By Mommy Emily

“But I will leave in your midst
a people humble and lowly.
They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord,
those who are left in Israel;
they shall do no injustice
and speak no lies,
nor shall there be found in their mouth
a deceitful tongue.
For they shall graze and lie down,
and none shall make them afraid.”

~ Zephaniah 3:12-13

We’re stuck in traffic in Kampala for one and a half hours, moving maybe 10 feet. This is normal here in a country where the president rules by imposing fear. When he travels, streets shut down until he’s home. He has the audacity to wave while he passes people who spend most of their lives commuting to and from work. Citizens are not allowed to fix their own roads, but the government refuses to, pouring money instead into military support and personnel. So the roads remain ruined, and the traffic in chaos. 

At 7:00 PM curfew, the soldiers come out and beat anyone who’s out on the streets. In Jinja we saw people running at 7:00, fleeing the men in camo. 

More than once, we witness God intervene on our behalf. Driving home from Kenya, we had to be on the road from 7 until 10 pm, long past curfew, yet even as we would approach the road blocks set up by police, and I would pray, “Please turn their eyes, and grant us favor, Lord,” I literally watched as up to 10 police turned around, even as we approached, and we were allowed to pass by unseen, their backs turned to us the entire time.

At other times, the police stopped us in the middle of the day, saying we had too many people in the vehicle (even though we were wearing masks, the rule was that we only have half the number as there were seats, and we often had even one more than that because of the size of the ministry team). However, God had already provided a woman in advance — a woman of peace whose name was, ironically, Peace, who worked in the police force — and whenever we were threatened with having to go to jail, my brother Enock would call his friend, Peace, whom he knew from law school, and she would talk to the officers, and explain she had given us clearance.

Yet still, the corruption is rampant. We pass soldiers tossing vegetables and fruits into the backs of army trucks, destroying the livelihood of men and women trying to sell their garden produce along the road. It’s all supposedly in order to keep streets “clean.” Meanwhile, these merchants’ children will have nothing for supper, their parents arrested and put in jail simply for trying to make a living. 

Everywhere you look in Uganda, people are suffering. Mothers are sleeping on the sides of roads with their babies. Hundreds of children are joining child-headed gangs, stealing and pickpocketing in order to appease the gang leader.  

Jobs are scarce and crime high, because terror reigns. We approach a street that’s been barricaded because bombs were set off there, killing more than five and injuring many at a local pork joint in a district which entertains opposing political parties. 

In the fishing villages, we hear story after story of soldiers barging in, demanding villagers to gather on the beach, and then beating them based on how many children they have and how many fish each person eats. “The fish in the Nile need to be exported,” they say, but this is the villagers’ only means of survival.

My friend, Baptist, grew up in the fishing village of Buleebi. We eat deep fried fish on the floor of his mother’s mud home, the roof made of branches and thatch; he shows us a pile of smoked fish in the corner. “Those put me through school,” he says, but his mother spent many nights in the bush, huddled over her bag of fish, so the soldiers wouldn’t arrest her. We praise God the soldiers never found her, and allowed Baptist to go to school. Baptist is now a pastor, who has recently become the director of Harvestime in Uganda.

We gather as a Lulu family in our brother Enock’s home, wives and children and husbands all in one room, worshiping and crying out to God for Uganda, the Pearl of Africa. A David is desperately needed to arise against this Goliath of a government. 

And God gives Enock a dream — a vision of the youth of Uganda rising up and knowing Jesus, and then taking Him into the darkest of places. He has a dream of going into schools, preaching to these lost and despairing youth who haven’t been to classes all year, with schools expected to open again in January. He dreams of discipling them and teaching them to pray. 

We sense the Lord leading us to pray to this end. With only two of our teenage mothers currently staying at the dorms, and most of them being in secondary school, we make the hard decision to close down the primary school building (which hasn’t been used in months, anyway, due to COVID) as well as the dorms. We are still committed to helping these beautiful mamas complete their education, once school resumes, but they will be doing it from their own homes, through schools that already exist, because the Lord is calling on us to wait — and to pray, as He gives birth to something new.

He’s calling us to focus more on Him, and to use everything in The Lulu Tree as a means for equipping families first with His Word.

As we drive, I look out the window and see young men walking, chains dangling, anger on their faces. And I hear the Spirit whisper, “Those are the future of Lulu Uganda.”

It’s our vision and prayer to see the school and dorms repurposed to raise up a generation of Davids — young men and women and pastors who are passionate about the Word of God, who are trained in the Harvestime curriculum and prepared to go out in faith to the corners of Africa, with the simplest and mightiest sling and a stone: the gospel. 

The president may be able to shut down roads and intimidate the people with his military force. But this is one army he is powerless to stop. A humble army of light and hope.

This is the third in a series of posts about Mommy Emily’s trip to Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan, October 2021