AMA Post-Uganda: Part One

What are some things you notice about the "necessities" of American living that really aren't necessities at all? What can we do without?

I have to admit, I left the US very bitter about Americans and our values, priorities, and “problems”. God had been preparing our family for a few years to live with less and to focus our energies inward as a family and outward in mission. We were focused and living very differently from most of our friends, and frankly, I thought we were doing it right.

We let our fridge remain broken because it still functioned, we didn’t replace our carpet, we stopped paying for haircuts, we embraced the imperfections, the weeds and the scratches. What martyrs we thought we were.

I was talking to an American friend who I met in Uganda about this, and she was quick to remind me of grace. Grace is a necessity no matter where you live or what you do. Just because God had revealed something to me, a way that He was calling me and my family to live for a season, He didn’t call me to impose that on the rest of the world. We are each called according to HIS purpose for us individually. There is simply no right way to live out God’s call except with absolute grace and humility.

It’s funny, too. After living in Uganda and missing some of the modern conveniences, I am desperate to have nice, clean, things that work! We did replace our carpet as soon as we moved back into our home, and as much as I thought I would continue hanging my clothes out to dry in America, I am over it. I love my dryer and my extra-large capacity washing machine. And, I even think God is okay with that.

Inevitably, I would hang out clothes, and it would start raining. Our clothes also were faded, eaten by bugs, and stiff as a board. Do we need dryers? No. Are they awesome? Yes.

I need grace. We all need to both give and receive grace freely. 

So, could we live without a dryer, an ice-maker in our fridge, air-conditioning, radios in our cars, dishwashers and a million other things, yes, we could, but unless God is convicting you as an individual to eliminate those things, then there should be no guilt.

I will say that our family is at a stalemate over the TV issue. We gave up cable several years ago, had Netflix for a short time, check out videos from the library for free, but we are once again trying to decide what role TV will have in our lives at this point. I feel that TV has the potential to draw us away from each other as a family and away from time we could be spending with God. My family likes to have downtime and relax with TV. Honestly, I do, too, I just wish it was easier to strike a healthy balance.

I now believe that it is healthier to ask: What gets in between God and myself? What distracts you from living in obedience? What hinders your relationship with Him? 

Those are the things that you can do without. I promise, they will be completely different than the things your neighbor can do without. 

Would you go again? And would you ever consider staying there permanently, if that were possible?

We would all go again in a heartbeat. Our friends there became like family and it is so, so hard to not know when we will see them again. Many of those closest to us don’t have facebook or internet access either, so there is absolutely no communication. We loved our year for a million reasons and in a million ways. If we could visit once a year for the rest of our lives, we would be so happy. Unfortunately, with a family of 8, that would be near impossible financially.

I would not choose to live overseas permanently, and I think the rest of the family would agree with that, though some would probably consider it if the right opportunity came up. It was just too much of a burden on my heart. I struggled with situational depression while I was there, and it just wore me out mentally and emotionally. There are no easy fixes and no obvious solutions to many of the problems facing Ugandans. Our call in being there was very much to walk beside others IN their suffering. That is hard.

There are several teaching opportunities that Dave and I could have had in Uganda to stay. There are also a few organizations that would welcome us back to serve with them. We don’t have any plans to travel again though. We feel that it is a time to dig our roots deep until God tells us otherwise.

What were your favorite new foods you ate?

I need to preface this by saying that we are NOT adventurous eaters at all. I had at least one friend who was sure that I was going to starve to death when I left the U.S. We did stretch ourselves though, and tried many things. I don't know if we would categorize any of them as favorites, but we could eat them all when the occasion arose. 

Dave was offered a cup of warm milk straight from a scrawny, sickly cow, but he did get out of drinking that somehow.

The kids loved sugarcane, which isn't shocking. It is like a giant pixie-stick in its most natural form. 

There was a little four-leaf clover-looking plant that grew everywhere, and someone told the kids that they were called “yum-yums”, so the kids ate them all the time from our yard. I tried one and it just tasted like grass, so I am not sure why the kids loved them, but they did.

Chapati was the Ugandan staple that we ate the most of. It’s sort of like a greasy tortilla, but it’s the only meal you can get that doesn’t take over an hour to prepare, so in pinch, chapatis are an easy dinner. The street vendors also will wrap eggs and vegetables in chapati and serve it as a rolex. Typically we did that on Friday nights after soccer club.

A Ugandan staple is matoke and g-nut sauce, but we were not fans of it. Matoke is similar to sweet potato, but more stringy and bland, and it would be covered in a brown sauce that tasted like liquefied peanuts. To me it was a strange combination, but we could all manage to eat it when we needed to.

Passion fruit, mangos, and papayas grew everywhere, so we did help ourselves to so much fruit right off of the trees. Our neighbor cut down a papaya tree one day, and the top half fell into our compound. They said we could have all the fruit, so that night I took 3 or 4 giant sacks to church to share. You should have heard the hooting and cheering that accompanied that abundant blessing!

Why is it so hard to transition back?

I have heard this question answered with an analogy, and it really is a good question.

Living in America, we are all “yellows”. We know how to do life, what the norms are, and how to speak and act like “yellows”.

We then traveled to Uganda, a land of “blues”. We loved the “blues” and learned how to live with them. We learned their language and their customs. Although we never turned fully “blue”, we were changed.

Now, we return to the land of “yellows”, and because of our experiences with the “blues”, we find that we are no longer fully “yellow” anymore.

We are now “green”.

A part of both cultures is alive in us and have become part of who we are. The only problem is, that we are different, we are not fully “yellow”, nor are we fully “blue”. We will forever be “green”, and there is a joy and a sadness that accompanies that. We are richer because of it, but there is a tug, a part of us that longs to be both wholly “yellow” and wholly “blue”, and an acknowledgment that we can never be fully one or the other.

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Traveling to a developing nation is different than traveling anywhere else in the world. This is one reason that people are so dramatic after returning even from just a week or two in Haiti, the DR, or other African countries. We are extremely isolated in the US. We can stay on one side of town and avoid seeing the homeless. We can avoid certain schools and never see a hungry child. We can stay out of the hospital and avoid seeing the sick and dying.

In Uganda, there was no avoid any of this. Every day, every waking hour, we were surrounded by things that just shouldn’t be. Each day my prayer was simply, “God, come quick.” So much is beyond “fixing” and requires us only to trust that there is a plan and a purpose far beyond our understanding. That can be a gift, but it is overwhelming.

Musisi suffers from chronic jiggers. No matter how  many times we teach his mom what she can do to prevent infection, she doesn't do it. Our heart breaks for him when it gets so bad that can't even walk.

This was Morris when we first met him. We connected him with the proper help. Below, his improvement is visible. Will his mother continue to follow through, or will she abandon him again?

Coming back home leaves us with the burden of knowing that people we love are still hurting. Once we have seen, we cannot pretend that we haven’t. Once we have held that starving baby, sitting alone outside his hut with his mother nowhere to be found, we can’t forget. I think about that baby every day and I wonder if he is there alone again. I know he may not live much longer if his mother doesn’t make different choices, but I will never know. That baby, and the fact that I had to set him down, starving and alone haunts me, but I know that there is nothing else I could do, and that there are millions of other babies just like him. 

What We Wished We Had/Hadn't Packed

My cousin Heather asked me, shortly after arriving in Uganda, what we didn’t pack, but wished we had, and what we had packed, but wished we hadn’t. It was too soon to tell at that point, but I thought about that question constantly while doing life there.

We packed so many school supplies that we either didn't need or could have easily purchased in Uganda, things like pens and pencils, crayons, highlighters, lined paper, worksheets and textbooks. When it comes right down to it, all of the basics can be covered just fine without all the bells and whistles, and the kids did great. (Or else that is just what their current teachers are telling us to make us feel better. It's okay. We'll take it!)

We ended up with more bug spray and sunscreen than we needed, but our night guard appreciated the bug spray, and we were able to pass on the sunscreen to several other ministries and missionaries.

I wish we had brought our own printer and ink instead of having to go to a shop to print things and make copies. When I sent our Ugandan friend, David, the price would be about half of the “mzungu price” that they charged us.

As far as food went, it was better to just forget about our American favorites and embrace what we had available, but tacos were a staple dinner and we did have extra packets of taco seasoning sent over in care packages. We ended up with a few ranch dressing packets, too, but those require sour cream, which was not available. Dave had to find a recipe to make sour cream using vinegar, cream, and milk and after letting it sit out for 24 hours, voilà, you have sour cream that you can then mix with ranch packets to make ranch dressing. Needless to say, we didn't do that much.

This is Central Market, where we bought all of our staple food items (rice, beans, fruits and vegetables) , tools, clothes, shoes, blankets, etc. There was a booth for just about everything. Most of the items were in used condition. This is where a good deal of the items we send to those less fortunate end up. Most items are from America and Europe. There are no prices on anything, but you can bet that whatever price they first offer is at least double what the actual value should be. 

There were many booths in the market where we could purchase tools, but they were not nearly as sturdy as the tools that we have in America, we wished we had brought a few more of those.

Also, shockingly, I wish we had brought some nicer clothes and my make-up. We were very conservative in the amount and type of clothes that we packed because…Africa. From the very first week though, I was caught off guard at missionary gatherings where all the women were still complimenting each other’s adorable new scarf from target or asking where they purchased their cute shoes. Evidently some missionaries have regular care packages sent over to keep them trendy.

While our style helped eliminate one more area where we would have been set apart from our Ugandan friends, even Ugandans spend a good deal of their salary to look nice on special occasions.

We did manage to scrape together something nice for most of the kids on Christmas...and those we couldn't find something nice for, we just hid in the back for pictures. :-)  What you also can't see here is Carter wearing basketball shorts with his button-down shirt.

Our home did have electricity, but no matter how nice the house is in Uganda, Umeme, the power company, could decide to turn the power off to all of town or certain sections with no explanation. We never invested in one, but some nights, we wished we had a large battery powered light to get us through dark shower times and bedtime stories.

We are so glad that we brought cereal containers with strong seals to keep the bugs out of our rice, flour and sugar. Our matchbox cars and magnetic trains took a good deal of the weight limit in our luggage, but the toys were so different than Ugandan toys, that many kids we had over LOVED them!

Cell phones are a necessity as there is no such thing as landlines in Uganda. You simply purchase a sim card, put it in your phone and buy airtime cards which give you a certain amount of minutes for phone calls. We had no idea which phones would work for us there, so we ended up with several extras donated to us that we were able to give away and provide a much needed lifeline to many of our friends. For someone in the village, a cell phone saves them having to walk many miles to ask a simple question or access a resource located in the center of town.

So, overall, we were happy with what we packed, especially since we had no idea what to expect. Even some of the things, like towels and bed sheets, which we could have purchased in Uganda, we were glad that we brought on our own for the simple fact that you need to negotiate the price for every single item you purchase. It is just exhausting and due to the color of our skin, we would still end up with a price double or triple what a Ugandan would pay. 

Unsettled Hearts

The day we arrived back in the country, we pulled up to our house to drop off the 16 bins carrying our life for the past year. New houses had been built, old neighbors had moved out, and new neighbors had moved in. So much was exactly the same, but so much was so different. 

In Uganda, we went from having a 6 week countdown going strong, to being told that we needed to leave the country within one week. It was a crazy mix of emotions. We had been gearing up our hearts and minds to come home, and we were excited, for sure, but 6 weeks is a lot different than 1 week. (We are still just as in the dark as all of you about why we were told to leave early. We don't know all that is going on with the ministry that we worked with, but we trust that God was so much in the timing, and though we were surprised by the change, God was not.)

As we drove into the neighborhood, I noticed that some good friends were playing outside, so I said to one of the kids, "Why don't you run down and say hello?" I had no idea how bad that idea was. It was too soon. My precious child went running excitedly, stopped suddenly halfway down the street and then came running back to me hysterically crying. Through sobs he said, "I can't do it. I don't know why. I just don't know who I am supposed to be with them."

"I don't know who I'm supposed to be." Wow. 

Through my own tears I considered giving the "just be yourself" answer, but somehow I knew that this was much deeper and more complex than that. So we went in the house and let the emotions come. 

His poor heart didn't recover from that for at least another week. He asked to not see any friends until he was ready. Maybe I should have seen that coming, but then again, I don't think he had any idea until that moment running down the street either. 

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Another simple question, another unexpected response.

"Hey, do you want to switch bedrooms with your sister since she likes your paint color and you don't," I asked.

Instant sobbing. Runny nose, hysterical crying and pacing the room. 

"Mom, it makes no sense, but all I thought about in Uganda was my window. I missed my window and I like where my room is. It's just too much to think about. I can't handle it. The change is too much."

Of course, it didn't make a difference to me. It seemed logical for them to switch instead of repainting 2 rooms, but it didn't really matter. 

The familiarity of something as strange as a window brought up so much emotion.

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Since we came home early, our renters were still living in our house, and we had the blessed opportunity to be invited into the homes of many friends who love us dearly. Those weeks were such a gift, and although we knew it on some level, until last night, I had no idea just how great a buffer those homes were between the world we left and the world we call home. 

Those weeks gave us time to adjust slowly to America. Our church had provided groceries that lasted for the first couple weeks, so we could avoid being overwhelmed by the stores for a while. Our friends let us dig through their kids' clothing when we had nothing to wear because all of our Africa clothes was full of holes, faded by the line drying and stained by the bright red dirt. 

To me, that old clothes was trashed, to the kids, that clothes was precious. We gave away all of the decent clothes while still in Uganda, and it was my intention to throw away all of the clothing that did make it back here with us. The kids didn't let me though.They wouldn't stop wearing the worn out clothes that they had become so accustomed to over the past year. For them, that was one way to hold on, one more piece of the past year that they weren't letting go of just yet.  Last night, 6 weeks after coming home, I had them go through the plethora of hand-me-down clothing that we have been given. I wanted the kids to find what they loved and fill their closets back up. They wouldn't take more than a handful of items. The girls picked 3 shirts and thought they were done. After all, we lived a year with only as many outfits, why would we need more than that here?

So, now, we have been back in our very own house, with all of our old stuff out of storage for 5 days, and they have been the hardest 5 days of my life. The crazy, unpredictable emotions, the lack of patience we all have, and the stress of making decisions all weigh on us.

Every decision seems so important and so big. We don’t remember where we used to have certain furniture or items in the house.  And even if we did, would we still want it there now? It feels like now is the time to start fresh and incorporate newness into our old patterns, but at the same time, we are craving the comfort of old routines. I still keep going over to the pen drawer and expect it to be organized like I've always had it rather than holding the one lone pen as it does now.

While we crave the comfort of old routines, even those are elusive. Who did we used to be? What were our roles here? Did you do the vacuuming or did I? Who was responsible for laundry and grocery shopping? Does this distribution of labor make sense now? I thought you would take care of that. Well, I thought you took care of that. 

We were only gone for a year. In reality, it wasn’t that long. I know that. I feel silly not remembering the simplest parts of our life here. It’s hard to explain, and it makes no sense logically. Maybe this is the part that they say you have to experience to understand, but I will do my best to paint a picture of where we are right now.

Moving to Uganda was like moving to another planet. Our lives were turned completely upside-down. Very few things resembled our lives here, and the stress was constant. We held starving babies, saw death, experienced manipulation, witnessed severe neglect and devastation and were faced with plenty of situations where there was nothing we could do but pray and trust that God would intervene, or that He had purpose in the suffering. So much of our day-to-day life, the things that were “normal” in Uganda, caused our hearts to throb. If only our hearts could have just broken, it would have felt better. The tension, the pressure would have released, instead it was this swollen, hurting emotion that could not be comforted. Each time the phone rang or someone knocked on our gate, we had to be prepared for our plans for that day and sometimes that week to be altered. Living in a developing nation, almost everything is an emergency. Living on high alert for an extended period of time is exhausting and terrifying and required us to be ready for anything at any moment.

I read that many people come home with a sort of mild Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I am starting to understand that a little. Even though we are safe and life is okay, our hearts hold onto what we’ve experienced. In those moments between wake and sleep, we revert back to the state of high-alert, or our hearts wander to the friends we love there and the people we know are still suffering. Relaxation is difficult, and if we do fall back into our old patterns of life and live carefree, then where do we put what we have seen and experienced.

It’s easier for me to focus on the kids and on their processing because, in a way, that is one more distraction to allow me to avoid my own processing, but it is becoming unavoidable. Dave and I have been struggling with the most basic communication in the past few days, and it is scary when your marriage, your foundation feels uncertain. We have been snippy with each other, and have lacked grace. (Doesn’t that sound so sweet? “Lacking grace” sounds so much nicer than admitting the rude, mean, controlling, hurtful things we have said and done lately. :-s) We called it what it was last night though, and found a place of peace. Sometimes just naming the thing stops the negative thoughts from growing and eliminates the need to blame each other. We can blame the thing instead and that leaves room for grace. 

Who are we supposed to be? Who is God calling us to be now, with what we have learned, with what he has shown us? We don’t know the answers, but I think these are some of the right questions no matter where we are in life.

When God called us out upon the waters, we walked with confidence. We never once felt outside of the will of God, but we did let Him drag us through some things that we would never have chosen to experience if we were in charge.

A friend recently described God as being “thick”, not an adjective commonly used to describe God, but it spoke to me. God is absolutely the center of our lives. He is in control and uses every single thing to draw us closer to Himself. We want nothing more than to be where He wants us. Sometimes, that is full of joy and hope and wonder and all things good. Other times, that feels more like quicksand or like walking up the down escalator. I have moments that I want to bow out of certain situations. I want to tell God that it’s been great, but I want a life that is easier. I don’t want to be strong or stretched or grown any more, but God is thick. He doesn’t make me stay, He lets me go. He lets me give Him the silent treatment and ignore Him. He’s thick like peanut butter though, and when those moments last for days, and I feel like I've pulled so far away, I turn back, and have to laugh because I haven’t gotten very far. And what a gift that is. What a gift to be loved by a God who can not only handle all of my brokenness and my attempts to run my own life, but who watches me  turn my back and just remains there with open arms no matter what I say or do.

May I extend to others just an ounce of the grace that He has given to me.