Boarding

Today is the day. We are about to board our flight beginning our 27 hour journey to Uganda. It's been a whirlwind of a month and we're kind of speechless. Thank you soooo much to all our family and friends for being there for us and we will dearly miss seeing you all in person. We'll be in Kampala for a couple of days before finishing our journey to Kotido via a 14 hour landcruiser ride, Lord willing. Our hearts and prayers will remain with our Colorado friends. We are praying for your safety as the fires continue. Alright, gotta board.

-Andrew

Encouragement

A few months ago Kerri and I started praying that God would raise up a network of people around us to support us as we live in Uganda. People to be the body of Christ around us, to pray for us daily as we pray for them, to come alongside us and what God is doing in Karamoja, to be our brothers and sisters, to keep us accountable, to encourage us as we hopefully encourage them, to e-mail us, to call us, to comment on our blog, to just be there. We don't desire to be an emotional sink-hole, but to have relationships that are edifying and life-giving for all involved.

Like I said, that was a few months ago and as I sit here in Canon City, CO drinking coffee from a great little drive-thru coffee stand called Jump Start Java, I am struck with the Father's faithfulness. We've had more than a month of just straight encouragement. The way God has used his body to come around us has been breath-taking.

First there's our Tuesday night bible study/dinner/field-trip/prayer/just amazing friends group. You're amazing and we've missed you all sooo much already. You are all very dear to our hearts.

The Father gave me an amazing boss at Starbucks along with some great co-workers and customers. Now they're all praying for us. You guys were a blast to work with and a daily encouragement for almost a year. I can't wait to see how God uses these relationships down the road (and we're praying for those future little Fletchers to know their heavenly Father's love even before they meet their new earthly father).

Then there's our house church. How can I express what an encouragement you have been. You are spectacular people. Sundays have not been the same without you. I truly look forward to seeing you all next week, except of course we'll miss Jack who will be up camping somewhere in the wilderness.

We were encouraged by not just our own house church but the whole Emmaus Road Network. What a truly great network of people you are. We tell everyone just how encouraged we've been by you. Shout out to the Superior house church as well. And the Hougens - we love you guys.

Staying on the house church theme: we spent an encouraging weekend with (next was) the RiverChurches network, a place part of me still considers home with my other brother and sister Jack and Jaelyn :). Thank you for being invested in us and we'll see some of you in the next couple of days.

There's also Advance Him, which is our mission sending organization. We look forward to being on the team and we are thankful for the support you've already given us.

We were very encouraged as well by Lake Tanglewood Community Church and their pastor Roger Hubbard, who have all supported us non-stop over the years.

Also in Texas we ran into my good friend Tanner Lemons who was super encouraging. We're glad to have him and my old friends Curtis and Colton praying for us. You guys are great, and hopefully next time we can meet up.

We were able to hang out with my old gang of friends from Texas and reconnect before we head out. Thanks Kevi-P, Brett, John, and Nels for a good time.

Then there has been all of my and Kerri's family. We're amazingly blessed with two great families who are nothing but supportive. All of you are a blessing and we love you.

In Louisiana, we met an awesome woman named Ms. Cynthia, who was super encouraging. She talked with Kerri for several hours about Karamoja and was excited to get her church praying for us. Thanks Ms. Cynthia!

All of Kerri's old and my newer friends in Canon City have been so interested in what's going on with us, which is a great blessing. We even ran into an old family friend of the Hunters at a grocery store in Pueblo. Nan was very encouraging and took a handful of prayer cards. Praise God for perfect timing.

Kind of last minute here in Canon City we ended up speaking at the Evangelical Free Church. The missions board was great and we really enjoyed the congregation. Thank you very much for your warm welcome.

Judi at Stamp of Excellence in Canon was super sweet and the stamps she did for us are great. She even said she'd be praying for us.

I probably forgot some people, but we have been truly blessed by ALL of you. I look forward to Karamoja even more now knowing we have such great people back here praying for us. Thank you all so much. Of course, thank you to the Father for knitting your bride together so beautifully and blessing us beyond anything we could imagine.

-Andrew

So Little Time

It's been over a year since we last left Uganda, five months since we decided to move back there, and less than two months are left before we leave. So little time. So little time that we've spent here in Boulder. So little time left. I remember thinking when we first moved back to the states that the idea of spending a whole year in Boulder seemed like an eternity. I didn't realize, however, how quickly one year could pass by here and still feel shorter than one month in Karamoja. I attribute this phenomenon to the fact that Karamoja and the West exist in two entirely different dimensions. Skeptical, are you? Well, I'm no Stephen Hawking but I do think there might be a wormhole located somewhere between Europe and Entebbe. But unless you want to come visit, you'll just have to take my word for it. You literally step from one world into another when you travel between the two. This explains why time doesn't move the same in Karamoja as it does here.

Here time flees. It flees our grasp, always evading and eluding us. We invent silly contraptions to help us save time, as if we can store it away for a rainy day. But time is antsy and refuses to keep still for us here. It flits about from one activity to the next, never idle, never at rest, never able to quite sit still. We can never catch enough of it. Somehow it always gets away from us.

But in Karamoja time crawls. It creeps slowly onward, pausing often in the shade of a tree to rest, never hurrying for anyone or anything. It doesn't know deadlines or emergencies or vocabulary words like "urgent" or "now". Forget your plans, your schedules, and your expectations. Karamoja Time will foil the lot of them. In Karamoja, it does not matter if you are white or black, male or female, young or old. Times moves for no one. No, like an old grey-bearded elder, time moves as it wills, slowly but determinedly, wisely pausing for meaningful occasions. The exchange of greetings with each person you meet on the way to the market, the interruption of a friend stopping in for a visit, the invitation to join a neighbor for tea. In Karamoja, time may not move for you, but it will always stop for you.

Here in Boulder time is fleeing before us, not caring to stop, pause, or slow even a little. We now have only three weeks until we leave on our tour of neighboring states to say goodbye to loved ones. This past year has been short but sweet, full of growth and rest, peace and friends. We have dearly loved being neighbors to our good friends the Wades, and we have found a true family among our house church and couples group - a first for us in Boulder. I am thankful, very thankful for this short year and I look forward to the long years ahead of us in Karamoja.

Leaving the Land of Thorns

In our last blog, we wrote about an opportunity we were exploring to move locations within Uganda and work with a coffeehouse in Lira (about 5 hours from Kotido) for the remainder of our time here. Since that post, we visited the coffeehouse (more appropriately termed the cafe) and spent a day and a half with the American couple who runs it. Quickly following that trip, it became apparent to both of us that we were not supposed to move. God was simply not leading us to Lira. We both felt somewhat relieved, as we were not excited about the idea of leaving our team - our family - so much sooner than expected. Little did we know God had another thing in mind.

Soon after we made the decision not to move to Lira, we felt God leading us to pray about when we should conclude our time here in Kotido. Originally, we felt like God was leading us to be here for six months to a year, without a strong sense of the exact time-frame. Over time, however, we began to assume that we would be here for one year. As we prayed about the timing God has for us, we realized that our assumption was incorrect. God showed both of us that our time was going to be up in March, not in May as we had expected.

So we purchased our tickets (barely a month and a half before our flight date) and we will be arriving in the Denver airport on March 13th. This fact is still difficult for both of us to believe. It's hard to imagine the cold March weather that we will be jumping into while it's still around 85 or 90 degrees inside our house at night when we go to bed. We will be the only Coloradans with a tan! Our team has been very supportive of us leaving, having prayed through this decision with us. However, this does not make it any easier to think of leaving them here to continue on in the dry heat and oftentimes exhausting culture while we get to return to electricity, running water, and refrigeration. We get to return to ice cream (Andrew's excited about the Blue Bell) and whole grains and salads (that'd be me Kerri) and so so much stuff. Perfectly paved roads, perfectly manicured lawns, perfectly controlled climates (with heaters and AC), perfectly cold drinks, perfectly clean water, perfectly safe surroundings. I know that we've only been gone 8 months, but it doesn't take long to forget what it's like to have so many resources at your disposal, so many luxuries at your fingertips. I can still picture the streets of Boulder in my head, with their fancy cars and huge, expensive houses and it's hard to remember that people really live that way. It's so easy to forget here. And it will be just as easy to forget there. It always is.

So we are coming back. For how long, we don't know. Where we will live, we don't know. All we know is God has said that we are done here, so we are leaving this land of thorns and sun and begging and friends and family and beauty and we are moving on, trusting that God has a plan we will discover in time.

Unity

Hey people, or Jonathan and Lynnette since you may be the only ones that read this now.

It's only been one week since we last posted, which is very exciting for us. We'd like to catch everyone up on what we've been doing on the practical, everyday life side of things, while trying not to bore you to death.

Firstly, we're still doing many chores everyday, but it's not as bad as back in the day.

Kerri is really focusing on helping Shalom Uganda get NGO (Non Governmental Organization) status. This is a long process with quite a bit of paperwork but she's plugging away at it and Lord willing we'll file in late January to early February. At the same time Kerri has started to help develop all the different documents and forms that will help Shalom run smoother and better in the future. She is also helping with the Mercy Ministry run by Shalom Uganda, which involves delivering food and supplies to vulnerable people in Kotido District.

Andrew is helping support the Child Sponsorship Program, which right now means preparing for the new school year (the Ugandan school year starts in late January).

It seems to be obvious that Kerri works much harder than Andrew, but that's not a surprise to anyone.

I (Andrew) am going to give up this third person thing now to share a little of what God's been teaching us this past week. As a little background I'll tell you that this year has been much harder than we expected. While we've felt God calling us to work among the poor for a long time, we've learned that doesn't mean we're automatically Mother Theresa and St. Francis' spiritual offspring. This week Jesus' prayer in John 17 really jumped out at me. It wasn't anything in particular, just the overall spirit and focus of Jesus' words: unity. That his people be united. That his current and future disciples would live in unity with each other and with God. I feel like we've learned just how important that is, particularly unity with God. This ties in with something Kerri was sharing with me from Deuteronomy 8:3, the famous "Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God." Just before that part of the verse it talks about how God humbled the Israelites in the desert, making them hungry and then feeding them with manna. Increasingly leading up to this week, we've felt like the Israelites. Like we've been humbled and made to hunger for words from God. I feel like we've learned at least a part of just how important unity with our God is, a part of why Jesus thought it important enough to focus on in his prayer in John.

So now we're praying that God would sustain us with words from his very mouth. Everything else has slowly and sometimes painfully been shaken away to the point that we just really want his voice to be present in our lives.

I hope I expressed all of this in an easy to understand fashion. We're still praying and working through these lessons, so like our lives this blog is a picture of a work in progress.

Alright, well time for me to eat.

-Andrew (and soon to be edited by Kerri)

Back in Kotido

It feels as if we've been traveling forever. We've taken three trips to Kampala since the beginning of November and our total number of hours on a bus since we moved to Uganda is up to 134 1/2 hours.

Kind of short on words today, so here are some photos:

The view from a nearby rock outside of town,

pretty much what the landscape around us looks like

Local elder at a healing ceremony

(his hat is made of human hair)

Our large mzungu (white person) house

Kerri and our neice Nevaeh enjoying one of our last big rains in September

Andrew and our nephew Izzy doing dishes outside

Hope you all had a great Christmas!

For those of you keeping track, we've passed the half way mark for our time here. Maybe we'll average more than a blog every two months for the remainder of our time...maybe.

Sorry for the lack of blogging, we'll try to do better.

So last week we traveled to Kampala, the capital, so we could pick up some supplies and meet up with some friends. While I did a lot of running around and getting stuff done I've gotta say the best part of the trip was the few short conversations i was able to have with the street children.

Since the Karimojong are a very poor people and Kampala is the biggest city in Uganda, many Karimojong end up on the streets of Kampala. They end up there in a number of ways and the worst of those ways is by human trafficking. People buy the kids from their parents or kidnap them off the streets in Karimoja then take them to Kampala and have them beg on the streets just so that the person controlling the child can make the money. Also many women and children just come of their own accord to try and make a living in Kampala and end up begging on the streets. I didn't write this blog to dive into these issues but if someone has questions they can let me know and we can talk.

So once the Karimojong end up on the streets they're highly despised. The rest of Ugandans are pretty cruel and can be oppressive of the Karimojong. All this to say these kids and women end up begging on the crowded streets of Kampala where nobody speaks their language or cares anything about them.

We've been studying the language of the Karimojong now for about 4 and a half months. It's an oral language and quite difficult for me. So I feel like I barely know anything. Me and Kerri were however able to carry on small conversations with the people living on the street in their own language. And it was spectacular. Their faces would turn from that of a downcast begger to this bright, excited woman or child.

So this is a long story to get to a small point. I don't have any huge spiritual or philosophical truths to lay on you. I just want to share my excitement. This is just a confirmation that to reach a people, while you may not be able to become completely like them, you must meet them where they are. Those kids were so stinkin excited to talk to us in their language that it just makes me want to become fluent in their language and then just go hang out on the streets with them letting them know that somebody loves them.

-andrew