A Bit Jua Kali

The long drive all the way from Nakaale. Even as I type, I am sitting in our van in traffic - watching cars, trucks, pikis, pedestrians, bicyclists, lorries and hawkers pass us on this narrow Kampala road. So far today I have gone from a scenic, open savanna scattered with mud huts to the totally packed streets of Kampala. So diverse, yet so beautiful - each in its own way.

Nakaale - the open, free landscape. Constant breezes blowing to and fro. To the west of our house, a wide plain covered in acacias and thorn bushes. To the east, the empress Mt. Kadam and her foothills. At night, the pounding of drums fills the wind. In the daytime, the hot sun lashes down, scorching everything within its reach. Quiet, beautiful, and serene - a tribute to God's wonderful creation.

Kampala - a crowded, constantly bustling city. People everywhere. Vehicles pack the streets. Peddlers walk to and fro among the traffic, selling their wares at car windows. Stores crowd the streetsides, clustering together all along the roads. Pikis and bodas zip around the vehicles, often barely dodging accidents. Posters and signs advertizing everything from phone service to sugar are plastered all over trees, sidewalks, streetlamps, walls, and houses. At night, the heavy bass beats of discos echo through the buildings. During the day, the noise of thousands of voices speaking in all different languages fills the air. Cows, goats and chickens wander about the streets. Countless sounds, smells and sights.

My love of this place grows every day. The diversity, the beauty, the fascinating differences in cultures. Everywhere I look, I see something beautiful. God did a wonderful thing in bringing me here.

Labels: beauty, kampala, karamoja, uganda

There are many phonetic and linguistical differences between Ngakarimojong and English. Both cultures find the other language difficult to speak, partly because of their different phonetic sounds - sounds that the other culture is accustomed to speaking naturally.

For instance:
In Ngakarimojong, some letters are interchangeable - s and th, f and p, l and r. Most of this is just the fact that they can't really hear the difference. In English, there is a MAJOR difference if you switch out certain letters. "Put it there" becomes "Foot it there" and so on.
I love these little cultural differences. It makes life hilarious. E.g.....

It was a nice, sunny day in Karamoja. I was baking bread in our kitchen, sweat running down my face. As I set the dough aside to rise, I heard a strange noise coming in the window - a sort of garbled yelling.

I leaned out the kitchen door to hear my youngest sister's voice raised in song.

"Raaaaaaamen!!!" she sang as she skated across the cement pad. Her song was echoed by five Karimojong kids leaning against our chainlink fence -

"LLAAAAAMEEENNN!!!!!!" they cried.

I started to smile. Anna and Mary came to the door, along with Megan, our teacher. We all started laughing.

"Sister RAMEN!!!!" cried Kipsy as she swung around a pole.

"THIITHTA LLAMEN!!!!"

"How I love you!!!!"

"'OW AA RAV OOO!!!"

"Raa - amen!!!!"

"LAA-AMENNN!!!!!"

By this time, we were all entirely dying of laughter. Kipsy then proceeded to replace "Ramen" with all the names of her various siblings. We all stood in the kitchen, cracking up at their "Karimojonglish".

Kipsy slouched into Math class this morning, a disgruntled air about her.

"What's up, Kip?" I asked.

"Dude. The Lamen kids are outside again, and I want to go sing."

Her face broke into a bemused grin as she watched me collapse with laughter.

Like I said, it makes life hilarious.

We were driving through Kampala at night, going back to the house where we were staying. Conversation was at a minimum, and we all stared out the windows, earnestly wishing for the traffic to move more quickly.

Mary started giggling. "That lady stuck her tongue out at me!" she said, pointing out the window.

We all shushed her and resumed staring out at the traffic.

"No, really!" she insisted, pointing at a matatu (taxi) that was pulling up alongside us.

Sure enough, in the back seat, there was a middle-aged woman making faces at us, sticking out her tongue and waving her arms. They started giggling, and the rest of us couldn't help smiling. The matatu fell behind again, and we all burst into conversation - "Did you see that?" "What was she doing?"

A few minutes later, heralded by "Here she comes!" and "Look, look, there she is!"the matatu came alongside of us again, the woman still making faces at us. I smiled and waved, and she paused her antics to grin back momentarily before resuming the show. This time, we all laughed out loud until the traffic moved her out of sight.

The matatu passed us again and again, and every time the hilarity grew until we were gasping for breath. Even the parents were chuckling.

Finally, the matatu pulled over to unload, and our van burst into cries of, "Aw,
man!" and "That was hilarious!" We then started doing imitations of her more funny moments, and everyone was soon laughing again.

I glimpsed a dark hand raised above the traffic, waving goodbye, and I waved back until I could see it no longer.

For every year that I can remember, it has drizzled on Christmas Eve. This year was no exception, and when it came I danced barefoot in the yard while the dogs snuffled bewilderdly at me.

Unfortunately, this also means that the blow-dried air finally has some moisture to soak up and keep us all nice and toasty warm. After months of burning, chapping and peeling, even the slightest humidity was unbearable. Our Christmas was pleasantly lethargic, for we all decided that napping was the best acitvity for the day. I, unfortunately, had a terrible sore throat that kept me out of action for most of the day. (We found out later that I had strep throat)

Christmas dinner was at four o' clock. The food was wonderful, and we all smiled and laughed at each other over our heaped plates. Afterwards, most of the women went out to visit the dance that was going on, but I chose to remain behind.

Em Tricarico and I went back over to my house, where we made a pot of tea and went up to the observation deck on the top of my house. There we sat, the cool breeze dancing through our hair, as we listened to the birds chirping and watched the sun plunge beneath the horizon, splashing color all over the clouds.

There are some evenings where the sunset is a brilliant collage of color, all reds, golds and purples. Other evenings, the sun blazes gold as it sets, brilliant and beautiful. My favorite, however, is when the sun sets as a single ruby, dropping into the waters of the African horizon.

It was fitting, I think, that on Christmas night, when miles away other families are watching the snow pile up, worrying about the icy roads, that I was sitting on our roof, watching the gorgeous African sunset over the savannah. This evening, the skyline featured a glowing golden bauble dropping from the sky's tree to land and shatter on the floor, sending up bits of colored wrapping paper all over the clouds. As it hit the horizon, it sent up a great wave of gold, beams of light streaming out over the sky. The clouds were splattered with bits of smeary color, dimming slowly.

We talked for a time, then sat silently, contemplating the gorgeous theatre playing out before us. "This is nice," one of us said.

"Yeah...this is nice." the other returned.

We went on like this for a while, sipping our tea. We'd brewed it African chai style with plenty of tea masala - a spice mix made specifically for tea. It is impossible to translate the joy of tea masala to those who've never tasted it's spicy, rich, biting flavor. All in all, any experience in which one has their feet up and a mug of chai in hand is a thoroughly pleasant one.

"And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31)

Our family had a great time this past week at our annual mission retreat. It was a
fun time of swimming, shopping, eating and fellowship. Every morning and
evening, we would gather for hymn singing and worship, but most of every day
was spent in the pool. It's a rare treat to go swimming here, and we wanted to
enjoy every minute of it.

On our last evening, we gathered after dinner to sing some Christmas carols. I
dragged myself out of the pool to play guitar accompaniement, and sat shivering and dripping in the middle of the conference hall with my parents. We tuned up our instruments, and soon had the room echoing with praise. I tried to keep a steady rhythm as my mom caught up the melody in her violin and my dad decorated it with complicated picking from his guitar. The music soared through the room, sending shivers down my back.

Partway through our caroling, a woman walked in with her two children. One of the pastors pulled up some chairs for her and she joined in our singing. I personally think the singing got significantly louder at that point, for we realized that the others at the hotel could hear us.

It was then that I realized how much Christmas really means. No matter where you are, people can lay down their weapons and rejoice together. Everyone can identify with the sound of Christmas carols and the joy associated with them. It's not a season of gifts and tinsel. It's a season of love.

Sitting there in that conference room, listening to the shivering echoes as the joyful carols reverberated through the room, I was struck by the awesome mercy of our Father. John 3:16 rang through my head as if someone was sitting next to me shouting it in my ear.

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son
That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish
But have everlasting life."

Rejoice, rejoice. Emmanuel has come to thee, O Israel.

As I walked through the village the other day, calling the children for Bible study, I happened across the sister-in-law of one of our guards. She was grinding corn in the shade of her hut, laughing and talking with the other women who were working with her. When she saw me approaching, she cried out and threw herself on the sun-baked ground in front of my feet, raising little clouds of dust where she landed.

The women sitting nearby laughed and asked her what she was doing. She replied, still lying facedown in the dirt in front of me, "This is the white woman who prayed for me at the clinic! She healed me!"

Shocked, I knelt next to her. "No, it wasn't me who healed you, it wasn't me!" I said over and over again, trying to get her to listen.

Meanwhile, the children who had assembled for the Bible study gathered around to see what the commotion was. My translator joined them, and began helping me reason with her.

"God healed you," we said, "It was not any white person's prayer."

For a little while she resisted, but eventually she listened to our pleading.

"Oh," she said.

She rose and brushed herself off, then shook our hands and proceeded with us to the Bible study, a huge, gleaming smile on her face smeared with dust and sweat.

We were cruising down the dusty dirt road, swerving and bouncing over potholes. All of us were laughing and talking, our early Thanksgiving dinner still heavy in our stomachs. I was sitting right behind the driver's seat, playing music on our laptop while discussing various bands and singers with my parents and sister.

I heard my mom yell and I clutched the computer as my dad slammed on the brakes. The sound of our car horn filled my ears as we skidded forward, our wheels locked. I looked up through the windshield to see a pair of t-shirt clad shoulders smash into the glass with a dull, heart-stopping crunch. The man's head cracked into the already smashed glass as his bicycle flipped under the car.

My dad leapt out of the now stopped car and ran over to the man, who leapt to his feet and immediately started demanding money. The rest of us in the car breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God for his amazing grace.

My dad took the man to the police station, where there was much argumentation over what really happened. The man seemed convinced that we had tried to kill him. One of the police officers said, "If that man had wanted to kill you, he would have killed you properly!"As it turns out, he got away with a large bruise and a scratch.

His bicycle and our windshield were not so lucky.