Pictures

Hello! I was able to borrow someone's laptop, which makes it much easier to post some pictures.  I also borrowed pictures from other people, because I haven't taken very many... so here are some more photos of what life has been like for the past three months!

 A group photo from when our class and staff did the Challenge Course at Discovery Center.

 

 The first part of the Challenge Course.  It's a fun course!  Lots of ropes and tires and balance beams.

Our classroom

 

The "dining hall"

The office, also known as "the Wifi"

The preparation area of the kitchen

The cooking area of the kitchen

Our dishwashers :)  Sometimes there is even soap!

The preschool on the base

Discovery Center

 Discovery Center

A few weeks ago our class hosted a "Cultural Fun Night."  Everyone was welcome to present something, and it was a blast!

The beginning, waiting for the acts to start.

Some of us performed the Electric Slide

 Me and two classmates.  Rebecca, on the left, is wearing a traditional dress from Uganda.  Ezekiel, on the right, is from Tanzania and just loves to look sharp!

Some of my classmates held a fashion show

Last weekend we were invited to an overnight prayer and intercession at a church about 40 minutes away, in a town called Lugazi.  Our teachers for the week that we studied Holy Spirit are pastors of this church, and they always invite the DTS class.  So our whole class and many of the staff went for the overnight.

Singing worship songs.  The way that Africans worship is so incredible! Notice someone holding up a chair, in the background...

My class performed two dances and two skits.  This is from the beginning of the skit that I was in.

The overnight was quite an experience.  We arrived there around 10 or 10:30.  We were special guests, so we were seated to the right of the stage.  There was a lot of intercession and prayer throughout the night, as well as guest pastors giving short sermons, our class performing, a few other performances, and the worship team performances.  I think everyone managed to stay awake the whole night...it ended around 4:45am.  It's hard to sleep when some of the African pastors are preaching...it's just like you might imagine it, with so much passion that most of the sermon is yelled rather than spoken.  I'm getting more and more used to this style of preaching, but it's still not necessarily my favorite.  Sometimes the person is screaming so much into the microphone that I can't even understand what they are saying...and if they're speaking in Lugandan first and being translated, they often don't wait for the translator to finish their English sentence before they start their next sentence, so I get lost very easily.  But in times like that, I just sit back and think about how incredible it is that I get to be in that place.  Even after three months here, I'm still often struck by a sense of awe when I think about all the things I've gotten to see and experience that so many Americans will never get to experience.  I still find the African style of worship pretty amazing...they really sing with their whole heart, and they move around and dance like no one is watching.  Because in this culture, no one IS watching, because everyone is dancing! (:  There is one song in particular that they sang at the overnight, and has also been sung in the church I go to here, where everyone starts carrying things around, like bibles and chairs.   Our class formed a line and danced around the church.  It was great!

The other thing about African church that has struck all of us Westerners is the spiritual warfare.  There is much more emphasis on spiritual warfare here in Africa.  And to a Westerner, it's quite an eye opener.  The West doesn't really talk about the demonic forces at work in the world...we believe in Satan and that he and his demons are working, of course.  But we don't often attribute them to much...and we certainly don't have sessions of casting them out.  But things are different here.  There is so much witchcraft and other things that happen, and the people are much more aware of the spiritual world.  It's hard for me to write about, because to people who have never experienced demons, it sounds unreal and silly... I myself used to think it was such.  But now I have seen things, and once you see them it's very difficult to deny their reality.  Sometimes even here at the base during prayer or worship sessions, people will faint or shake or scream.  At the overnight they had a session of anointing, where everyone was standing in prayer and the pastors and a few others were walking around, praying for everyone.  There were several instances of people falling on the ground and rolling around, and there was screaming and convulsing and other things.   I'm telling you, once you see these things with your own eyes, you can't deny them.  People are doing things that they would never do in their own right mind.  And when you go back over the Gospels and read what it looked like when Jesus cast out demons, it sounds very similar... demons calling Jesus by name, throwing people on the ground, and coming out with screaming... it's almost eery to read these scriptures and now have a real life experience that is so similar. 

Now, the Africans know that the West is extremely physical and that Africa is extremely spiritual.  We've talked many times about how each culture needs to balance better.  The West barely even believes in the spiritual, yet Africa is overly spiritual.  Some of the Africans on the base even joke with me, "Everything is a demon.  A frog hops into the church and we cast it out as a demon!"  So awareness about the physical world is growing here, but I don't think awareness about the spiritual world is growing in the West...it's a tough thing, because you really need to see it to believe it. 

Anyway, I have learned a lot!  I am so grateful that the Lord gave me this opportunity to experience Ugandan culture.  Life has been good :)