Romans and batteries

Well, it’s been a busy week so far…but in a good, productive kind of way! Monday and Tuesday of this week I was doing an overview of Paul’s epistle to the Romans with the students at Living Word. This involved teaching from 09:30 – 16:30 both days and left me simultaneously drained and invigorated! I think I’m beginning (he says, tentatively) to understand the Christian culture here and see just how different it is both from the culture in the UK and also from what I had expected. Much rumination is ongoing, but it was fascinating to teach Romans intensively into this context and see the ways in which students reacted and the questions they asked.

In amongst that, amusingly, we had some car issues that gave a wonderful insight into the Ugandan way of doing things! Every morning this week so far, the car has failed to start. In the UK, I know what to do…either you ask a friendly neighbour for a jump start or you call the AA. Here, the process is as follows:

1)        You get a boda (motorbike tazi) to a local petrol station

2)        They tell you where the nearest man with a battery is

3)        You continue on the boda to aforementioned man

4)        You add him to the boda with his battery and head back to the car

5)        He attaches his battery to yours and kicks the car into action

Now, given that today was the third day that this had happened, I decided we needed to test the battery. Sadly, the battery man said that his battery testing machine had been borrowed by someone but that he would get it back. He managed this by early afternoon and so I headed up to his workshop. He attached the tester to our battery, it lit up brightly and then promptly stopped working. I asked whether there might be anyone…anyone at all who might have a multimeter in the local area…he looked very doubtful, rang someone, spoke to them in Luganda, and then shook his head. ‘How about your battery charger?’, I suggested, ‘surely that will at least tell us the voltage of the battery’? He pointed towards the charger and so I went to have a look. I’ve never seen anything like it…it was like a 1960s computer…full of dials and switches but with about as much chance of telling us the voltage of a battery as the goat who grazes on our road. In the end, he suggested we replace the terminals on our battery and see if that helps…for the princely sum of £2.40. More updates soon!

Other updates include Theo’s birthday trip to the zoo ‘behind the scenes’ (pictures below) and a video from Zoe about some new members of our community!

(Zoe had made the whole video before we realised it would be watermarked...her next videography attempt will be using a different software that's actually free - any windows-based recommendations appreciated!)