Uganda Survey Part I

During my missionary internship in 2007, I was with one other girl—Sam Strange. To make a long story short, Sam decided to visit me in Uganda so that we could do a survey of sorts for future mission work. Uganda is so very different from Mozambique and someone who is considering mission work in Africa needs to experience at least a taste of those differences. So Sam and her brother Nathan met me in Uganda to set out on a three week trip exploring Uganda. I would love to give more detailed accounts of each place and our experiences, but for now I’m going to focus on what we did. We had planned to go to Gulu after their arrival in Entebbe, but the weather was not too good so we stayed in Kampala instead. I took them to the mall and we slept at a guest house, nothing very exciting. The next morning we got on a bus headed to Gulu. At first Gulu seemed like a waste of time, but we had to get some focus and really rely on God to guide us and lead us to what we needed to see. We stumbled on the office of Favour of God Ministries where we went in to see what they did. We talked with the director for a while and then the District Speaker came in. Both men were very nice and helpful in providing information about Gulu, the Acholi people, and the needs in the area. After that we went to Grace Academy (I talked about this place in my post about my trip to Gulu) for Sam to see the clinic there. Then we went to the Invisible Children office where I talked with the director of the teacher exchange program for a while; it was a much better experience this time. Since we had stayed in Kampala the first night, we only had one night in Gulu, which isn’t very long considering how long it takes to get there. The next morning we called the District Speaker and set up a meeting with him. We went to his office and learned much about governments and politics. Then he arranged for us to go to an Internally Displaced Peoples camp. What was supposed to be a 2 hr max trip took more like 4 hrs (this is Africa!), but we met with people in 3 different camps asking them about their lives and needs, both physical and spiritual. These camps that we went to were not the original IDP camps, but more like temporary villages between the camps and their home villages. After rushing back into town, we caught the bus just in time to make the 5 hr trip back to Kampala. In Kampala we stayed with Darla, an NTCC missionary. The next morning we met with a driver we’d hired to take us around western Uganda. After getting all the paper work settled, we headed to Fort Portal to stay with the NTCC missionaries there, Jeff and Cheryl Cash, and visit other teammates, Andrew and Aimee Jo Martin. We learned about the mission work in Fort Portal and enjoyed spending time hanging out with Cheryl, Aimme Jo, and their kids (the men were in Kampala). We also were blessed to worship with the congregation in Fort Portal on Sunday morning. I started to get sick and was worried that I had malaria again…