The People we Meet

Throughout most of our time here, a nightly ritual has been our walk over the road to YWAM in the evenings for a soda and a chat. It has been a bit of relief during our power outages, as YWAM is on a different transformer and usually still had power, and gives us a break away from the village and the knocking on our door.

One of the side effects that has been really good has been the range of different people that we meet over there. From our friend Aggrey who until recently was the operator of the soda stall, and who is well known to all of the teams who have been here, to the various YWAM'ers from all over Africa who are visiting and the people from all over the world who are at the base doing a course.

Last week YWAM Hopelands was hosting a staff conference for eastern Africa and we met a guy who was director of YWAM Rwanda. He was very interesting to talk to, and was also interested in what we are doing and talked of his desire to establish such a village in Rwanda.

Then on Friday we had a conversation with a man from the UK and his two sons who were down for the conference from Arua, in north west Uganda where they work with deaf people. Again it was very interesting to hear what life is like for them in a different part of the country, and how they were managing life with 2 teenage boys as well as a daughter back home in the UK.

Then last night we caught up again with a young couple we first met at a swimming pool in Jinja back in January. Rachel is from the UK and Eric is Ugandan. Eric is on staff at YWAM and Rachel has been helping out with the Vocational course and is now doing a Discipleship training course. We have had a number of chats with them and get along really well. Last night Eric let it slip that Rachel is seeing Anne as a bit of a 'mother figure' and so was likely to talk for a while.

It s not only at YWAM that we meet interesting people. Anne has already mentioned on her posts lots of times when she has met up with people on her way to school or at the groups she attends.

Today we were in the bank and had quite a long wait. Anne stuck up a conversation with another customer who was waiting. He turned out to be a politician (after yesterday's post it was good that it was Anne who met him) from the West Nile area. He was definitely a politician, quite full of his own importance, but also made a lot of sense in what he was saying. Towards the end of the conversation he announced that he was a cousin of Idi Amin. Anne asked him if that was a good thing or not, he thought it was probably OK. Fortunately the acting bank manager was ready for me then and we left.

Wherever we go there are interesting people that we get to meet, and even I enjoy hearing from them. Most days we will encounter someone new. Just one of the added benefits of being here.