1 John 3:18 “Dear children, let us not love
with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”
At our wedding in Canada on December 19th,
we chose this verse to describe the marriage we desire to aspire towards. To
not just say words of love to God, to each other, and to friends and family,
but to act out that love and willingly choose to love every single day. We are
so thankful for the 3 weeks we had in Canada and California leading up to and
following our wonderful wedding, and all the time we got to spend with friends
and family. Time and time again we felt the desire to be more involved in and
invested with the lives of our communities in North America, and yours with ours.
We pray this blog opens the door for you to be involved in our life in Uganda,
and that it remains a way that we can love you well.
We’ve been married now for a little over 2
months, and back home in Uganda for a month a half. The day after we returned,
we had the wonderful opportunity to celebrate our marriage with our Uganda community.
eMi, DOORS Ministries, Heritage International School staffs and many other
friends spent the Saturday afternoon with us enjoying an Ethiopian meal and
Uganda style reception planned and coordinated by a handful of dear friends of
ours here. We resaid our vows in front of our community, and had several
friends give vows back to us in how they would support our marriage. We were
tired, but oh so thankful for the wonderful day to reconnect and reinvest in
our community here, and see everyone in one swoop. It was a wonderful afternoon
and we went home with gifts of rice, sugar, washing powder, mugs, and candles.
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| At our Uganda reception |
We are getting more and more settled at our
home which is in the Kampala suburb of Buziga and has a beautiful view of Lake
Victoria. We live on a DOORS property called Yahaya’s Plot. Yahaya’s Plot is a
work in progress with the ultimate vision of being a nutrition farm to
supplement the diets of DOORS schools and homes directly meeting nutritional
needs of the children, to be a place of income generation for DOORS, and to be
a place of education and empowerment for marginalized children and adults. As
of right now, the garden is flourishing and the other programs are in the
planning and dreaming stages. The plot overall is just over an acre in size,
and we have a small house on one quarter of the land. We share the plot with
our sister, the Farm Manager, and her 5 daughters (some biological, some
fostering). We’ve started to make the home our own by painting, redecorating
and dreaming up plans for the very empty rooms.
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| Front of our house |
Matt started two new projects at EMI this year. The first
project is for a ministry called Hope Alive! They provide school sponsorship
and mentoring to children who wouldn’t otherwise go to school. They have
recently purchase 340 acres in northern Uganda where they have a vision as big
as the site. They want to have a nursery school, primary school, secondary
school, vocational school, church, community center, and agriculture training.
We are helping them to plan how to best utilize the site. It was great to be part of the team and to hear how God has worked in Hope
Alive! and in the lives of the volunteers. Matt went for the first few days of
the trip but left early to attend meetings for his other new project, the
Amazima School.
Amazima Ministries also provides school sponsorship and
mentoring to kids who wouldn’t attend school otherwise. They are building a
secondary school in Jinja. EMI has been involved in this project for a few
years now from master planning to phase 1 drawings and currently helping to
oversee phase 1 construction. EMI is now designing and producing drawings for
phase 2.
Matt role at EMI is shifting away from calculations and
producing drawings towards more management of projects and interns. It is
taking time to adjust to this new role, sometimes he gets to the end of the day
and it doesn’t feel like he has done any work because he has been helping other
people all day. The adjustments will take some time to grow into but it is
going well thus far.
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| Project team at meeting with community near Gulu |
Ashley is back in the swing of things at DOORS
overseeing progress at Yahaya’s Plot, and connecting with potential DOORS
volunteers among other things. She is also back at Heritage International
School teaching a high school public health class focusing on hot topic issues
this term including genetic screening, clinical trials, and alternative
medicines. One of my highlights so far in being back is the restored vision and
joy God has given me over Yahaya’s Plot. The gardens are flourishing like never
before, and we are weekly distributing large harvests of eggplant, tomatoes and
onions to various ministry arms. Also, take a look at the recently launches DOORS website at http://doorsministries.org.
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| Tomatoes |
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| Greens |
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| Pumpkin |
Life continues in Uganda as if we have
never left. We spent our weekdays either in Kajjansi at the office (Matt) or
bouncing between DOORS Ggaba properties and meetings and Heritage School.
Evenings are spent together at Yahaya’s Plot reflecting on the days as we cook
over our charcoal fire. Weekends have brought fun activities, along with our
consistent Saturday nights at DOORS Worship Night and Sunday mornings at Ggaba
Community Church (our home church) with street vendor rolexes for breakfast (2
eggs fried with veggies wrapped in a chapatti…almost like a breakfast burrito).
Our church has chosen Joshua 3:5 as the
theme for the year, “taking steps of faith.” We are excited to see what
steps of faith God will ask us to take this year, as we reflect on the many
steps of faith we’ve taken to reach the point we are at. Would you pray with us
as we seek Him for guidance of when to step, and where?
