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.