This is part of a multi-post series on the week I spent in Uganda doing door to door evangelism. Click here to read all posts in this series.

It is worth repeating that this was the first year that the School of Discipleship went to South Africa so not everything worked smoothly. When it was time to leave for Uganda we departed from Umtata in the evening and attempted to drive through the night to Johannesburg to catch our flight (map of route).

The problem was that our bus driver started to get rather sleepy on this long overnight drive. To his credit, he wisely decided to pull over at a service station to catch some sleep.

The problem was now finding a place to sleep. The bus itself was a sauna full of bodies, but there wasn't anywhere else to go. Luckily some of us found a nice patch of grass near the gas pumps and managed to catch some sleep after reciting the litany "SoD is hell, we sleep at Shell" a few times. Others were less lucky and hung about the station for the long hours until daylight.

I woke up to the sound of clucking and we found a herd of chickens pecking the ground around us when daylight came. To this day that is one of the strangest, most surreal experiences I've had when waking up.

Once we packed up again we set off for the airport, made our flight and had a lovely and uneventful flight from Johannesburg to Entebbe.

Once we arrived we got off the plane, into the terminal and encountered another surprise. Apparently we needed a visa to get into Uganda and no one had told us about this. The cost to enter Uganda was fifty American dollars per person. We waited around the airport terminal for a while wondering what to do, until the customs officials allowed one person of our group to be escorted to a bank where they withdrew enough funds to cover everyone's visa.

This was another event that further worried us about what was ahead. If we didn't know about the visas, what other horrible surprises lay before us?

Once we left the airport we boarded a minibus that took us to the hostel. Much to our relief the accommodations were taken care of, so we wouldn't need to worry about were to stay.

Once we were at the hostel (map) we unpacked, explored a bit and were handed our testimonies for the upcoming days. The testimonies came in two large packages, one in English and one in Lugandan.

We started to read our testimonies and noticed that they weren't quite what we had written way back in Canada. Mine was basically unaltered except for a few areas that I now forget. One guy from our group, Cory, had his changed to read that before becoming Christian he was disobedient to his parents.

This wasn't what we had written so we were deeply angered that our testimonies had been changed. A testimony is supposed to be something personal, but between using a template format and having it modified we felt violated.

From the impressions we received in reading our own testimonies, things weren't looking up for the coming door to door work.

This story will be continued in two days time, stay tuned.

A few days ago I was talking with my priest and came onto the subject of my time spent in Uganda. Uganda holds a special place in my life since it was arguably one of the worst weeks of my life, but also one of the most important and formative. I've decided that I want to write this story down since it has been so important to me.

This is the beginning of a series of posts that detail my experiences in Uganda and the impact they've had on my life.

In the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003 I participated in Canadian Mennonite University's School of Discipleship program (currently known as Outtatown). The program is a six month study and travel program with the stated motto of "Knowing God, knowing yourself, knowing the world". The first three months are spent in Canada studying and learning, and the second three months are spent in Guatemala or South Africa learning about Spanish or conflict resolution and apartheid.

2002 and 2003 was the first year the program went to South Africa, and I choose Africa since I was most interested in conflict resolution and the history of South Africa. Africa intrigued me to the point where there was little question as to which country I would visit.

Now I've established that I was in South Africa for three months, but how did I find myself in Uganda?

Back when I was in the program it was run by Wally Schmidt. Wally one of the most creative and imaginative people you'll find. What happened was a businessman approached Wally and offered to pay our airfare and lodging if we spend six days in Uganda doing door to door evangelism.

If you know Wally, you know there is no way he could ever turn this down. Basically he was able to detour the trip to central Africa for a week for free - a pretty good deal.

We were told to write our testimonies for translation into Lugandan while we were in Canada and were provided the general format we should follow. Every Christian knows this format. It goes like this; life before faith, conversion experience, life of faith, [bible quote], invitation to become Christian, and [bible quote]. The pre-defined format bothered me a bit, but I played along with it. We finished our testimonies and sent them off for translation.

Uganda slipped from our minds for about three months until we found ourselves in South Africa and a week before the trip. Wally came to explain to us what this trip was going to be all about. He was a gentleman about it, he took us wine tasting, but after the tasting was done he laid down what he knew.

Basically we were told we would be going to Uganda to act as 'door openers'. We would be paired with a local guide who would go with us and read our testimonies while we just stood there and played along. Easy right? He also took the time to explain that he wasn't entirely sure about our food and accommodations but those would be worked out in time. This was not what we wanted to hear at all.

We were already nervous about leaving South Africa, but being told that not all areas of the trip were finalized came as a blow. Never the less we carried on and a week later drove to the airport for the flight to Uganda.

This story will be continued in two days time, stay tuned.

Last night I found out that the commenting system on my blog was broken. It looks like reCAPTCHA and Wordpress were not talking to each other. I've upgraded reCAPTCHA and everything seems to be working again. Let me know if anything is still acting funny.

Girish's kinetic typography assignment just makes me smile.

[flashvideo file=http://www.seancarney.ca/seantv/with-club-sauce.flv image=http://www.seancarney.ca/gallery/display/22390-2/club-sauce.jpg /]

Quote from Arrested Development.