New Beginnings
Bagole: the newlyweds
Issue I // November 2021 to July 2022
I'll start with my life's timeline:
Born March 1993 in Portland, Oregon to Ukrainian/Russian immigrant parents; the sixthborn in what would become a family with 12 children; raised in a Slavic Evangelical church; accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior at the age of nine; majored in Nursing and French Studies at university; left the country for the first time at 21 years old on a missions trip to Mexico; and the next year I flew off of the continent for the first time (I graduated with my BSN in May 2015, took the NCLEX on a Wednesday in July, and was on a plane the next morning) - on my way to Uganda, East Africa; visited Uganda several times over the next years, one of those times being in 2018 for my Discipleship Training School (DTS) through YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Hopeland (where I met my husband-to-be, which apparently is a common YWAM story); after all manner of complications in our long-distance relationship (LDR), including pandemic problems, we were married in November 2021 and that brings us to today. We are now finally able to stay together, living and doing ministry in the Pearl of Africa.
My husband, Sam, is a twin in a family with 10 children. His older twin was number three, and so Sam is the fourthborn. He was born in Uganda, and is of the Busoga tribe. He also grew up in the church, and accepted Christ at the age of 12. Sam is a talented artist, and pursues his love of art through drawing, painting, dance, singing, drumming, playing the saxophone, choreography, creating skits/ plays, and teaching all of this and more to his classes of adults, youths, and children. He received his Bachelors degree in adult communication, social work, and special education. Sam now serves as a children's pastor (and dance/ drama teacher, worship leader, mentor, counselor, father figure, and so on), as he also operates his own business in screen printing (as in graphic tees), school uniform labeling, tailoring/fashion, and bag design. In addition to this, he also volunteers with other organizations (such as Hi Girls Foundation and YWAM), and plays as the striker for the Good News Football Club.
As you can imagine, mixing our backgrounds, families, cultures, countries, and even skin colors has been a bit of a journey on its own. Many people feared for our "cultural differences" and how they should cause many problems. True be told, they haven't created any big complications. On the other hand, the fact that we were ready to expect many differences between us actually led us to communicate, a lot! We talked about everything, not just assuming that the other person viewed things the same way. In many cases, we did actually have the same idea and values. There are things that many couples automatically assume are similar between them, so they don't find out that they're on two different sides until after the wedding. In our case, we approached every topic just being open to hearing how the other one views it - everything from household chores, to how much to give to charity, to how long people spend at our home, to our music preferences (we both love to have music playing all day long), etc. Our open, indepth, and lengthy, communication helped us to better prepare for life together, and avoided many classic newlywed arguments. It also helps that our hobbies and things that bring us joy are nearly identical: music, singing, dancing, outdoor activities, and painting, among others.
So that's an overview of our backgrounds, and how they bring us together. Now that I'm living away from my home country, I constantly get questions about how my life is going, what I have been up to, and how I am fitting into life in Uganda. This blog will serve to answer some of those questions. I enjoy photography and usually just allow my photos to speak for themselves, but I decided to have my words accompany them here.
I am enjoying life in Uganda, and have settled in quite well. After our busy, colorful, energetic, and thoroughly enjoyable African wedding, it was time for me to figure out what I will be doing with my time here. As a nurse, I knew that I wanted to upkeep my medical skills, but I needed a break from dealing with elderly, chronically ill patients as I was doing in America. At university, I knew that I never wanted to work with babies and children in the medical world... and since coming to Uganda I now know that that is exactly what I want to do. I started volunteering with a hospital on the Prayer Mountain, and received midwifery training. After a total of one and a half months of training, through some unexpected events, I was the only one present at a home delivery and helped deliver the baby, solo! Praise God that everything went well, though I was more nervous than the laboring mother. I also started going with my husband to the children and youth activities at our church. Later on, I decided to also start volunteering with YWAM. I am now involved with teaching art at the preschool, working in accounts, leading in the worship team, and suddenly also got involved in working with the new DTS students. Sam and I also went with one of the YWAM outreach teams to an island on Lake Victoria to preach the gospel and give out Bibles through End Bible Poverty Now. I have always loved languages, and have been trying to learn the local languages ever since I first came to Uganda. I speak some of my husband's tribal language (Lusoga), though he mainly teaches me the most commonly spoken language - Luganda. I have also learned some Swahili, with a few words from other tribes, including Atesso, Lukbara, and the Nigerian Igbo.
My days consist of traveling by bodas (motorcycle "Uber"), walking the red dirt roads among the jungle foliage (often seeing monkeys and birds of every color of the rainbow), consuming a lot of the local tropical fruits, calculating time differences with friends and family around the world, and trying to switch between languages in my head with each conversation as people can greet me in Lusoga, Luganda, Swahili, or English, and I never know which one is coming. For sure, things are done differently in Uganda. I can't imagine ever being on a motorcycle on an American highway without a helmet, but I do that nearly every day here. I can pass a truck, hugely overloaded with sugarcane, while five young men try to balance on top of the load. I can watch a young girl of eight years old walk to the burr hole for water, with her baby brother strapped to her back, and no adult in sight. I can go into the marketplace and try to barter for mangoes, pineapples, guava, and rice as the shopkeepers try to double their prices upon seeing my "vanilla" skin. I can walk down streets near my church and hear greetings shouted out to me as people ask about how my ANCO Sam is doing. I can speak about the gospel to a couple of women smoking catfish on an island, and receive a catfish as a gift. [Side note: while preaching the gospel in various corners of Uganda, I have received many gifts of food, including a live chicken on two different occasions. My teammates used to ask to travel with me to partake in my "food blessings."] These were not common experiences in my American life, but I'm now getting used to them on this side of the world. I really enjoy these opportunities to experience a different style of living. I hope to update my blog a few times each month and give you a peephole into my Ugandan life. As always, you are most welcome to come and experience it all for yourself!
These photos are a bit disorganized and backwards, so we're starting around the current date and working back to November 2021.
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