Dear Friends,
John asked me to tell about today and I told him it would be my pleasure. John gets these ideas all the time. He got the feeling hearing me react to what I have been seeing and thought I was seeing things with fresh eyes. So here is my take on today and the trip.
Yes, I’m green. In fact, Uganda is the first “foreign” country I’ve ever visited. In God’s providence, He
chose this country to be the first and He indeed has made it special like a first crush. Though I have been here less than 48 hours, it seems like a week.  But how to explain it?  All that keeps coming in my head is the song, “How do you solve the problem like Maria?” How can I tell you about Uganda?
It’s not at all what I imagined, not at all what I got from the previous teams. Picture red earth deep colored thick like coffee and blood.  The constant and pungent smell of burning fire in the air at first seems sharp and annoying, then cloying sweet, then rich, aromatic, comforting like an old relative’s pipe. What a land for smells!  But most remarkable are the people. There is no way to describe the beauty of the people – the physical beauty and some other quality it seems every African I’ve seen has – young, old, destitute or not. I don’t know what the name for that quality is. Except I see it in the eyes, the faces. I think it is the beauty of an un-complex life.  We in America have gained the world, but we generally have lost our souls.
The Ugandas I’ve seen have little of “the world” but have something more important. And they have been giving it to us in buckets, giving it to me.  The little we have given pales in what we have received.
Yesterday, after awakening to the fact that I’m in Africa, I’m in Africa, the team went to two primary schools. When we got to the first one, a primary school of about one hundred kids, they all stuffed into a room the size of a small American classroom – which looked like one from the Depression. The blackboard was peeling black paint on the wall, not slate.  The children then sang for us. There is no way I can explain how this sounded. The plain, rich, raw beauty of it in it’s sincerity and simplicity – it is no use to say more. By describing it I would ruin it, violate it. I think if the group could, we would have, stopped and said, “We can do nothing.”  But we didn’t. We shared and acted Bible stories. And in the rear of a red brick schoolhouse, a dozen Americans told the old, old story.  Amazing grace. It was the only thing worth interrupting their songs for.
But I am to report about today. We packed the van and drove twenty-five miles and about one hundred years back into time.  Rural Uganda is complex.  Exotic flowers strewn like litter, carelessly. Mud huts, brick huts, children.  SO many children.  Each one looks up at you in sincerity, sincere eyes, always a smile, a handshake.  So much poverty.  The poverty itself is indescribable, too.
At the church – small, plain and simply beautiful like an old, crumbling house that has given so much but has much to give yet, we are, Frank and I, to preach.  Neither of us are sure of what to expect, I much less than Frank, who’s an old pro.  I am green.  I am trusting hard.  The singing is incredible, though I don’t know or understand a word. After two minutes, its clear we are honored guests, most honored guests. The hospitality of Ugandans is unrelenting and catches you off guard.  That’s  what is getting me, getting all of us. Frank and I are on fire, he preaching, I teaching.  This has turned out so much better, so much richer, so much an answer to prayer. God has blessed more than we imagined.
Serendipity is another way to describe this indescribable Uganda. Sarah stopping to talk to one child, then two and three, then twenty gather.  Then she breaks into “Head and shoulders, knees and toes.” And fifty Ugandans no more than six or seven years old crowd her politely, singing soft, sweet words.  Planned serenditity when Stephen plans a talk on love aimed at high schoolers, but finds his audience has switched to primary schoolers, but keeps on going – and the primaries listen.  Michal Bryant playing a somewhat chunky, two-day stubble Martha because at the last minute we notice the real Martha is on another assignment today. (He gets Abbus, our driver, who is a Muslim, to hold up a creation picture that illustrates our skit, and Abbus smiles – genuinely, sincerely.)
More I can’t tell. How do you solve the problem like Maria? I can tell you things.  I thought that was enough too once. God’s hand seems touching tenderly everyone. We are in good and gentle hands.

Thank you for your prayers!

For the Team,

Steve Wozny