Dear Friends –
Today we visited a town called Iganga, a village about an hour’s drive east of Jinja. This day had the entire team going to the same place for the first time. Our van past miles of wide open fields of sugar cane that looked something like corn fields swaying in the day’s wind with a couple of exceptions. Here we have low lying mountains as a back drop and nearly steady stream of people walking along the roadside. We departed the main road once in Iganga and drove another 30 minutes on a bumpy dirt road passing children in school uniforms on their way to school – a couple Muslim women in full burkas with barely an opening for them to see the world in front of them as they made their way – a school for the blind seemed out of place and again some homes along the way. When we arrived at Pastor John’s church we were greeted by women “ululating” which I can only describe as an excited high pitched YeeYeeYeeYee – welcome to Africa!

While Steve and Frank taught local pastors in the church building and Ed Leaton gave a talk to adults regarding HIV, others of us stood under a tarp roped to the trees with a bunch of children. About 40 children, wary of the us of the strange white people, could not resist warming up to Uncle B’s guitar and songs let by the Cindy, Sara and Stephen. Lots and lots of laughs and smiles to such classics tunes as “This Little Light of Mine” and my personal favorite “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. Soon we learned once again to our own and maybe the children’s astonishment that despite where we come from, how we look, what language we speak or style of dress that we know and love the exact same God of creation. This is just one of several things that I may have intellectually known prior to my arrival however this experience in the towns of Kampala, Jinja, Kayunga and Buziika – local primary and secondary schools, local hospitals, farm land around Canaan where children seem to appear from nowhere from among the elephant grass and of course the courtyards and dorms around the Children’s Home have transformed my own view of this reality. I’ve been honored to witness the dignity of teachers, administrators, drivers, cooks led by the Wagabas live as family-community that play the multiple roles of mother, father, teacher, pastors and friends to children; all that and the ever present love that makes Canaan an uncommon oasis in desert.

Jack Wheeler