This is final installment in 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.

Uganda was a low point in the program for many people. For the longest time I hated the week I spent going door to door until I realized how much it's helped me.

You know the tired old saying about building character? Well this built no end of character, and also helped shape many views of mine on Christianity and missions work.

In one week I learned vast amounts about myself. I learned just how I react when I am stressed and the situation is going out of control, and I also learned how I can best cope. Looking back that week was truly invaluable. It's never enjoyable to be pushed to the edge, but a lot of good can come from it.

Through first hand experience I developed my views on evangelism, poverty, and aid. The trip raised many questions that I wasn't initially able to answer, but over time I have been able to wrestle with them and find some answers.

Sadly it should be noted that not everyone on the trip has had something positive come out of their experiences. Some people were simply pushed too far and couldn't cope. To my knowledge there is at least one person who left the church and didn't look back, which it truly unfortunate.

This is the chance that was taken when we were sent to Uganda - a week that looking back could be summarized as 'It could make you, or break you.'

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.

Probably this most important thing that came out of the trip to Uganda fell under the category of "knowing myself".

Everyone was struggling with many of the same questions that I was and the strange culture did not help at all. Most people in my group were emotional wrecks. We would be grumpy, cagey, and depressed over our situation. The evenings and nights back at the hostel were desperate times. You wanted to leave, but you couldn't. You wanted to sleep, but you couldn't. We learned about ourselves by being pushed right to our limits.

The first nights were especially bad. Kampala had rolling brownouts at the time, so the evenings were spent sitting in the dorm with the lights flickering on and off.

One night I had an idea. I figured that if I set my digital camera on a tripod doing a long exposure, the flickering lights would be the same as doing a multiple exposure picture with film. Easy, in-camera trick photography.

Eventually the guys of the group wandered into the room and asked me what I was doing. I explained the technique to them and showed them a few dismal looking pictures. They thought it was interesting and wanted to join in. Eventually we started using flashlights for light and the results were excellent. This was a terrific mood lifter for all of us since we were able to forget about our situation for a little while and focus on something else.

After that night, we all started coping better. Generally we turned to absurdity to get us through the week. Justin bought a crucifix and attacked people with a bad southern evangelist impression as they walked by. We started dueling with patio chairs in our off time, wedgies were exchanged, and I have many pictures that I simply cannot explain. Basically we figured out how to have fun even when pushed to our limits.

An issue I struggled with was the expected attire. As I mentioned previously Christian were expected to wear collared shirts, nice pants and have a conservative haircut. I wasn't too pleased with this, but also after all we had been through in that week of evangelism, I didn't want to identify with that image of what a Christian was. My hair was getting long and I needed to get a haircut so I decided to get a mohawk.

I told the guys and they were pleased to help. The only cutting implement available was a battery operated beard trimmer from Joe, but it worked in a pinch. We were able to get half of my head done before the batteries died. When it came time to charge the batteries we plugged it into the wall and immediately smelled ozone. I guess we forgot about the difference between 240 volts and 120 volts.

Needless to say I wasn't happy since my hair looked rather odd. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and remembered hat there was a hair salon in the lower level of the building, which would likely have a hair trimmer. Thankfully they let us borrow it and my mohawk was completed. A couple days later it was time to leave Uganda.

When it was time to return to South Africa everyone was ecstatic. I found myself surprisingly happy to be re-entering South Africa and going through customs again. I never thought a foreign border would look as welcoming as it did that day, but it just felt so good to be back in a country I understood.

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

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.

I had numerous issues with my time spent doing door to door evangelism and they continue to influence me today.

One thing that annoyed me was the apparent desire of our sponsoring organization to convert as many people as possible. We were asked to keep a count of how many people converted and basically everything seemed to revolve around the numbers. I feel that evangelism should be relationship centered, so the idea of jumping into a foreign country, converting as many people as possible, then leaving seems so wrong to me.

Having our testimonies altered completely devalued them. It felt like someone took my faith story, my personal experience, and turned it into a sales pitch. "How can we sell this even better?" must have been the question they were asking themselves when printing our testimonies. It caused me to lose all my trust in the organization that was sponsoring the evangelism.

The biggest issue I faced was based in the sheer number of people who converted. As a rough guess, ninety percent of people I talked to converted to Christianity. This number is so huge that I struggled daily with wondering what these people were thinking.

Religion is a big deal and not something to be entered into lightly. Why so many people would decide to take up Christianity after only a fifteen minute conversion with me was a complete mystery. It didn't feel like the people I met knew the weight of their decision or what it implied and entailed. I felt like I was just shoving my religion down people's throats without any concern to their preexisting belief systems.

The questions dogged me. Perhaps people thought that if they converted, they would become wealthy like me. What if they were simply being polite and this was the most expedient way of getting rid of me? I'll never really know.

The few people that still stand out and I remember are those that seemed sincere in their interest in Christianity. Those few people greatly helped me get through the day. I also really enjoyed encountering Muslims since I could actually have a reasoned discussion with them about faith. I never converted any Muslims, but it was a relief to finally find someone who would question my beliefs and decide to keep their own.

Another minor issue I had was the required attire. It is my personal belief that you can be Christian regardless of what clothing you wear, but in Uganda we were asked to wear shirts with collars and no t-shirts. This was because good Christians wear nice clothing and have a conservative haircut in Uganda. This failed to impress me to say the least.

The times I was asked to perform a healing and exorcism had their own issues.

The healing I was okay with since you just need to have faith, pray, and wait and see. The person had chronic malaria and really needed to see a doctor, but I suppose some prayer can't hurt.

For the exorcism I really struggled with what everyone was expecting me to do. I was called on to exorcise a young boy who had apparently been disrespectful to his parents. To me this is a sign of adolescence, not demonic possession.

I had the feeling that everyone was expecting a big show, but I don't think that yelling and shouting is required or even justified. What I ended up doing was praying quietly over the boy, but in truth my prayer was more about his being headstrong than casting out any demons.

Overall this week raised a lot of good questions in my mind about Christianity and how I feel about it. I disagreed with nearly everything I was called upon to do that week, but it helped me get to a place where I could starting thinking issues through for myself.

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

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.

The next six days were the main component of the trip - door to door evangelism. We went out for six days, spending two days each helping three churches in the outskirts of Kampala.

We would be sent in pairs to churches every morning and would be sent out from the church individually with our guides. Immediately we noticed that things weren't as we expected them to be.

There was a running problem in that year's trip in which everywhere we went people thought we were experts in the field that we were helping in. When we helped at a school in Alexandra, everyone thought we were teachers. When we planted gardens in Cape Town, everyone thought we were farmers. Lastly, when we did door to door evangelism, everyone thought we were pastors.

The confusion about our vocation lead to a number of issues, one of which was that we weren't simply going to be letting our translator do the talking since our translators were under the impression that it was our job to talk. So we ended up going from being the 'door openers' Wally had talked about to being full blown evangelists.

Unfortunately the confusion about our training didn't stop there. Numerous people from my group were asked to deliver a sermon as guests at one of the churches they had helped. For those who have never enjoyed a Ugandan style sermon, you should know that a short one clocks in at an hour. If you're lucky.

I didn't have that much trouble politely saying "No" or more typically, inventing a hundred excuses which would keep me from speaking at a church. My fellow group members had a harder time resisting these invites and I know several who literally spent the next Sunday morning hiding in bed from the pastors who came to collect them and bring them to their church.

Doing all the evangelism ourselves wasn't what we signed up for, but there wasn't anything we could do about it at this point in time, so we just went along with it. We spent our days walking through the outskirts of Kampala reading our testimony / tracts to people and converting them to the faith.

Twice I had the opportunity to do something other than just evangelize. I guess the word got around that there was a North American pastor in the neighborhood since I got requests to perform a faith healing and an exorcism. I prayed over both of the people, but I had doubts in my mind concerning what my translator was expecting me to do.

Another problem we had was that the translators provided to us from the local church had often never attended the church in question or knew the area so we frequently got lost. Getting lost in a foreign country is never fun but under these circumstances it was simply horrible.

One day I was waiting at a church for Kimbo to show up so that we could eat lunch together. She was late by half an hour and returned crying since she and her translator had been lost. It happened to be her birthday and the stress of the week caught up with her in that moment. When she came into the room she sat on a bench at the back of the room. At this point I realized that I had dreamed about this happening a couple months beforehand. I did my best to comfort her and desperately tried to remember what happened next in the dream to give me some indication of what to do.

Everything continued to be stressful and weird as the week went on. Whereas we had become completely accustomed to the South African culture, the Ugandan culture provided no end of confusion and stress for us. Starting from the first day I was counting down the days until we went "home" and returned to South Africa.

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

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.