New Adventures 9-20-10

September 20, 2010 Monday

Yesterday we learned that in Uganda, the wife is supposed to kneel to her husband when she approaches him in a room. If the woman is older, she won’t kneel. The custom is fading, but still alive in many areas. Dowries are still paid, but they are a sign of appreciation to the bride’s family for raising her properly. Mostly, men have only two wives if they are living polygamy because you must have enough money to sustain two families.

The District leader here is a young man from Uganda. We traveled quite a distance with him, so we pumped him. When we showed “The Other Side of Heaven” to the elders a couple of weeks ago, he piped up and said, “Tonga is like Uganda. I have had my feet eaten by rats as well.” Yesterday, he said, “We have 36 tribes in Uganda. The Bantu and Niolites are the largest. Me, I can understand 6 languages, but I can’t get anything (understand anything) from the Niolites.” The Niolites are here in Kenya as well. They are descended from people of the Nile.

“We in Uganda look the same as Kenyans. Our borders are so close. When they had genocide in Rwanda, the people there fled to Uganda. There were so many. Now, it has been many years, and the Rwandans live among us and you can’t tell the difference when you see them. I was young when they had the genocide there. My people talk of bodies floating in the river because so many people died. There were dead bodies in the streets. I remember some, not all. These have assimilated into our culture now. We call them Rawdese.”

His South African companion said, “ we have brick houses, not like here. Our roads are of good quality. We do have the townships—slums where people have tin foil for their houses and no tarred roads. Apartheid has made many changes in South Africa. We had many protests, now we have much crime, but the police are trying to make it better. Before the police could not shoot until someone else shot first. Many policemen died, now it is changed. “

As we drove along, children walking along the side of the road waved and called to us. By that time, we had picked up two members who were walking along the road as well. The Sister we picked up said, “It is because the children think you look like Jesus Christ because you are white. That is why they call and wave to you.” The man we had picked up, corrected her and said, “Jesus Christ was not white, he was an Arab. They look brown.” She said, “That may be so, but the kids think the muzungos look like Christ. They think they are very good.” Boy, do we need to be better!

About that time, a woman clad all in yellow from head to foot passed by. “She is Church of Israel.” Then we saw a woman with a white neckerchief and white dress.” I asked if she was Church of Israel, too. “No, those kind are Quakers. You can tell because they wear the white dress and neckerchief.

We arrived at Church in good time, met with President B. He is pretty amazing, a tall, young, good-looking man with a young family. He is well-organized. If he had opportunities like in the states, he would be a business executive I think. We joined with his counselor, E. B. (no relative), and started out to drive what we thought would be 20 minutes out to Matuma (a dependent branch). The counselor was to preside . Their branch presidency take turns going out to Matuma each week.

It turned out to be more like 45 minutes over a terrible road with canyon craters to negotiate back and forth across the clay---no tarmac here. Often we left the road to take our chances in the "barrow pit" because the washes and cutaways were so deep, we were afraid we couldn’t make it out. It seemed forever to get out there.

We got to the church to find it is a deserted building converted to a Church. It had a dilapidated sign on the top that the owner of the building (he is LDS) proudly told us was a gift from God. They have no electricity, so, no music., but they had chairs set up and there were 7 people there. We discovered that the auxiliary meetings were first.

I went to Primary and sat in while the one teacher/president did the whole thing by herself. These folks are absolutely phenomenal…the things they do. She is a young woman with 3 children of her own. She and her husband are pioneers. They joined early when the Church first started. She tearfully told me how blessed they are that God is so good to them. She said when she first joined the Church, they used to walk to Sikhendhu (another branch in our area…miles from where they are now meeting). She said they walked carrying their food and baby from their home leaving at 5:45 AM to get to meeting at 10:00. Now, she said, “It only takes us about 2 hours.” The Lord is blessing us so much. We have so much to be thankful for to know the gospel is growing here.

Knowing that we are almost always called upon to take over in opening exercises of auxiliaries and to speak during sacrament, I try to go prepared with music and stories. This time, I took an old pillow slip, stuffed it with rags, tied an elastic around the neck and body, and made baby Moses. I didn’t have a basket, so I took a colander with slits in the sides and wove construction paper strips into the slits to approximate a basket. The kids, many of whom couldn’t speak English, did understand a “baby” because they do so much of the caring and toting of “babies”. I just cut up some copy paper and painted a face on it and taped it to the dummy. The kids were fascinated with the “Baby”. They don’t have anything even remotely like a doll. Kids here don’t “play” much that we can see. We see them climbing on things, but we don’t even see the wire hoola hoops or jump ropes like we saw in the Philippines. They work. They carry stuff. They go to school. I don’t think they are unhappy, I just think they don’t know “FUN”.

The adults are the same way…..life is a pretty serious business. I left Primary and walked into Young Womens. The Primary President is also the Young Women President and so she assigned the girls to teach themselves. It is quite dark in this old cement building, and there is no electricity, so the girls were huddled around the window hole—no glass of course. I joined them as they read the Mia Maid manual together. The lesson was on avoiding the dangers of bad media. They have no movies, radio, magazines, books, TV, but they were valiantly reading and trying to commit to living virtuous lives and avoiding these evils. We talked about kids at school teasing them because I didn’t know how to relate this lesson to anything they could hold on to. One girl said that the kids wrote her name on the board each morning before school and listed how many people she had “eaten” that week because they call her a devil worshiper, and how hard that was for her. It is just a different world here for them. So often, our manuals are geared for American kids.

The yard behind the Church…well, everywhere around the Church, is just piles of mud, but especially so in the back. You have to cross an open space with hills of clay…wet, to get out to the bathroom. I tried to cross this with my scriptures, my bag, and a 3 ring binder in my hands…I made it ¾ the way before falling—mud all over my dress, knees, shoes….and self-confidence! The bathroom consisted of 4 stalls joined together…drop holes…but there was some paper! I’m sure I made quite a picture…tottering old woman….they watch everything we do, and the door from Sunday School looked out on the courtyard, so I’m sure it was just GREAT VIEWING!

A couple of candid shots…that I’ll remember. Sacrament had started by the time I made it back across the courtyard. There sat a little 2-3 yr old girl with her tattered dress and broken shoes, perched in the middle of the clay sitting on a brick solemnly watching my progress….

Then I slid into a seat next to Neal, and we glanced down under the chair in front of us to see the woman seated there fold her feet under her seat. Her shoe uppers were clogged with mud, but the soles were worn away, and there she sat with the bottoms uncovered--her bare feet—mud-caked. We wondered how far those feet had carried her that morning…They have such great faith under such hard, hard conditions.

Neal spoke extemporaneously. All morning during our meetings we had been blasted with a tremendously loud speaker projected from a neighboring church. They were yelling and ranting and raving…We asked what they were saying. It was much louder than anything we could create in our little building, and the kids had a hard time listening to our lessons because it was so loud. The members explained the other church had people speaking in tongues and that’s what all the clamor was about. So, when Neal spoke, he talked softly and said, “The gospel does not need to be loud, the spirit speaks with a still, small voice.” It was great!

The counselor we had taken out to preside had a meeting afterward, so we waited. During that time, we investigated a water pump on the front porch of the Church that the Church had built. It still works great. A man walked up off the street and said he was interested in the Church, so Neal met with him. It was getting close to 2-2:30. The missionaries and the Branch President back at the parent branch had warned us not to get caught out there if it started to rain, because we wouldn’t get back. As it does here every afternoon, the clouds started moving in…It can be almost immediate. I got pretty nervous and gestured to Neal to come on. He came, but the counselor was still meeting. Then we got a phone call from the elders telling us they were worried—that the rain was coming, and we needed to get out or we would be stuck there and not be able to make it. They spoke the truth!

The counselor came out as it started to rain. We thought we were not going to make it. It was like typhoon just pouring…we couldn’t see ahead of us and the deep cracks in the road were just floating. We kept praying as we skidded from one crack to another, with the truck just bouncing like you can’t believe. It seemed like it took us forever. We finally got back to where the elders and church members from the parent branch were hovering inside that building to wait out the rain.

Neal ran inside…it was pouring, so I stayed in the truck for maybe 45 minutes or an hour. It looked like it was stopping some, and Neal came out to the truck, but there was a whole horde of members with him climbing in behind him and many standing in the rain wanting a ride in the back of our covered truck. There is nothing but metal sides and bottom back there, but they wanted to ride as far as we could take them. We took off…..WRONG! Big mistake.

The road was like nothing we’ve ever experienced…nothing! I tried to get pictures, but we were lurching so badly (even going so slowly) that I couldn’t get good pictures…the cracks in the road were so bad, the truck we were following (had 2 wheels on each side …4 sides) and it couldn’t make it. We finally passed it. The potholes had water covering them so you couldn’t see how deep they were…. We were in 4 wheel drive and on a flat (supposedly) surface, and we were skidding sideways….both sides of the road were flooded with brown water so it looked like sand, but it was water…some places the water went clear across the road.

Those poor people in that tin can in the back in their Sunday clothes, I don’t know how they made it. They got out at their stops and said, “That was really rough!” Coming from those veterans, you got to know they were really getting slammed! Some places we just sank. We thought we’d never make it. The Lord really, really protected us. We finally got through…then when we got home, they hadn’t had any rain at all here in Kitale. Today, our landlady saw our pictures, and smiled wisely and said, “You are learning aren’t you!”

When we got home, we went to visit a prospective seminary student in her home, and came home and died! The Lord is surely blessing us. We just can’t tell you how much He blesses us. I really don't know how we made that!