.  That is a promise!

Hard times:

-          -  Holding a naked two year-old on your knee in a stuffy mud-floored hut in the slums of Kampala.

-          - Children banging on the side of your bus begging for money at an intersection.

-         -   A little girl telling you she wished she had your skin colour instead of her own.

-          - Visiting a slum primary school, made of wood and iron sheets.  The best score of the primary 7 (Grade 7) class tested to the equivalent of Grade 2 on the national exams.

There are more and bound to be even more hard times over the next five months, especially as we get more invested in different ministries throughout Kampala.   Uganda has come so far from what it once was and I am excited to say that the new Ugandan Declaration that the government put out is very promising and hopeful.  

Here is the song that I referenced in the title.  Hard Times - Eastmountainsouth

Peace and Love