Pictures from our outreach in Zanzibar.

Kelli, Lucy, and me on the Indian Ocean for our birthdays.

Being blindfolded for our birthday games.

Our outreach team, celebrating my and Kelli's birthday.

Zanzibar night sky.

Our outreach group.

Queen of the Masaai warriors.

Our little room in Zanzibar.

The first round of outreach pictures, there are millions more to come. These are all from a bus window, taken on the thirty hour drive from Jinja to Dar.

Kenya, first thing in the morning.

Mountains of Tanzania.

Masaai men. 

It's our first day back from outreach, and already we're in Jinja, drinking chocolate milkshakes at the Keep and looking through the millions of pictures from the past two months. As incredibly glad I am to be back in Uganda, I do miss the outreach. It was such an incredible time, and just looking back at everything that happened in my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters on the DTS in the past two months, it seems unreal. This morning, right after base worship, the group got together and just had a chance for everyone to share what happened on them while on the outreach. The group from Barara had a lot of good things to say, and I was surprised at how encouraged I was by their success, and generally just how happy I was to see them again. I didn't realize how fond I had grown of everyone during the lecture phase, although for sure, it was nothing compared to how close we all got on the outreach. The thought that, a week from now, all but two of the people who I now think of as family will have left Uganda absolutely kills me. As excited as I am for what's next for me in the beautiful land, it's going to be such a different experience without all of the amazing people that God brought into my life five months ago. As much as Hopeland is my home, everyone on the DTS is my family, and everything about this week seems completely perfect, everything is back to normal and if I could have my way, I would want it to stay this way for years. Almost immediately after we all got back, Scovia was prancing around the room naked, and Kari was asleep early, asking us all to turn the light off, and we got chips and chapati and moaned about having to wake up early this morning, and it all just felt so perfect. Five months ago, I could have never imagined that I would feel this way about Uganda, but God has just completely changed everything that I thought was me, I can truly say that He has taken this time to begin forming me into the person that He created me to be, and in this new life, I think I could live in Africa for twenty more years.

As exciting as it is to be home, I'll have at least four more months to blog about how much I love Hopeland, Uganda. I want to begin writing about the outreach, because it really was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had, but I really don't even know how to begin explain everything that's happened in the past few months. If I start listing off all the things God's taught me, I'll be here typing until Friday, but it seems like such an injustice to try to summarize it all. So, at least for now, I'll just try to describe the main events, and I'm sure as what I'm about to experience and learn builds on what I've been learning, I'll go into much greater detail.

So, the first three weeks of our outreach were spent in Zanzibar, and I'm pretty sure that I wrote a quick blog entry from there, but it was just such a hard environment for the beginning of our outreach. I don't think any of us were really prepared for what we faced in Zanzibar, but it definitely taught us a lot. The island was predominantly Muslim, and the ones who weren't Muslim were too afraid to ever say this. This proved to be a big problem for us, as we were walking around trying to tell people about Jesus Christ, no one wanted to be seen talking to us or showing much interest in what we were saying, and for good reason - the Muslims burned three churches during the three weeks that we were there, simply because they were getting too loud about their faith. So we faced an incredibly hostile group of people, and just the spiritual environment of the island was oppressive and dark. Every night, as we went to sleep, we could hear the drums of the witch doctors and the chants from the mosques, but we woke up at five every morning and countered it all with Swahili praise songs and prayers. This spiritual tug-of-war really taught me a lot about how much exists beyond what we can see, but it also how to work through it, and despite everything that was happening around us, I think that Zanzibar was the first time that I really learned how to talk to God, and how to truly have a relationship with Jesus. It was absolutely breathtaking, to watch God work in such an impossible-seeming situation.

After Zanzibar, we got back on the ferry and went to Dar Es Salaam for five weeks, and that's the time that I really count as our outreach. The difference between the ministry in Zanzibar and the ministry in Dar was absolutely night and day. In Dar, the entire church rallied around us, and supported us in everything we were doing, and even the people we were talking to just seemed so eager and interested in what we had to say. It was so refreshing, so just have the freedom to work as we felt God was leading us to, and our work there was a huge success. We had two weeks of door to door, and I don't think a single day went by that someone didn't receive Christ, which was just so encouraging after our struggles in Zanzibar. We then went into a week of sermons, followed by a week of open air crusades, which we so great and powerful. By the last week, the church had grown exponentially, and everyone there had such a fire for Jesus about them, it was one of the most amazing transformations I've ever experienced. As much as I loved watching the people in the area falling in love with God, it was my own transformation during this time that meant the most to me. God really reached out to me, in a way that I had never known before, and my relationship with Him really, truly became a relationship. It stopped just being in my head, and flowed into my heart. He taught me how to truly love and respect people, He taught me what it really meant to have faith and hope in Him and His word, and He really begin to teach me what it means to live in and with His Holy Spirit. It was incredible, I really learned to lean on God for everything in the past month or so. Everything that I learned and experienced was really put to the test on the last week of my outreach, when I was faced with something that I knew I could absolutely not deal with. I was broken, scared, and totally hopeless, but that's when God proved to me His greatness, when He really finalized everything that He had been teaching me about faith and hope by showing me that it was nothing that I could work towards, nothing that I could attain by myself, but instead something I would have to fall back on Him for. As soon as I learned that, as soon as I truly experienced the kind of faith and hope that I know He wants me to live in, I realized that I could handle absolutely everything that life has in store for me. It was the most freeing realization ever, because no matter what happens or doesn't happen, I can always fall back on God, and with Him, nothing will ever be too hard. I guess it's nothing new, I didn't really come to any brilliant conclusions, it's the stuff that we all grow up learning in Sunday school, but the difference is that it's finally become real in my life, it's no longer just words or an idea, but it's a life. And of course, through all of this, He was also teaching me a million little things about how to live, to love, to believe, but in comparison to the realization of the full greatness of God, all of those don't even seem worth mentioning.


So, in a short summary, that has been my outreach, and hopefully will really lay the foundation for what's to come, both immediately here in Uganda, and in the future, whatever that may hold. I thank God so much for what an incredible experience it was, and what He's done to revive a life that I had never before considered worth living. In the past five months of this DTS, the Lord really took time to teach me the beauty of every single day, and showed me what a blessing it is to live this life, to live it for Him.

I've managed to find a few minutes of internet in the middle of Zanzibar, however, the keys stick terribly, there is no spellcheck, and I've got fifteen minutes left, so I'm going to make this incredibly brief.

Outreach is going really well so far, we've been here for a little over a week and we've got a week left on the island before we head off to mainland Tanzania, a place called (and I know I'm not spelling this right) Dar Es Saalam. It's really hard here, pretty much the whole island is Muslim and so there's an incredible resistance to what we're here for, but today really felt like a breakthrough, at least for me. We broke off into small teams, and I was with one of my friends from Uganda so that they could translate English/Swahili for me, and we stood on the corner of a road and just talked to whoever would listen. It was hard at first, I feel so intrusive trying to sit people down and tell them what I believe and why they should believe it also, but it got easier as I gave it to God, and in the end of the two hours, I had gotten to preach to thirteen-some Muslims, and one of them even ended up getting saved! It was an incredible experience, and exactly the encouragement I needed at the moment.

Being here, here as in Zanzibar, but also just in the outreach environment, is really challenging everything I've ever known or experienced, but it's also taken me on a whole new level of trusting in God and of loving Jesus. Because I've left everyone in my life that I care deeply about to be here, I've had to completely turn to Jesus for everything, to be there for me and to love me through it all, and it's been amazing. I want to go so much more in-depth into all of this, but my time is incredibly limited.

As for what we're actually doing here, it's twelve of us, leaders included, staying in a few rooms from the house of a Muzungu who occasionally comes to the island to work with a church, which is located right next door. Er, well, currently in a circus tent type deal, but when they get a real building they will be right next door. We're doing a lot of ministering with the church, preaching on Sunday services as well as Friday and Wednesday ones, and we're working together with the leaders of the church for our ministery around the island. We've been mainly focusing on door-to-door, as that seems the most effective way to reach individuals here, but next week we should be heading into the market places to do some open-air type things. We're incredibly limited in what we can do here, because the island is almost all Muslim and they tend to burn churches that get too out of hand, but with God all things are possible, so there is no doubt in my mind that great things will come from us being here.

I'll post more about the island, the ministry, and everything else when I can, and expect a lot of pictures as soon as I get back to Uganda and my laptop.

Love and blessings.

Just for the record, beginning a blog post is an incredibly awkward thing. It's not like an e-mail, where you can begin with something funny or personal, or even just hey, because a blog isn't really directed at anyone, it just kind of exists on the internet. So, awkwardly talking about the awkwardness of blog posts seemed like a good way to start this one, since I initially went to start with “well,” but then realized that was how I started pretty much every blog post since I got here. Wonderful.

Anyways, everything in Uganda is going incredibly well right now. Our DTS is in intense preparation mode, since we leave for outreach next Monday. I can’t believe how quickly it’s gone by, I remember the first month or so that I was here, when it seemed like it would be an eternity until mid-November, but here we are. Tomorrow is our last day of lectures, and in whatever free time we have, we’re practicing skits, dances, and songs to present while on outreach. It’s exhausting, because we’re still getting up at 4:40 in the morning for prayer, and this morning I was completely unenthusiastic about pretty much everything about today, but during prayer time I was really convicted about my attitude, and I realized that if we want to make any kind of difference in Zanzibar, I need to go into it with a completely positive attitude, no matter how exhausted I am. I just used about ten commas in that sentence, whoops. I’d blame it on exhaustion, but really, I think I have a bit of a comma problem, please excuse. Another grammatical shortcoming, er, maybe just an English language shortcoming, I’ve found myself talking more and more like an African lately, hence the previous “please excuse.” I do it a lot less when typing, because I have more time to think out what I type, but in regular conversations I’ve started to leave out everything but the words absolutely necessary to convey the point I’m trying to make. I didn’t realize it until the other day, when I said to Ansie “No, you keep,” and Will was like, “Lindley, she’s white. You don’t have to talk like that.” It’s just a natural way of speaking at this point; but I really hope that I can resume speaking in complete sentences by the time I come home.

I’m not really sure when the last time I updated my blog was, we currently have no internet (I’m typing this in Word so that when we do get internet I can post it quickly before it turns off again), so I can’t check, but I think it’s been a while. A lot has happened in the past few weeks, but I can’t remember anything incredibly noteworthy. I preached in an African church for the first time last Sunday, on Halloween. It was an absolutely incredible experience, and God really blew me away with what He did through me. Going into it, I was over-prepared, with four or five pages of meticulously taken notes on what it meant to have a relationship with God, and carefully drawn out charts illustrating the connectivity of the various relationship aspects; however, as soon as I got up there, God took charge of the message. I don’t remember looking at my notes even once – the general idea of the message kept with my original plan, but God completely used me to say what He wanted to say. It was truly amazing, and when it was over, I realized that I seriously need to trust God more, even in little things like that. That doesn’t mean not to prepare, that would be stupid, but at the same time, I need to not over-prepare. I need to give Him more room to work, leave more space open to trust that He will work through me, because if it’s not through Him, it’s entirely worthless anyway. It tied in so well with what He’s been teaching me the entire time I’ve been here – the importance of complete submission to Him, in every part of my life. All in all, it was an absolutely amazing experience, and I can’t wait to do it again both during and after outreach. In addition to being completely floored by God’s desire to use me to speak His words, I was, as always, struck by the beautiful hearts of the people in the church. I don’t think that I ever fully understood the joy of praising the Lord and just being in His presence until I came to Africa, and it still amazes me every time. Being at this church on Sunday, it was one of the most authentic worship services I’ve ever attended. It was small, only about thirty people, forty being generous, and most of them were under the age of fifteen, but the love and joy in that room, not only for God but for everyone else there, it was the most beautiful thing in the world. After the message and the worship, I discovered that it was “giving day,” and so I stood there, the only white person within miles, and received gifts, money, salt, fruits, and other things, from these amazing people who had next to nothing, but not, as is so easy to come across in Africa, because I was white. Instead, it was simply because I was there, because I was loved. It was convicting to the extreme, but not in a bad way – I think it was probably the first time in my life that I’d been convicted with absolute joy. I realized that, here were people who didn’t have enough money to buy pants for their children, giving away everything that they had to bless other people, and in doing so, bless the Lord. It sent me into a spiral of thought about money and love and giving and blessing, and I honestly have yet to completely sort it all out, but it made me realize, on a very basic level, that love is something that can be given to anyone, without knowing them or anything about them. It seems so simple, but it changed my outlook on pretty much everything in my life, and will hopefully change the way I live my life as a result.

In other, far less life-changing news, the internet is back on. So I’m going to end this post, and go reply to e-mails and all of that lovely shenanigans. I’ve only got internet for one more week, we’re not allowed to bring laptops to Zanzibar, so this will probably be one of my last posts on here for a while, but I will resume posting as soon as I get back to Uganda in January. Although, probably not right after we get back, since my mom will be coming to visit then (!) and I will be spending every waking moment with her.

One last thing, please keep our outreach teams in your prayers, especially these next few weeks as we make the transition from learning to applying. We’ve already had a few problems as a team, the family members of three people in our team are currently in the hospital, one is undergoing an operation, another has malaria, and the third, the child of a lady named Diana, is sick but we’re not sure with exactly what. So pray against sickness, but also against distraction, and also, as always, for protection, for God to be with us and to guide us in everything that we do, as we have no idea what we’re about to go into in Zanzibar. Mukama yebba zibwe.

A few pictures from last Sunday at church. As always, they're about a week and a half late. Sorry.

With several children from the church after the service.

My African son.

The pastor's roof, which is in need of some serious repairs. 

Well, we finally have both power and internet on the base, and although I should be using this time to write my sermon for Sunday, I wanted to give a quick update on life here at Hopeland. We're in the final stages of the lecture phase - our last week of actual class is next week, and after that, a week of team building and preparation, and then we're off to Zanzibar. It's been really rocky these past few weeks, both in the DTS as a whole and in my personal walk, but things seem to have smoothed out pretty well by now, and I really feel like we're ready for whatever awaits us on the outreach. Every free moment these days is spent working on skits and Swahili songs to present in churches, and today we started waking up at five in the morning for group prayer. I'm really hoping that five in the morning becomes a little easier to deal with as the time goes on, since we'll apparently be up praying every morning during outreach as well, but today was pretty rough. Even though we turned the lights off at nine last night, getting up this morning was nearly impossible. If it hadn't been for my and Lucy's brand new Masai blankets, which are amazingly warm for such thin pieces of fabric, I don't think we would have survived at all. The freezing African mornings are hard enough when the sun's up, but before sunrise it's even worse. So, after prayer and before lectures, Lucy and I had to absolutely beg Msaki for some coffee so that we could stay awake for class. He gave us some, and it was actually wonderful - I've never been much of a coffee drinker, but African coffee has so much sugar in it that it's absolutely delicious. Of course, we were shaking for the rest of the day, but at least we were wide awake! I'm going to have to buy some when we go into town tomorrow, otherwise there is absolutely no hope of making it through these next few months.

In other news, I'm preaching this Sunday, and I'm both excited and nervous. I'm speaking on relationship with God, based entirely on what He's been teaching me these past few months, and I'm planning on sharing bits of my testimony and the things that brought me to God, which will be the first time I've ever done that in front of a group of people. So, please, keep me in your prayers, and hopefully the Lord will use me in a way that will absolutely blow me away.

I'm still in the process of figuring out exactly how long I'm going to be staying here in Africa. I've been getting more and more serious about the idea of doing a School of Biblical Studies in September, but if I were to do that, I would probably come home for the summer at least, just to spend time with my family before I'm gone for another year. I know, without the slightest doubt, that I'll be spending a large amount of time here in my life, I'm just not exactly sure where that time will fall. I am, as the Ugandans say, slowly by slowly learning the language, and it is my greatest hope to one day understand it so well that I'm able to teach English here to the people who don't have the resources to learn it in a school or with a private tutor, but again, I'm waiting on the Lord to discover exactly when all of this will happen. I still have a commitment to go home for at least a month to fundraise for the lovely orphans in Karpinsk, Russia, so whenever I think about trying to schedule and plan all of this, I get a little bit anxious, but I know that God has given me all of these desires and alerted me to all of these needs, so again, I am fully trusting Him to tell me where to be, and when to be there. I can't wait to see how He works it all out. One travel plan that is certain, however, is my upcoming trip to Egypt. I'm not exactly sure when that will happen, but we're planning on the end of January, a bit after DTS graduation. Lucy gets three weeks vacation time from her Year for God program, and I know I'll need a bit of a break to clear my mind after getting back from outreach, so we've decided to save up our Christmas money and take a week long trip to Egypt, to see the pyramids and just relax. We're going to try to work it out so that we can stay with a YWAM base in Egypt, and since we've (as a total answer to prayer) found round-trip flights to Cairo from Entebbe for $420, tax included, that would make the total trip unbelievable inexpensive. So, from Uganda to Zanzibar to Egypt. And then, who knows. It's so exciting, to see how God is working everything out right now. If you had told me a year ago that I would be traveling all over Africa, I don't even know how I would have responded. Yet, here I am. Just another testament in my life to how wonderful the Lord is.