It’s always an adventure going to villages where “muzungu” sightings are rare. It’s even more of an adventure when you are staying in that village for a week with a native family you have never met before.
Patrick and Joy are the proud parents of 5 boys (now all young men) and have spent their entire lives in the area of Kapchorwa. Patrick is the headmaster of a school about 30 minutes (walking distance) from their home, while Joy teaches at a school roughly 45 minutes away if you cut through the coffee beans and cow fields. While teaching is their career, Patrick and Joy are also subsistence farmers along with 80% of Ugandans.
You may wonder why Patrick and Joy walk so far to go to work, but having a car is obsolete when you live on the side of a mountain with very few roads.
Several times over the course of the week I found myself asking “Is this real life”? Like when I woke up in the middle of the night, climbed out of my mosquito net, walked around the cows, and through the coffee beans to go to the latrine. Like when I walked half-way up a mountain to fill up a jerry can of water from a small spring flowing off a cliff. Like when I milked a cow (and got chased by one!). Like when I walked and walked and walked with two of the neighbor girls that spoke absolutely no English, not knowing where they were taking me until we made it to the top of this incredible rock that over looks the entire city…..I could go on and on about the past week of my life and how adventurous it has been, but that’s not the point at all. The point is that there are hundreds of beautiful people in a beautiful, mountainous city near Kenya that matter to God.
You may be wondering by now why we went to Kapchowra to begin with, and the answer to that is life. To live life with these people and share The Life with them. As I have said before, and I am sure I will say again, God is already present in Uganda. I did not come to tell them about Jesus, for they already know. I have come to give, experience, and live Love. The kind of love that only comes from the Father and His Church.
The title of this post is what most think of in relation to Africa, and it’s true, there are mud huts (I lived in one this week), and seeing naked babies is like seeing mosquitoes in Arkansas, but there is much more to Africa; just as there is much more to the gospel than simply knowing about Jesus.
May we never underestimate the value of a person or the richness of the Gospel.
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