Life

Aloha!

Apologies for the lateness of the blog, ran out of batter in a power cut yesterday. Shocker!!

So I thought this blog was going to be pretty uneventful midway into the week. That was before Wednesday and Thursday happened. Wow. Here's how my week has gone so far:

On Saturday we came back from the beautiful Jinja, I really gained a lot from that conference that I've been pondering during this week. God really did some cool stuff, I feel like a lot of forgiving and forgetting as well as some receiving went on in my heart, which was really cool. We had heaps of time just one-on-one with God which was great - and something which I really feel I needed.

On Sunday we went to Bethel again. As soon as we sat down (Madam) Tiff was whisked to sit at the front at the Preacher's table, so we realised that she'd been hiding the fact that she was preaching! What was quite comical was that she gave each of us the chance to bunk of church that morning, it's less nerve-racking preaching without the presence of mzungus. It led Sam and I to have a cool little chat in the evening about getting involved in some preaching at churches while we're out here. So we chatted to Madam on Monday about it and the plan is to start off preaching in the smaller Bethel church plants, then we'll move on to preach at Bethel, hopefully. So I'm pretty excited to see how that's gonna pan out!

Monday and Tuesday we pretty standard office days, working on this flipping News-update which was supposed to go out about half an hour ago, but we've had yet another set back (sarcastic woop). So just waiting for Tiff to come round and hopefully we'll sort it!

On Tuesday evening Sam and I went round to GJH (Girls JENGA house) for Tuesday games night, a new tradition that is proving to produce high amounts of quality banter each time. On the walk home Sam and I saw a huge plume of smoke coming from town, with a bright orange glow at its base. There are so many fires roudn here that I thought nothing of it (the burn their rubbish here), but Sam had a nudge from God that we should pray for that fire so we sent up a little one and carried on our way. The following morning we saw our Askari, Michael, who looked anxious and even more exaggerated in speech than usual. It turned out that the big clothes market in the center of town had been burned down the night before. We went with some of the JENGA staff to visit the site. What laid before us was just a field of ash and charcoal. Everything destroyed. We took a walk round and visited Annette, Tiff's tailor, she looked shell-shocked. She told us that she had lost everything, apart from her sewing machine. When she heard about the fire she rushed down to here her stall to see it ablaze, she managed to grab her machine and get it to safety, but when she grabbed some clothes she was beaten to the ground by some opportunist robbers waiting outside and the legged it with her stuff. With this, the magnitude of what had happened to these people had dawned on us. These people have lost their livelihoods. It would have been better if it was a food market. Fruit and veg with grow again, there is always more, but these people had spent hours on each piece of clothing they sell. I saw one of the street-kids I know, Icinda, picking up bits of scrap-metal to sell. We spent the rest of the morning in prayer and intercession. I still don't think I've fully processed what I saw there. In the evening I talked again with Machael the Askari. He told me that his Uncle had a stall in the market and had taken out a loan from the bank of 190,000,000 Shillings (£42,000 approx) and now has no income with which to pay it back. And since I've heard of many worse cases. The amazing thing about Ugandans is that they just get on with life, accept the situation and keep living. They have to in order to get food on the table and to keep the roof over their heads. If you pray, I hope you will give time to these people.

On Thursday morning I took my first visit to the hospital. Every fortnight on a Thursday JENGA pays a visit to Mbale Referral Hospital to pray for the sick. We first visited the malnutrition ward. We found a shelter with no walls whcih is like a feeding zone. We met a child who was 4 years, except he looked about 2, tops. his stomach refuses food, whenever he eats any sort of decent meal he vomits straight after, Sam put his hand on the boys shoulder whilst he was praying for him and could feel the tendons and bone. We then visited the children's ward to pray for them, I prayed for a Muslim boy called Medi who had Pneumonia, he then bled and almost became anaemic. The strange thing was that usually when I see children of this age they yell at me in a beautifully nasally tone, "Mzungu Byeeeeee", but these children didn't, they didn't smile or laugh like the others. Especially in the malnutrition unit they've seemed to have lost their joy. It made me angry that these kids don't get as good a shot at life as kids of the same age in the west. Why is this? Their lives aren't of any less importance to mine or yours. I could rant about this for about another 1000 words, so I'll stop now before I get going.

So that's another installment of my blog. Still really loving it over here. Feel like I gained some more vision on matters of my future this week, which is great, but not developed enough to announce publicly!

Out for a curry in a sec at Delicious Dishes, no lamb Balti, but it's pretty darn tasty anyways.

Big Love, Dan

P.s.If you'd like to get in touch, chuck us an e-mail on challis_908@hotmail.com I'd LOVE to hear from you.

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