Babies...and What Am I Doing Here?

Hello all!

So it's been about two weeks since I last updated. In that time I can't say that things have been incredibly eventful, but a lot has been going on (if that makes sense). For the past two weeks I've been in the office working on the design for the secondary school and training center, like I've been doing for a while now. It's a big project and the civil design has lots of different elements, so that gives me plenty to do. A lot of this stuff is new to me, so it's a learning process as I go, but it's been good. From an engineering standpoint, I've definitely already picked up a lot of practical knowledge that I'm sure will be useful in the future.

So last weekend I and the other interns took a trip to a babies' home in town. A babies' home is just an orphanage for babies and toddlers, by the way. We went there because a few interns had an interest in helping out, and we all decided it would be a great thing to do. So we went. I should preface this with saying that although I love kids, I'm not so good with babies and toddlers. If I can't carry on a simple conversation with them, I have issues. So I knew this would be a stretch for me, but it turned out to be great. Basically we just showed up and starting playing with the kids. There were about 20-30 toddlers there (only one real baby actually) so we had plenty of kids to play with. Of course since it's an orphanage, none of them have parents so the only kind of parental figure they have are their house mothers. So no real guy influence at all for them. The more I thought about their situation, the more it hit my heart. So we just played with them in various ways and let them climb on us, we held them, etc. The orphanage seems to be low on money, because none of the kids had any diapers on, which made things interesting. A lot of them had self-control issues and relieved themselves all the time. So we all got relieved on a few times. No big deal. But in the end it was great to just go and love on these kids and serve. We got recruited to move some firewood as well, so there was some manual labor involved.

Also in that weekend I got to spend more time hanging out with Jordan, the son of a woman that lives with my supervisor. He's a fun kid, and we had a great time playing around at the pool and playground. Hopefully I'll be able to have some positive influence in his life. With no dad around, I know how that can turn out, and I don't want that for him (not to say that everyone who grows up without a dad is second-class or anything, but I think everyone could really use a father-figure).

This past week I was in the office again working on the design for the school. It's coming along, but there's still plenty to do. Along with that there's opportunities to go out to villages for projects, so the pressure of finishing enough work to go can be stressful. In the midst of working on the all the engineering work, I've realized that it's really easy for me to lose focus on why I'm here. I've honestly had time were I've wondered what good I'm doing sitting the office working on the computer all day. I'd like to be out in the community more, serving in a more practical way, but I had to realize that's not where I've been placed. Plus the work I'm doing is serving in a practical way, I just haven't been looking at it that way lately. I let the tediousness of the work distract me from why I'm here. Did you know that around 5000 children die a day from lack of clean water? Or that 40 billion work hours a year that could be spent doing something else are spent carrying water in Africa? Or that 884 million people don't have access to clean drinking water? Also...it takes abut 10 US dollars to provide someone in a developing country with clean water for a lifetime. That's how much I spend on iTunes buying a CD, when I already have hundreds. So it's things like this that led me to be here in Uganda, and they remind me of why I'm here. Sure the work may be tedious sometimes, but someone has to design this water system so that these girls and future teachers don't have to walk miles for clean water, but instead they can get an education. That's why I'm here. To serve those in need just like Christ has called us to serve the least of these. In this case He's put me here as an engineer to design the necessary water systems. In the future I may be serving in a completely different way, but I'll still serve. It's what I'm commanded to do.

So no pictures this time around. No cameras were allowed in the babies' home, sorry. But know that great things are happening here in Uganda, and that this place is beautiful and full of wonderful people.

Running this race,

Kyle

PS: So I've decided to run a 10k downtown in November, so be expecting to hear more about that later. I've never ran more than a mile, so a 10k (6 miles) will be quite a feat! I ran for the first time today and did did 2 miles and felt pretty tired, but I think I can make it up to 6 by the race!

A Little James 1:27

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. - James 1:27

So I didn't quite make it to the widows this weekend, but I did get to visit some orphans! Let me give some background...

This weekend, me and the other Kampala interns took a visit to Jinja (about an hour and a half away) to visit the interns there. Their work consists more of managing construction of projects that eMi has designed in the past, mainly with a group called Arise Africa. Some of them work out in the bush during the week on a site, which always leads to some great stories. But anyway, we went to visit this weekend. Friday we got to have a Uganda-wide intern hangout time, and then Saturday morning we got some coffee at an excellent place in downtown Jinja. If you're ever in Jinja, go to The Source cafe for coffee, and then grab a cinnamon roll from Ozzie's across the street. Amazing. But after than Saturday, we got to go visit the orphanage across the street from where the Jinja guys live. The Jinja interns have established a relationship with the owner of the orphanage, so they've been helping out over there. They spend time hanging out with the kids, playing soccer, and helping build a tree house there. The tree house is really more like a fort. The plan for it was already pretty big, and when you get 4 construction management guys involved, you can imagine what happens. But it's a great ministry there, and some of the kids who started out their lives being abandoned in the bottom of pit latrines are now followers of Jesus. At least one I know of is going around preaching at other orphanages now. Amazing.

All of us at the orphanage.

I know this pic seems funny, but I thought it was funny how he was just playing with the machete. He showed me a thing or two about it.

So Saturday afternoon we just spend some time playing soccer and building the tree house with some of the orphans. One of the interns likes likes baking cookies and giving them to people (his cooking baking ministry, as he calls it), so he did that for the kids. We had a great time, and it was great to just spend some time around the kids and just love them. For kids that had such a rough past, they seemed really joyful, and it was cool to see how they interacted with some of the Jinja guys. The whole thing kind of made me think of the concept of adoption, and what that looks like both spiritually and physically. I've considered adopting (possibly internationally) later in life, but that was only part of what I saw. At one point before I left, the pastor at my home church in Mobile preached on spiritual and physical adoption and how God has adopted us as his children. He used his own experience of adopting two kids from Russia to show how God brings us in as His own. Really cool, and it led me a lesson I've been learning a lot lately: that salvation belongs to God alone. We don't do anything we obtain forgiveness of sins, it's all God working to draw us to Him. In the same way that a adopting parent comes to a child and chooses them as their own, God chooses us as His own. I'm not going to get into the election/free will deal, I'm just saying that it shows God's glory even more in the fact that He is the one that does everything in salvation, and that we are too sinful and fallen to really come to Him, so He comes to us.

This is Gordon. Cool kid.

So enough theology for now. Overall we had a great time at the orphanage, and I wished we could have stayed longer. Hopefully I'll get to go back, and maybe I can find something similar to help out with here in Kampala. We'll see.

On a side note, this past Friday was Uganda independence day! Uganda is 47 years old as an independent country. Pray that God continues to work here in the coming years. There's a lot going on here, and a lot of things will be happening in the near future with elections and such. Pray that God will just work in the hearts of the leaders here so that innocent people won't have to die and that more people will come to know Christ in this country.

As far as eMi work goes, things are coming along. I should have the grading plan for the school finished by Monday afternoon, and I'll begin work on the water and wastewater systems. A lot of that has been thought out by the civil volunteers, but there's some fine-tuning and rethinking to be done, plus I have to make it all fancy by drawing it out on the computer.

Well, I hope you're all doing well! I'm sure fall is on its way now, so enjoy it. That's my favorite season, but I'll suffer for the mission by being here and missing it ; ) Honestly, I'm okay, it's not like I haven't experiences 22 falls already or anything. Ok, well until next time!

PS: If you notice, I've started a list to the right of my updates that I'm calling my "Post-Africa Resolutions." These are just things that I want to put into practice in life based off of what I've learned here. Maybe you all can hold me accountable to these things once I get back.

PSS: Also, if you have any kinds of questions about Uganda or anything I'm doing here, feel free to shoot me an e-mail. If you don't have it, it's kylestevenbryant@gmail.com

My Own LOST Experience

Hello all!

Well here I am again trying to fit weeks of experiences into a few paragraphs. I'll do my best. But overall, I think I need to say this: you had to be there. It's hard for me to really relate to you how things have been here in Uganda. But here we go.

So like I mentioned in my last update, a few days after we returned from our project trip/safari adventure, me and another intern Travis got recruited to travel to Ssese Island (on Lake Victoria) with a ministry called Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). A quick little background on these guys. They're an international ministry (locations all over the world) that transports missionaries and humanitarian worked to hard to reach areas so that they can share the gospel and help those in need. Their mission statement is "sharing the love of Jesus Christ through aviation and technology so that isolated people may be physically and spiritually transformed." Really cool ministry. Well MAF wants to put an airstrip on Ssese Island to provide safer access to that island and the smaller ones around it. Apparently around 5000 people die a year in the areas around Lake Victoria due to unsafe transportation to the islands. Also, the islands are not a very strongly churched area, and providing safer means to get these would open up lots of doors for the church (and the gospel) to grow there.

So eMi has worked with the MAF Uganda office in the past, so we were asked to assist in locating the property line that is critical in locating where the airstrip can go. Property lines oddly enough end up being a big part of what we do in terms of surveying. Property issues are kind of a nightmare in Uganda, with lots of property "surveys" being drawn by hand and property corners not necessarily existing anymore. Anyways so our job was to figure out this line based on a few documents they had and then lay it out (approximately) in the field. This wasn't an easy task, and required some less-than-perfect surveying, but in the end we got the approximate line to within about 45 meters. That's pretty big, I know, but when the airstrip is a kilometer long and you have the amount of space they had, its good enough. We gave them the best we had, though.

This is the boat we took to the island, not too bad!

The village where we had the meeting

So the trip itself was really interesting. We left from a dock in Entebbe (where the airport in Uganda is, which is right on the lake) around 7. The boat we took was a safari ski boat, which is apparently a lot better than the inflatable boat that was used for the last trip they took. The boat took about an hour to reach the island, where we the met the leaders of the local village. The last trip out there MAF met with leaders of another village on the island (I think there's 3 total) to explain some things. We did the same thing this time basically. Apparently in the past mzungus (what white people get called here, it's not derogatory, it's just what they say) have bought smaller islands on the lake and then kicked off all of the Ugandans and made it their own private resort. Awful, I know. Well we wanted to make sure the locals understand what we're doing, so we had a village meeting. These are interesting. Introductions are a big thing here, so about 30 minutes of the meeting consisted of just that. Once we were all introduced, the meeting itself went smoothly, and we were done in about an hour and a half (not too long, I guess). After that we went out to the field of the proposed airstrip, and started looking for survey markers that we had been told were there. After a brief scare of not finding them, we found them and got to work, which ended up with us getting a decent line. After this, we had to walk a total of a few miles through tall grass to plant bamboo poles to mark the line. Praise God for His protection from snakes, we didn't see any! There were plenty of locals with us to help, so we had fun trying to speak a little Luganda (their language) with them. They thought mzungus speaking Luganda was hilarious. So after we finished the line, the MAF guys with us had already staked out where they wanted to strip based on the property line. We did some simple soil tests to see if the ground was appropriate for airplanes to land on (it'll work) and then the locals got to work on clearing the land. The cool thing about the strip is that it will be completely owned by the community, and MAF will just use it. That way it can be used for all types of community development. So after some clearing, it was time for us to go. Overall, it was a great experience. I see some great ministry going on in the island villages in the future.

Some boats on the shore of the island.

Well, I think I'll keep this update at that. I'll be updating soon about some other recent occurrences. I hope you're doing great wherever you are, and thank you again for your prayers and support!