As the weeks approached I have to admit I was not very excited about the the trip, 8 days, 1100km and many many unknowns. The two months prior to the trip I had spent time preparing 50+ young people for an outreach to a place that I had never been. I heard stories about staunch muslims, hatred of christianity, deep powerful witchcraft, hot weather and bad roads. But despite my lack of excitement, in our weekly discipleship classes God continued to give me insightful teachings that seemed to go deep into the young people to build their faith. On one hand I was not excited but deep down I recognized that God had a plan and I needed to be open to see what was coming.
Finally the day arrived! We loaded the vehicles, a 35 passenger coaster and an additional car to carry luggage, food, tools and a few people and began our journey at 6am on Sunday. Our destination, the village of Midigo in the district of Yumbe which is in what they call West Nile. 39 of us in total ranging from the age of 13 to me as the oldest, shocking, I know :-)
Upon arrival, 12 hours later, we were warmly greeted with a hot meal and began planning for the days ahead. Many of the children were nervous about the conditions as they had heard of the dangers and now that we were actually here the fear tried to grip our team. Coupled with the fact that the local pastor told us that the previous week a pastor from the neighboring village survived a assassination attempt by some militants. As we settled in we encouraged them to take fearful thoughts captive that would try to bind them and trust God for His plans. He is trustworthy and is the one who brought us to this place and we could trust Him with His plans.
In the morning we went on our first service project, weeding a large garden that belonged to one of the village elders. As we finished an elderly muslim man came to greet us and thank us for the work. As he spoke to us he said he had never seen anything like what had happened that day; that a group of people including bazungu (white people) could come from so far to help him. He boldly declared “...this must be God!” Following our work in the garden we went to the local health center where we spent time cutting the grass, cleaning the grounds and praying for people. Again people were amazed at what they saw. As we worked people gathered around watching and asking, “who are these people and why have they come?” Our afternoons were filled with more activity, as we were sponsoring a soccer tournament with 6 teams participating and well over 1,000 people watching. We also did a children’s program where we sang, danced, played games and brought the gospel through child friendly activities to over 200 children each day. The day culminated with the showing of the Jesus film after dark in local languages.
Each one of our days looked similar to this with minor variations but filled the EYO motto, “...blessed to bless” from Genesis 12. As time moved on, despite some tension during the showing of the film, our young people began to grown bolder in their faith and the fear passed from our midst. Throughout the week we were able to bless many as we dug in their gardens, slashed (cut) the grass around the hospital and a secondary school, cleaned the health center, cleaned the town of trash and of course played football. By the week’s end more than 2,000 people had watched the Jesus film and we saw the local people picking the vision of community service especially the local church whom we challenged to take up the spirit of EYO in their own village. For me one of the greatest victories was watching the our 35 young people walking out their faith. To see growth in their lives, trusting God with their future and growing in maturity is an immense blessing.
Hopefully more later...
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