What a day!

Recently, at one of the OPCU church plants, three widows lost their homes in a land dispute.  The day after the court case was lost, they were evicted from the property and a barbed wire fence was put up to keep them off.  The church shines during difficult times like this: they gathered resources and began to build new houses for two of the widows (the third had children helping her).  The youth in our church spent the day yesterday helping to construct the mud and stick structures.    

They are built by making a frame of sticks and then slapping mud up onto the frame.  When the mud dries, they smear it with cow dung and it hardens enough to last a couple years.

Making the mud can be a fun project for a bunch of teenagers...they basically dig up a huge area of dirt, add water and stomp in it until it is good mud. :)

This is one house frame:

And here is the other:

We have visitors in from Australia right now.  Here they are smoothing out the floor of the house.

The morning and afternoon went super smoothly.  They got a lot of work done.  Eric left with one car load of kids to bring them home and then this happened:

Heh, heh...While Eric was gone, four of the kids (including Timothy and Katelyn) that were working needed to get some bricks.  The neighbors told them to cross the barbed wire fence (yes, the one blocking off the disputed land) and get some.  When they crossed, they met a security guard, told him what they wanted and he said "yes."  But then, he left and went and got the other two security guards and when the three of them came back, they were NOT happy.  It was as if the first security guard tricked them (lied to them?) in order to get them in trouble.  They made them march to the security guard head quarters and beat the boys with a stick (including Timothy one time, the other two boys got a bit more) along the way.  Thankfully, they didn't hit Katelyn although they did push all of them around quite a bit.  They got a good yelling at.  The guards were roughly talking in Luganda to the two other boys and they had quite a discussion that Timothy and Katelyn couldn't follow.  Then they turned to Timothy and Katelyn and got their story, talked some more among themselves and finally released them.  About that same time, Eric had come back and all the other kids came running up, "Pastor Eric, pastor Eric the kids were arrested!"  He eventually met up with them on their way out.  They were a little shaken up over their "arrest" (a few tears), but then once they were home, we all had a good laugh about their "record."  And we just had to take a few mug shots to remember it by, right?

Happy to be home...