I just wanted to reach out and thank you for your continued prayers and support for the 7.5 years we have served in Uganda. Thank you!

It has been an interesting year to say the least! We started off the year on a high with our lockdown lifted and our programs back up and running. Right about the time things were running at full steam, the legs got kicked out from under us. Around May, a second wave of COVID that they were calling the “Indian” variant (I think it was the Delta variant that ravaged the US as well). Our hospitals were being overwhelmed and everyone you talked to had friends or family that were either hospitalized or had passed away. The President first did a partial lockdown and shut down cross-district travel. This was a real challenge for us because we live in Buikwe District, our training center and businesses are in Jinja District and our farm is in Mayuge District. This meant that we couldn’t be present at any of our ministry sites for this lockdown. This lasted about two months, then the President declared a total lockdown. We were stuck at home for another two months. He did allow for “cargo” trucks to travel, so I was able to use my Toyota Hilux truck to go to Jinja to get groceries once per week. 

This lockdown was MUCH tougher on us than the lockdowns in 2020. In 2020, we lived in town, so we could walk to the grocery store, to work or to friend’s houses to play board games or hangout. We now live outside of town in a village. It is a beautiful, peaceful place to live, but we were totally isolated. It was good for not catching COVID, but tough for our mental health. 

Things are now partially opened back up. We still have a curfew that runs from 7pm-5:30am, still can only have 3 people in a vehicle and max 100 people in church. We still struggle with the social connections because restaurants close around 5:30 or 6 to allow their staff to get home before curfew, but at least we can travel outside our home and our ministry can operate. 

We have been able to conduct our farm training from September onward but were only able to start our business and job training programs beginning on November 1st. We are now operating Farming God’s Way training at 4 different sites. We have the training at our farm that is continual, and we are doing outreach with farmers that have implemented Farming God’s Way on their own farms. We are still operating a 2-acre training site at a place called Busoga Forestry where we are training about 18 women in Farming God’s Way traditional crops (corn and beans) as well as vegetable gardening. Each of the ladies has been allocated two “experiential” gardens where they are growing traditional crops in one and vegetables in another. We run trainings here every Wednesday where we teach a new step or new vegetable each week. This has been a very successful site.! We have also been given a 2-acre site at a children’s hospital and are teaching the women with children in the malnutrition ward how to grow healthy vegetables utilizing Farming God’s Way to hopefully prevent malnutrition in the future. We run trainings here every Tuesday and Thursday. We have also put in a vegetable training garden at our house to train our staff and our neighbors. We are training them Farming God’s Way every Monday and Friday. 

Our main job training facilitator, Hero, had a baby in October and is on maternity leave for the rest of the year, so we have been focusing on running our barista and service and hospitality training programs until she is able to come back. Our training classes have been completely full (we can only have a max of 7 students in our barista classes) since we started back up on the 1st and we have a waiting list for future classes. 

We are also adding a basic coding course to our program. It is a smartphone-based puzzle game where the students must logically solve a problem. Logical thinking skills is seriously lacking with the current education system (Uganda’s schools have been shut down for two years now and is the only country in the world still closed). We are not trying to create computer programmers, but just helping them to learn critical thinking skills. We have just started, but it has been so fun watching the students work through solving the problems! 

All that has kept me pretty busy! It has been a welcome change from the complete down time we had during 4 months of total lockdown, but we are ready for a break. We were meant to be headed back to Texas this month for our once every two-year furlough, but we have put that on hold until the summer when we take Paytyn back for university. We are planning to go to Kenya as a family in January right before our busy season takes off in February. The senior Farming God’s Way trainer in Uganda has moved back to Canada, so now most of the organizing and running of all the regional and national training events are my responsibility. We have a regional training in Jinja February 10-12, an In-field mentoring week where we mentor young/new Farming God’s Way trainers Feb 14-19 and a regional training in Northern Uganda (Gulu) from Feb 24-26. Planting season starts in March, so I should just be busy enough to not have time to think about Paytyn moving 8,000 miles away from us!

Thanks again for your continued support of our ministry in Uganda. We appreciate you guys!!