I’m sitting here this morning at a coffee shop with Christian worship music, blasting out of the sound system at one of the nicest cafés at UCU. They make the coffee how I like it. It just rained last night. The clouds are just now beginning to dissipate. There’s cookfire smoke in the air as cooks are preparing breakfast and lunch. The setting numinous. The perfect mixture of tropical weather pouring its blessings upon the developed and undeveloped corners of the district.
I wait for my cup of coffee and sambosa breakfast. I try to organize my mind before the week begins in a flurry. The logical reality and organization of eLearning curriculum must somehow meld with the invisible spiritual jungle I have found here.
Despite the beauty of the setting, my heart is heavy as I pray for life, supernatural protection, love. I pray fiercely. Not with the same rote, calm recitation I do from USA. The energy of the songs pounding from the sound system animates my mental prayers. Love. Redemption. Supernatural protection. Life. Life. Abundant life.
I remember the stories of weekend encounters.
Recently, I’ve been bold. I’ve talked and written about the witchcraft done for twins and the serious, heavy sinister nature of it. A new friend, who cares for the emotional needs of the most poor from the villages told me a story. She is Dutch, and has noticed how strange things happen when certain objects come into the house. She was caring for a mother who recently birthed twins. The mother left the babies sleeping in the hut to run nearby to purchase tea. She was gone for five minutes, only, and the entire hut was engulfed in flames in her absence. The babies were badly burned. One died, and the other lived. I recognize the pattern. I tell her the little I know about the witchcraft that comes with twins. They say burning and death is one of the curses that comes. My new friend is shocked and sobered. Even as a rational person, she recognizes, there is a pattern, which she is not accustomed to. She tells me the fire that burned those babies seemed not to be a normal fire. It burnt a completely perfect circle around the babies.
Today my husband is attending a burial for a young girl…the daughter of a close family friend. She was about 18, pregnant and having sudden seizures. The real nature of her death or sudden ailments will never be known. I’m certain of it. She leaves one child behind. They say they are not certain how she became pregnant. They suggest she may have been raped during her seizures. An unimaginable but plausible circumstance if true. It may be the truth or a way for the family to cover the truth. Nobody can be certain.
Another former missionary is reaching out to me in a private mail, asking about what to do that her Ugandan ex-husband is wanting to take their underaged child for a private Ugandan ritual.
My niece has told me about a relative’s cousin, who has taken residence in her fathers house with her live-in boyfriend and children from another man. From there, she continues the witchcraft traditions of her mother, who died of ritual poisoning some years ago. According to tradition, it is taboo for the daughter to live with her partner, in the same house as her father. Yet she has taken the position of her mother, and her father seems powerless to make his own decisions for his own house. So the daughter and the father’s new live-in girlfriend clash and exchange juju.
Love. Redemption. Supernatural protection. Life. Life. Abundant life.
I read the stories in the Scriptures. They make more sense than any of the stories of my childhood. I need miracles of the most fantastic sort but the benign Christianity of my youth has not prepared me for this. I begin to reach further back into the more distant past of my faith tradition. I call upon the of the resurrection of Jesus. I call upon the God who is with us.
Shared Frontiers, Uganda 