Flood Blog – Current impact opportunities, stories of impact and classifieds.

Hello Flood Family,

Greetings from Lira, Uganda!

On behalf of Derek, Liz, Katie, Erin, Jamin, Luiken, Tobias and I would like to thank you for your prayer and support as we prepare to do God’s work through Kotel Leadership Summit 2009.

Getting to Uganda was quite the adventure that started at LAX. It was a long 16 hour flight to Dubai, which was our lay-over destination. The team, as groggy as we were from such a long flight all wanted the opportunity to go into the city and explore a bit. We figured that the best place to explore Dubai was the Mall of Emirates, which is complete with an indoor ski lodge. As the rest of us ran around the gigantic mall, Jamin bought a two hour pass to snowboard, for which he came out with a broken camera but a fantastic memory. Once we had our fun running around the mall, we headed back to the hotel to sleep what little we could before getting back on a plane and heading to Uganda.

The seven hour flight from Dubai to Uganda seemed like nothing compared to our previous flight of 16 hours. Our team was over-joyed to arrive at Entebbe at about three in the afternoon, and once we got all of our luggage, we all piled into a van and headed toward Kampala where we were to spend the evening. To all of our surprise, spending the evening in Kampala ended up being shorter than expected. When we got tot he guest house that we were going to spend the night in, we found out that we wouldn’t be getting much sleep because we were to be on the road at two in the morning to make it to Lira in time for church. The car ride ended up being just fine, and filled with about two hours straight of just about every song we could think to sing.

Once we got to the house in Lira, we were all excited to be greeted by the interns who had just arrived two days before us. We changed our clothes then had the joy of experiencing our first church service in Lira. Church in Lira is unlike anything I have ever experienced. We arrived a bit late as it was, and still managed to participate in three hours of the service. We were warmly welcomed by everyone, and the Holy Spirit is so clearly moving in this place.

Being at the house is quite the experience, because there are are two different teams living in one place. It is always quite the task figuring our transportation and which team is doing what, and when, but God has blessed us with amazing leaders who keep things running smoothly. We have all been able to bond over things like morning devotions and a mutual hatred for one rooster who decided to wake us up at around 4:30 on Tuesday morning. We had our revenge on the rooster at dinner that night.

On Monday, our team had the opportunity to visit some of the sites where victims of the war fled to seek refuge. One of the sites which was called Barlonyo, was a site where the LRA brutally murdered over 300 people. As we visited this place, it was very bitter/sweet for everyone on the team because we were all aware of the trauma that this place was subjected to, but we could also see God’s healing hand at work especially in the joy that we saw while playing with the kids there.

Tuesday was a fun day of construction. We got to do some handy work where COTN is starting to build houses for the children who are orphans from the war. Our task was to move quite a few rows of large bricks to the location where the house were being built, which was gracefully accomplished with the help of an assembly line of the interns and our team as well as a few choice show tunes to keep the momentum going.

Wednesday, Adam’s team came in and we devoted the day to conference prep which truly payed off as tonight was the first night of our conference, which went really well. We will have more details about the conference in our next blog post.

Until then, we appreciate your continual prayer and support as we work to further God’s kingdom!

In Him,
Hanna Venizelos

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Global Impact, Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.