I know this is crazy another blog post so
soon but I thought you would have nothing better to do as your summer begins
then to read another blog post. This one is hopefully written gooder than my
last one as that one was tough to write because I had so many thoughts but I
had a tough time thinking them through.
For most of May I was out at the African Children’s
Choir Primary School just outside Kampala. The school asked EMI to provide the
construction management for construction of a football pitch so EMI sent me. It
definitely started off very challenging as it was the closest that I have work
with the same Ugandans for a long period of time. The longer I am in Africa the
more I notice the cultural differences. I realize how I am very direct and how
that can conflict with a very indirect culture. Ugandans use indirectness for
good and bad. Sometimes it helps the other person to save face and other times
people use it to save their own face. For me it is simple, just admit your
wrong and move on but that is not how it works here. This is one of the things
that I think about often is there a right way to interact and a wrong way and
how do we decide. Now we must look to the Bible how God interacted with his
people and told his people to interact with others. I look at God in the Old
Testament as being very direct often saying “do this or this will happen.”
Looking at God in the flesh it gets a little more complicated, Jesus was very
direct sometimes especially when talking with the proud like the Pharisees.
Although, when talking with others he used indirect communications such as
parables so it makes it difficult to know whether one way is better than
another. I find often here people use indirect communication more for their own
advantage than to save others from embarrassment. In the end I just had to sit
down with the contractor and talk about the need for directness even though it
may make him uncomfortable. There were
still a few times the contractor used indirectness for his own advantage but in
general communication became much easier. The construction went quite smooth except for
hitting some rock, the bull dozer getting stuck and it taking a whole day to
dig it out, and the project taking twice as long as anticipated.
The beginning of my time at the school was
very quiet because the students were gone for break leaving the school with an
eerie stillness. When the students got back from their break the school was
transformed into a vibrant chaos of children everywhere. As I would be working
in the morning I would hear the students singing and playing drums nothing like
being at an African Children’s Choir concert six days a week. They are so good
that a group of them will be going to England to sing at a lunch for the
Queen’s Jubilee celebration. The students were great and every day after school
there would be some soccer matches that I would often join in on and they would
always take my dishes before I had a chance to wash them.
It really was great getting to serve and
spend time with such awesome students and staff at the African Children’s
Choir.
As soon as I finished at the African
Children’s Choir school I got a few days in Kampala and then was off to western
Uganda where I am now. Now I am managing another but very different project at
the Western Uganda Baptist Theological College (WUBTC). We are doing a
replacing and renovating a roof on a building to allow more light in because
the school’s power comes from solar panels and the building is very dark during
the daytime. The area I am in is amazing I am sandwiched between the second
largest game park in Uganda and the snowcapped Rwenzori Mountains, although
they are more cloud capped and I have yet to see the snow.
Okay that is it for now take care and God
Bless,
Aaron Haazen
