Tag Archives: America

Our Own Africa

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After six years of growing relationships and other-worldly experiences in Africa, I am planted back in the USA. Am recreating the simplicity of life that fed me on the other side of the planet. Fortunately, I have a lot of Africa here with me.

Am happy to have my lovely companion and wife, Evelyn Akiiki, with me. Together we are raising Divine Camilla, now one year old.

We live along Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Seattle. Our neighborhood is wonderfully diverse and looks a lot like those places we left behind in Uganda. Somalis and Ethiopians are our neighbors, A Vietnamese woman cuts my hair just right. An African-American pastor leads the nearby neighborhood church.

Ours is a bilingual home. Evelyn is frequently on WhatsApp catching up with news from family members and friends in Uganda. Her conversations in Rutooro or Luganda are conducted too quickly for me to keep pace. We’ll trade greetings in her dialect each day, whether we’re standing side by side or conversing via iPhones. The baby babbles in an attempt to mimic both tongues of the her parents. She gets a daily earful in Mom and Dad’s native languages.

Divine is a walking dynamo, driven by curiosity to get into everything. She and Mom slow down and sit on the floor at meal time, sharing potatoes, rice, millet porridge, vegetables and anything else we’re eating. It’s a beautiful thing to see a healthy baby with an adventurous appetite.

For all the joys Evelyn brings to my life, her love of the Lord and her grasp of appropriate scripture lifts my spirits time and again. It is what really attracted me to her. We share fellowship with the Holy Spirit throughout each day and night.

We thank God for the provision made for us here in America and for what has been built for Team in Faith and ourselves in Africa.

A Season Like No Other

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It’s a Christmas season like no other I’ve spent. And it’s come on the heels of two Christmas seasons that I’ll never forget.

Christmas 2017 finds me back in California after spending the the previous two in the villages of Uganda.

Holiday lights shine on homes nearby. Traffic backs up near shopping centers. The parking lots look pretty full as bargain-hunters make their pilgrimage to buy toys and gifts for loved ones. It’s a commercial tradition that begins earlier each year.

I am working at a big retailer. It’s a first for me to see the Christmas shopping scene up close.

Crowds come early. The aisles of toys, neatly prepared at the start of the day, are turned into busy avenues of decision-making before the popular attention-grabbers run out.

Parents discretely peak at their wish-lists. Kids often join them in the search for holiday cheer. Young ones play with whatever they can get their hands on then discard it wherever they may. This cultural exercise occurs hour after hour, day after day until it’s time to move on to the next secular holiday.

Ten thousand miles away it was a much calmer scene in the days before the savior’s birth.

While Christmas carols could occasionally be heard over the radio, decorated trees were few. In the homes where I stayed in 2015 and 2016 there were no gifts exchanged. The Ugandans I knew were not awaiting Santa Claus.

Fellowship and community are cultural mainstays in Africa. The celebration of the baby Jesus takes place in the form of worship, family gatherings and feasts.

It’s simple. It’s quiet. It’s Christmas.