July 1, 2002

Dear Friends,

I am just fine. Very healthy, in fact, but most of my Ugandan friends are suffering from malaria right now. I can only think of a few who aren’t. It really is a miserable disease but usually not fatal for adults.

One of our families lost a baby girl to malaria two weeks ago. Sad to see a tiny casket like that. They are homemade in poor areas like ours, and that makes it even worse. Not that they are badly made, just that you know that the person who made the casket knew the little girl he was making it for.

School is going fine. The more Luganda I learn the better it goes. The children always laugh when I speak it, but they know what I’m saying (I think). I’m now more aware of misbehavior, so I have to do more discipline. Mostly that means making sure that going to the latrine ("short call") is not a group activity. More difficult than it sounds in a class of 60.

I’m having a great time getting to know the children better. It’s interesting to know their stories, but usually the ones who speak more English are the ones who have come from the city to our rural school as boarders. And if you came from Kampala, usually it is because one or both of your parents are dead, and no one else will take care of you.

The headmistress, Sarah Sozi, Peterson’s wife, told me about one of the boys in my P.4 English class, Mutebi Andrew. His parents died, and he was staying with his uncle’s family. One day they moved out of the house and left Andrew with a cup, a bowl, and a mattress, saying they would be back to get him. They didn’t come back. Eventually he got kicked out of the house. Somebody gave him a piece of corrugated metal and he used it to make a house for himself between two of the slum houses. Andrew was living there with a dog when Sarah heard about him and came for him. Sarah took him to their home and later to the family farm, but he ran away and caused other problems. Now he is boarding at Mwera School, and it is awesome to see how the other boys have become his family. (Lots of them are from similar situations.) Definitely God’s hand is at work in Andrew’s life.

The reason I heard this story was because I was disciplining him for having skipped school for three weeks (a whole other story!). I was asking him to do tasks every day to make up for missed work (20 hours, by my estimate). One day he was giving me trouble, and Sarah was there. She told me the story.

And the weird thing is that Andrew hangs around me, peeping from behind other people and smiling at me. Me, the one who had disciplined him every day for two weeks. It just kills me.

But there’s a lot of good stuff going on too. The children have a music competition next week. The song they are singing is remarkable, and they are learning a traditional dance. They are so good. I’m learning the dance too, but they keep watching me when I do it, so I don’t do it a lot. (I’m not a natural talent.)

Last week, one of the Muslim children, Abudu, asked me to go to the mosque with him, so I told him I would out of respect for their faith. The Muslim children are especially curious about me, so it was a strange but good ministry opportunity. They were very pleased that I would come, and they loved it when I put on a lesu (head and shoulder covering) to go into the mosque. (Fortunately, they didn’t ask me to do the ceremonial washing! Sarah said they probably cleaned the place out after I was there.) Men and women worship separately, so Abudu told me I was to follow what his sister did during the service (kneeling, standing, etc.). None of that was objectionable to our Lord, so I said I would do that. I didn’t understand any of the service, so I just worshipped alongside them, praying for our Muslim students, the Muslims in the community, and relations between Muslims and the Christians in the world. We worshipped for 30 minutes, and then went back to school. (Muslim students are excused for this on Friday afternoons.)

I was really thankful to get to do this with my students. I think God has given them the opportunity to go to a Christian school and know Christians for a reason. So I hope you’ll be praying for Abudu, Isima, Aisha, Jamira and all the other precious ones God is sharing with us at Mwera. Maybe they’ll accept Jesus and we’ll never know about it, but isn’t it great to know that God can use us in the first steps!

More later.

Love,

Ruth