Mberera Forest

This is my first real effort to make good on something I mentioned a while ago. What was that? you ask. To provide you with shorter, more frequent posts. See, the Westminster Recap post I wrote took about 6 hours to produce (writing, editing, resizing pictures, uploading, etc). My plan for this post is to finish it in less than 15 minutes. I better get rolling...



The picture you see above is from a hiking trip Amanda and I took with John and Tom and Jill Fontaine. When did we go? Oh, about a month ago. September 30th to be exact. We visited Mberera National Park, which is only about 45 minutes from Kampala, on the way to Jinja (east of Kampala). To be honest, I was expecting to see a lot of colorful plants and interesting wildlife on our hike, but I was kind of disappointed. The forest was primarily green vegetation and there weren't many animals that we saw. (The welcome center had a picture of a ~4 m Python that had been spotted on site. Amanda wasn't happy.) There were two redeeming aspects of the trip though: The first one is these amazing trees that are shown above. They remind me of trees I've seen Florida where the root system is also exposed. Of course, the big differences were that the Ugandan trees were over a hundred feet tall and the visible root systems were 8 or 9 m wide.



The other really neat thing we saw was a group of five monkeys. We had hiked for a few hours hoping to see some monkeys but didn't. At the end of the hike, with the welcome center literally 50 m away, we here these guys making all sorts of sounds. We watched them run around on a few different trees for a while before they scurried out of view. If I remember correctly, these are Red-Tailed Monkeys, even though you can't see it in this shot John took:



Alright, it took a bit longer than 15 minutes but I'm still happy with my time.

Go Cards!

Westminster Recap

About one week ago I came back from the Westminster project trip. I’ve been looking forward to posting some pictures and comments about the trip since I’m really excited about how our work turned out. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to read my previous entry so that you’re familiar with the names. Here’s a brief synopsis of what happened:

Saturday, October 7:

Chad, John and I, along with Amanda and Shanthi, left the eMi compound in Kampala and made the 30ish minute drive to Dave and Darlene Eby’s house in Zana. Amanda was instantly comforted that I would be taken care of after meeting Darlene and hearing her meal plans for the week. Later that night Chad, Darlene and I went to the Entebbe airport to pick our volunteers (“pick” is used here, not “pick up”).

Sunday, October 8:

The entire project team visited New City Bible Church (Amanda and I attend here) in the morning. While I wanted the team to hear Pastor Gerald since he is a Ugandan, our host Dave Eby preached a great sermon this morning. Two quick thoughts from the sermon on Romans 8:28-29: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he may be the firstborn among many brothers.” 1) The “good” which God is working for is for us “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” It seems that during difficult times it is easy to hope that the “good” will eventually be something that we deem good, something other than Christ-likeness. I can remember thinking during school that the difficulty of my courses would eventually pay off and that I would get a great job. Actually, and even more personally, I remember thinking that the difficulty of my courses would lead people to think, “Wow, isn’t he smart!” My messed up view in those situations saw “good” as something other than Christ-likeness. 2) Paul didn’t write “And we know that in most things…” or “And we know that in some things…” but rather “And we know that in all things…” God is at work in everything to sanctify us. We don’t have to guess at whether God is using an event to make us more like Christ. He is.

After church the Eby’s hosted a lunch for the eMi team and Westminster Theological College (WTC) faculty. After people interacted a bit, Chad asked Emma to share his testimony and plans for WTC (incidentally, Emma is short for Emmanual).


Later that evening our eMi team took a while to share about God’s work in our lives. I was struck at the different ways God had pulled people to himself despite abuse, neglect and other forms of unlove some team members had endured. Another thing that I was excited to learn about was Kathryn’s foundation back in Ft. Meyers, Florida. A few years back she quit her job to start the Harlem Heights Foundation to provide for the spiritual, educational, recreational and physical needs of her community. What an amazing way to love people in her own neighborhood!

Monday, October 9:

Monday was the first real day of project work. Chad, Gene, Kathryn and I met with the faculty at WTC all day to discuss the architectural program. We discussed what buildings were needed first, how many would be needed at the completion of the campus, the number of current and eventual students, what type of feel the campus should have, which buildings should be in close proximity to each other and scores of other questions. Kevin and John went out to the project site to begin the survey.

Tuesday & Wednesday, October 10 & 11:

If my memory serves me correctly, Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty similar in that Kathryn, Gene and I all worked together on the site master plan. Tuesday began with the three of us working on one plan together. We weren’t completely satisfied after the preliminary sketches; it seemed too rigid—the buildings were all arranged perpendicularly like an old Western campus. That led to the development of a second plan, the meandering pathway, which was very random with no order at all. We decided this one wasn't right either, so from that point we each decided to develop one plan per person: Kathryn took the Western plan, Gene took the Meandering plan, and I developed a new one, which Gene affectionately called the Zulu plan. We spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday working on the different versions of our site plans so that we could have three distinct options to show the WTC faculty.

The architecture team also toured African Bible College to see their newly developed campus. They have one of the nicest libraries in Uganda along with a functional radio station. Dr. Palmer Robertson gave us a tour and provided some information about what he thought helped and hindered the campus. I took note of something myself…Most people in Uganda do their laundry by hand sitting on the ground. I noticed that ABC provided an area for students to stand while doing their laundry. This initially seemed like a great idea to our team, but I was skeptical of whether this was an improvement since the students would be leaning over for at least 30 minutes. I asked several students “How do you feel after washing your laundry in these sinks?” in an effort to confirm or refute my skepticism. Each student said their back hurt after leaning over for so long…so yeah, we’re not including them in our design!

In addition to the site planning, the survey continued on despite some problems with the Total Station.

Thursday, October 12:

The faculty from WTC came over again for a meeting to review the three site plans we developed. Before we began, Chad said that he wanted them to feel comfortable telling us what they liked and didn’t like. I wanted to underscore the necessity of their candor so I planned out and said something similar to “It is very important to us that you share with us what you think because we want to create a campus that works well for you. At this point we’ve spent less than 100 hours as a team working on these designs, but we’ll easily spend hundreds of more hours finishing the report and drawings. If there’s something we’re doing that is making it difficult to share your opinion, would you please let us know?” Gotta love Advocate-Illustrate-Inquire.

The meeting did seem to go well. The faculty identified which aspects of the plans they liked and disliked. It seemed a bit personal when they pointed out things they didn’t like on my plan that I thought were marvelous, but I think that was really my own pride. Talking afterward, Gene and Kathryn seemed to handle the critiquing much better. Maybe it’s because they’re so used to it (as real architects) or they got so conditioned to it in college (in real architecture school).

Friday, October 13:

Friday was more drafting, done primarily by the Gene and Kathryn. We talked for a bit about structural issues, but the highlight of the day was going to a great dinner at Lindsay Cottages. Amanda would have come except she was in charge of the Rain Festival (it's what Heritage has in place of a Fall Festival since we're in the rainy seaon now) at school that night. Gene and Kathryn treated the whole team…Thanks!

From left: Kathryn, John, Amil, Gene, Darlene, Ida, Dave, William, Chad, Joanna, me, Kevin

Kevin also spent some time using Google Sketch Up to draw our site in 3D. The entrance to the site is along the lowest elevation.



Saturday, October 14:

The WTC faculty dropped by in the morning for a review of the totally new site plan. They were really excited about it but had a few suggestions, none of which were too difficult to work into the plan. Here’s the rendering:


Some things to keep in mind…the reddish/orangish roofs are for buildings constructed during Phase 1. The grey roofs are for buildings constructed in later phases. The little circles you see represent bandas. Think of them as concrete gazebos with thatched roofs.

The final site plan really incorporates aspects of each of our designs. The campus portion of WTS retains the order of the perpendicular buildings from Kathryn’s plan, the dorms are loosely arranged in the spirit of Gene’s plan, and the placement of the church near the entrance of the site, as opposed to the back, came from my design.

Sunday, October 15:

The highlight of my day was being able to play the Indelible Grace version of “And Can it Be” at Zana Community Presbyterian Church. A quick story…Amil is a Ugandan who lives with the Ebys and the worship leader at Zana. He was a Muslim but became a Christian in the 90s when the Ebys visited Uganda. Last Saturday I heard him singing the old version of “And Can it Be” and asked if he would like to learn a new tune. He said "Yes" and so I taught it to him. An hour and a half later I went to their Saturday afternoon practice and taught it to the choir (no CD!..yikes) and then we sang it together on Sunday. Perhaps the idea of putting old hymns to new music will catch on here--several of the choir folks said they liked it much better than the old tune.

Later that afternoon our team presented the WTS plan to about 100 people. The crowd had a mixture of locals, current WTS students, and other Presbyterian Church in Uganda folks. After the presentation there was a time for questions, several people prayed for the project, and everyone had a soda while they talked.
That evening the Ebys invited people over to their house for a light dinner.

One quick note..."Darlene Eby, you rock!" I told her that and then we did the whole fist-punch thing that baseball players do when they go into the dug out after hitting a home run. Her hospitality was amazing the whole week and she was also great to talk to. My favorite quote of hers, in reference to a discussion our team had on Ephesians 5:22-33, was, "It's not old school, it's biblical!"

Well, I wanted to get some sort of description up here and I think this is where I’ll stop for now. We took Monday off as a “tourist day” which I’ll describe a little bit later. Also, I want to share a little bit more of what I learned on the trip and why I’m so excited about the work of Westminster, but that will have to wait for another day.

A Visit to a Local School

On Monday, October 9, I had a holiday from school. Uganda celebrated its “Independence from Dependence (England),” to quote our Pastor. Pam Sinclair, a missionary here with MTW (Mission to the World) took me and several other girls to visit an elementary school across town that was started in a community with a high percentage of orphans. The children, despite having a day off from school, attended school anyway because they knew we were visiting. We were rather overwhelmed and felt almost like celebrities when 200 children showed up to see us, many of which did not even attend the school (they just heard we were coming!)


The school, Kawempe Community Nursery School, was very bleak, consisting of dirty, cement floors adn walls, crude benches for desk, and tiny, open windows. On a typical school day, about thirty children are crammed into each tiny room. The children, ranging from ages 3-12, were so excited to see us. They all wanted to touch, hug, and hold our hands. I even had children “petting” my arms! They drew us pictures on newsprint torn in half with colored pencils and wrote about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Doctors and teachers were the most popular. One little boy wrote, “If I grow up I want to be a conductor.” (Someone who takes the money on a taxi.) The fact that he knows he has a chance of not making it to adulthood is heart wrenching to me. I had never heard a child say “If I grow up…” It’s always “When I grow up…”


We sang with the children outside (where there was a lovely breeze!) Paul, a Ugandan teacher from Heritage, came with us and helped lead the children in songs in their first language, Luganda. It was so cute to hear them sing, my favorite was a song about a Mango tree. We brought cupcakes for the kids that had to be split in ½ and some into ¼ so each child could be served. Sodas were also handed out to all the children they’re only 30 cents a bottle here!


Pam is organizing the collection of “Love Boxes” for the many orphans and poor children in this community. Some People/Churches in the states are helping to raise money, along with Heritage, to collect clothes, socks, shoes, medicine, school supplies and other basic necessities to be boxed up and given to these children for Christmas. Boxes will also be taken up to an orphanage in Gulu, where the LRA rebels have displaced many children. I will post more information soon on how/where to give money to help with the Love Boxes if you’re interested. (Unfortunately supplies are way too expensive to ship over here from the states!) There are so many precious children here in need of the very basics, including the gospel of Jesus Christ. We pray that we can make a difference and share his love with just a few!

Westminster Theological College

At last, the project trip is here!

I’m excited to share with everyone that my fall eMi project trip begins today. I’ve been looking forward to this trip since May or June or whenever I saw that eMi was partnering with a Reformed college in Uganda. As soon as I saw the project listed on the eMi USA homepage, I did a Google search for the local pastor to learn as much about the ministry as possible. If you’re interested, you can read what I did here.

A major problem in Uganda is the lack of qualified pastors for the local churches. “Operation World” reports this, along with the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard and seen. For instance, one of our local staff members was told in her church that if a Christian commits a sin and then dies, they’ll go to hell. Straight, simple, and wrong. Last week sometime I met with an evangelist named David (incidentally, we were introduced to each other solely because his brother, Wilberforce, thought that two people with the same name should meet ). Anyway, I met David at his house and the few books I saw were those written by some folks generally considered to be theologically misleading (Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland). I hope to meet with him again and discuss the Bible, find out more about what he believes, and share with him some of the problems I see with his books.

I think that it would be helpful to describe the larger Ugandan Presbyterian context that Westminster will serve. And I know that Trevor, Tyler and several other PCA/CPCers are reading this and leap with excitement over the very word “Presbyterian.” So a quick background, which I’m taking from the application eMi received from Westminster:

The Presbyterian Church in Uganda started in 1979 after the Tanzanian army succeeded in dislodging Amin’s reign of terror. It started as a small congregation aiming to fulfill Christ’s message of going to the whole world and preaching the Gospel. The founder of the PCU was Rev. Dr. Kefa Sempangi, who carefully studied the Reformed faith. The PCU has established more than 40 organized churches and more than 15,000 members.

A quick note about the Ugandan school system before going on…this little chart was described to me by Semei, our office manager who is Ugandan. It’s the best approximation I’ve been able to come up with:

Uganda America
Nursery School ~ Day Care
Primary School ~ Elementary School
Secondary School ~ Middle School/Junior High
College (O level) ~ High School Underclassmen
College (A level) ~ High School Upperclassmen
University ~ 4 Year College/University

Westminster is currently called Westminster Theological College, meaning that it is somewhat comparable to an American high school. They are fully operational and have ~40 students currently enrolled (this number is a guess). They desire that their students become both pastors in local churches as well as Christian leaders in society. Part of their vision for accomplishing this work is by developing Bachelor and Master level programs for approximately 300 students. Westminster currently owns ten acre and six acre plots of land and desires to develop these properties for their campus. And this is where eMi comes in…

Our team of volunteers will meet with the Westminster folks this week to discuss the vision and master plan for the campus. Here’s a quick breakdown of those involved:

Emma-Dean of WTC and pastor at Zana Community Presbyterian Church
Fred-A local pastor
Dave-An American faculty member at WTC
Bruce-An American faculty member at WTC

Kevin-A volunteer civil engineer from the US
Gene-A volunteer architect from the US
Kathryn-A volunteer architect from the US

Chad- The eMi East Africa director, civil engineer, and Project Leader
John-An eMi construction management intern
Me-An eMi architectural engineering intern

The volunteers will arrive in Uganda later tonight, and then we’ll all meet with the ministry tomorrow after visiting Zana Church. The rest of the week will be spent surveying the plots, developing drawings, and praying for much wisdom. I know that my responsibilities will be to participate in the master planning/building design meetings and helping out with structural issues (no worries here folks, it’s all single story…I think).

I actually hoped to write a bit more but I need to do a couple of other things before I leave in a few hours, namely, pack my bag. Look for a follow-up report in a couple of weeks with more pictures and an update of how the trip went. For those praying for us, please keep this trip in mind, particularly:
1) That our team would be able to provide Westminster with the design help they need
2) That the grace and love of Christ may be furthered in Uganda as a result of our work

And you may be wondering…Amanda will be spending the week with Shanthi (Chad’s wife). They just adopted two children (ages 2 and 4) in addition to their two biological children (ages 6 and 8). She’s excited to help out over there after school.

An Update from David

I’m aware I haven’t described at all what my work with Engineering Ministries has consisted of yet. Before I describe some of my work, I want to explain a little about why I haven’t and what I’ve learned in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss my lack posting because it seems to take at least a couple of hours, if not more, but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is a bit more personal.

For a while, I’ve felt the things I’ve been doing here aren’t really what our supporters thought I would be doing. In fact, some of the things I’ve done so far aren’t really what I thought I would be doing. These two ideas made it easy for me to not want to describe my work. I haven’t created glamorous renderings of a new school. I haven’t designed a structural system to protect children at an orphanage. I haven’t engineered a water system to provide drinking water to an unreached tribe. I don’t even have a touching, sentimental, National Geographic-quality picture of me with African children.

A couple of weeks ago I was telling Chad, the eMi EA director, that I got jealous of my friend John (see link to the left). John has been able to visit a project sites in western Uganda and in Kenya, see the locally-famous Rwenzori Mountains, stay in the Rift Valley, and even interact with the Massai. Now that’s adventurous. That’s what I want to do. And then I realized I was thinking, “That’s what I want to do.” Somewhere in this mess of jealousy and self-pity I remembered that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And this is exactly opposite of how I sometimes think about my time here. I’m often prone to think about what I’ll enjoy most instead of what I can do to help. So for those out there praying for us, you can specifically pray that my attitude will be continually molded by the grace of God to desire serving others versus seeking my own gain.

With those things in mind, I want to share with you a little about what I’ve been doing. Before I do that, I should describe AutoCAD very briefly for people who aren’t aware of it since I’ll refer to it frequently. AutoCAD is a computer program architects and engineers use to transform their ideas and calculations into drawings (which used to be called “blueprints”) that construction companies use for building. It’s like a gigantic piece of digital paper where I can draw lines, shapes, and patterns with varying degrees of thickness and on different layers before adding dimensions and notes. Best of all, I can make changes without wearing through a piece of real paper with an eraser. Onward…

So far I’ve worked on two different projects making drawing changes. Both of these projects were at the 95% percent completion level but needed final edits since the previous group of interns wasn’t able to finish them. Unfortunately, making these changes has been somewhat tedious and frustrating because some of the drawings were poorly drafted from the beginning. When I say “poorly drafted” I mean that certain lines or shapes get drawn on the wrong layer (or one of a slew of other problems). For instance, I had to change some railing from “Extra Fine” to “Fine” so it would show up properly when printed. This should have taken one minute to change 12 or 16 different objects. However, the person originally drew it incorrectly, so it ended up taking 20 or 25 minutes to edit.

Anyway, the drawings were both for great ministries. The first group, New Life Ministries, has a babies’ home for 11 children, a nursery/primary school with 230 students, a vocational training center for unwed teenage mothers, and a training center which host groups like Compassion International, World Vision, and Food for the Hungry. eMi helped this ministry design a 1.8 acre site for a primary school and an 8.6 acre site for a secondary school (needed to educate the students finishing their primary school).

Mto Moyoni was the second project to which I contributed. This ministry was started by a Dutch lady who has been robbed at gunpoint, shot and accused of being a rebel leader and political agitator. She started a “restoration ministry” for other Christians enduring difficulties in their ministry. eMi surveyed and master-planned three sites in close proximity to each other and developed detailed fundraising documents for one of these plots. My part in both of these projects was really quite small, but I’m grateful to have learned about them and contributed anyway.

I’ve also had the task of developing our eMi EA AutoCAD standards. Interns at eMi, and apparently universally, do a lot of the drafting work, but unfortunately come in with varying levels (mostly little-to-none) of AutoCAD experience. So part of my time has been spent adapting and adding to a manual from my dad’s company to help future interns draft more effectively. The hope is that when changes do need to be made in the future, they’ll only take one minute, instead of 20 or 25, if they’re drawn correctly from the beginning. The eMi architect, Steve, estimated that the poor drafting practices led to an additional 20 hours of work during the crunch time of a recent project. Hopefully my work will enable future interns to learn AutoCAD quickly and correctly.

It’s 9:35 PM right now, which does in fact confirm that blogging can take a considerable portion of someone’s life. Amanda’s ready to go to sleep so I won’t be able to describe my upcoming project trip tonight, so please check back before the weekend for another post about what I’ll be doing between October 7-15.

(I’m not sure who drew the renderings I’ve included above, but if you are really interested I can find out for you. Incidentally, the first drawing is the 8.6 acre New Life site and the second is a view of Mto Moyoni's three plots)