Musasizis

Wairaka B Issue IV // October 2022 We live in a village called Wairaka B (or it may be Wairaka A, I'm not exactly sure where one ends and the next one starts), next to a small town called Bugembe, just outside of a medium town called Jinja, which is a few hours drive away from the crazy bustling capital city of Kampala. Our home is just up the street from the beautiful and lush YWAM Hopeland base, and our landlord is actually a YWAMer. We're situated at the bottom of Mwiri Hill. When the fog starts to settle around the hill in the evening and the moon is dark, the lights of the school perched at the top of the hill look like a floating city. Other times, the morning fog completely blankets the school, and the hill looks very mysterious. Our friend was a former pupil there, and that is how we found out that black leopards live in this area, since he survived a late evening encounter with one on the school football field. I have yet to see any of those wild cats myself, but I run...

The Next Generation Issue III // September 2022 Mjabale! ("Well done" - the standard greeting in both Luganda and Lusoga). Now you respond "kale" (pronounced /kah-le/ not /keil/), which is a catch-all to mean some sort of agreement - eg. okay, yes, you're welcome, I agree, etc... And then you return the greeting, and I'll also respond. Now that we're both welcome here, I want to talk about our lives with children, which seems to be the largest part of our ministries, both past and present, even though we're not even parents ourselves! As a son and daughter from two large families - 10 and 12 children - we have both grown up surrounded by children. I currently have 12 nieces and nephews from my family's side (with one more on the way, and about 15 honorary nieces and nephews through my in-laws), and Sam's side has one nephew, with another on the way. I've been a nanny, Sunday School assistant, then teacher, VBS staff, puppet team member, a...

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 relatio...