Kisses from Katie

by Katie J. Davis

  Things that seemed so simple were insanely challenging in my new environment. For example, I didn’t have any idea how to prepare a freshly caught fish for dinner or what was a fair price for a pineapple in the local market, so someone had to tell me. I also had no idea how to prepare fresh beans, a Ugandan staple, for dinner. In America, I simply bought a can of beans at a grocery store, emptied them into a pot on the stove, and ate them several minutes later. This is not the way to cook beans that don’t come out of a can! “Mama Cook,” the woman who prepared meals at the orphanage, had told me I needed to boil the beans, and that sounded easy enough. I had no idea how long the boiling of fresh beans could take, so I put the pot on the fire around six the first night I cooked them, fully expecting to eat at seven. They were finally ready around midnight.

  While the orphanage I was living at had electricity, it rarely worked. The power often went out for days or weeks at a time. Many of my nights were spent sitting in my tiny room with a candle handwriting 138 worksheets for the next day’s school lessons, since there was no such thing as a copy machine where I was staying.

  Many times, as I looked at the candle illuminating my room on those dark and sometimes lonely nights, He reminded me that I could light candles in the hearts of others as long as I let Him fill my heart first. He reminded me that I was indeed the light of the world and I was to shine before those around me so that they would glorify Him (see Matthew 5:14). In the soft glow of candlelight one black night in my room, I opened my journal and began to write:

  My candle is lit; I am on fire for God, for this place, for these people. My purpose here is to spread His light. One candle can light up my entire room. Jesus can light up this entire nation, and my flame can be a part of that. I am blown away that my God, who could do this all by Himself, would choose to let me be a little part of it.

  I spent many nights without power in the place where I lived, and yet that’s where I saw the power of one life, one candle in one woman’s heart.

  Everything seemed to be such a paradox: One minute, I was squatting over a pit latrine in the middle of a village, pressing my lips tight together to avoid the rancid smell and keep giant flies and cockroaches from flying into my mouth, and the next I would be staring out over the Nile River, deeply inhaling the fresh breeze. Materially speaking, the people who began to fill my life were the poorest I had ever met and yet they overflowed with the riches of the heart. They lived in houses of sticks or stones and mud; they slept on hard dirt floors. But they did not blame God for this or ask Him for more. They knew their circumstances were due to the brokenness of this world and they simply praised Jesus for keeping them alive through it all. They believed in His goodness. They lived with love and passion, caring for one another and for me and deeply appreciating the simplest gifts life had to offer: the happy giggles of children, the smile and warm greeting of a friend, the beauty that surrounded them, a chance to work when possible, a helping hand when needed most.

  In my mind, these people had every reason to be despondent and downcast, but they were the most joyful human beings I could imagine. I learned so much from them as they made my frustrations seem small and petty and taught me just to rejoice in the simple pleasures God had surrounded me with. Once I could do this, I embraced extreme exhilaration; I felt closer to God, to myself, and to the people and more alive than ever before.

  Through all the challenges and contradictions and through the gracious people all around me, God was opening my eyes to a whole new world and way of living and most important to a whole new way of living out the Gospel. Every day I have spent in Uganda has been beautifully overwhelming; everywhere I have looked, raw, filthy, human need and brokenness have been on display, begging for someone to meet them, fix them. And even though I realize I cannot always mend or meet, I can enter in. I can enter into someone’s pain and sit with them and know. This is Jesus. Not that He apologizes for the hard and the hurt, but that He enters in, He comes with us to the hard places. And so I continue to enter.

  As I continued to enter the lives of new friends God had given me and walk in the midst of a new culture, I realized that He was using the contradictions that surrounded me to change my point of view. In the beginning, I would have described it as God turning my world upside down, but now I know that He was actually turning it right side up! I thought of the life I left behind, in which I would have easily dropped $100 on a pair of shoes. Now I looked around and realized that $100 could provide a starving family with food for months. I thought of how, after a long, hard day in my previous life, I would have crashed on the couch with a pint of ice cream, a good sappy movie, and my closest girlfriends. Here, at the end of a long, hard day, there was nothing to do but cry out to Jesus for the strength to go on.

  I loved my new life. It was wonderful in so many ways, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the comforts and the people of my old one desperately. My human flesh still sometimes wanted to go to the mall and spend a ridiculous amount of money on a cute pair of shoes. Sometimes I wanted to sit on my mom’s kitchen counter chatting with my friends and eating brownies. Sometimes I just wanted to turn off my brain and watch mindless television. I wanted to go on dates with my boyfriend. Sometimes I wanted to hop into my convertible, go to the grocery store, and pick out any kind of food that my heart desired. Most days, I wished I could wake up under my down comforter in a house with my loving family, not all by myself. Sometimes I just wished I could hang out with my little brother and his buddies, eating junk food and laughing late into the night. Sometimes I wanted to spend hours upon hours talking with my best friends about boys and fashion and school and life. I wanted to go to the gym; I wanted my hair to look nice; I wanted to be allowed to wear jeans. I wanted to be a normal teenager living in America, sometimes.

  But I wanted other things more. All the time. I wanted to be spiritually and emotionally filled every day of my life. I wanted to be loved and cuddled by a hundred children and never go a day without laughing. I wanted to wake up to a rooster’s crow and open my eyes to see lush green trees that seemed to pulse with life against a piercing blue sky and the rusty red soil of Uganda. I wanted to be challenged endlessly; I wanted to be learning and growing every minute. I wanted to be taught by those I teach, and I wanted to share God’s love with people who otherwise might not know it. I wanted to work so hard that I ended every day filthy and too tired to move. I wanted to feel needed, important, and used by the Lord. I wanted to make some kind of difference, no matter how small, and I wanted to follow the calling God had placed on my heart. I wanted to give my life away, to serve the Lord with each breath, each second. At the end of the day, no matter how hard, I wanted to be right here in Uganda.

  Opportunities to make someone else’s life better were so much more attractive to me than the thought of the comforts I once knew. The longer I stayed, the more I realized that deep fulfillment had begun to swallow my every frustration. No matter how many contradictions I struggled with, how difficult certain situations were, no matter how lonely I got, no matter how many tears I cried, one truth remained firmly grounded in my heart: I was in the center of God’s will; I was doing what I was created to do.

  ONE DAY . . .

  Tuesday, October 23, 2007

  It is pouring. It is freezing. The power has been off for days and the water lines are down. Yet I stand in the middle of twenty-five children praising and thanking the Lord. Our usual outside worship has been taken indoors due to the storm, so instead of praying together, the children are praying in their individual rooms. I am in the primary boys’ room, which is home to twenty-five boys ages six to ten. I have never seen anyone so alive with love for their Maker. Some stand with their hands in the air. Others, like me, overwhelmed with awe, have fallen to their knees on the cold cement floor. The beautiful sound of twenty-six voices lifted in prayer drowns out the beating of the rain on the tin roof.

  God is so in this moment; I feel so full of His love that my heart threatens to b
urst. This is not something I can explain. This is not something words can capture. This feeling is bigger. The splendor of God in this room takes my breath away. We all pray out loud and our voices mix into one, all different words, but the same message: Thank you. Thank you.

  At first glance, it would be easy to feel sorry for these little boys. Their clothes are tattered; they sleep on old, dirty mattresses; they walk to school barefoot in the rain. They have no electricity, no running water, and it is raining so hard that the whole compound has become a muddy swamp. But I should not pity these children. In fact, I should envy them. At six years old, these children know what it is to be filled with the Holy Spirit. These children know the greatness, the wonder of our God.

  I’ve had people ask me why I think Africa is so impoverished, but these children are not poor. I, as a person who grew up wealthy, am. I put value in things. These children, having no things, put value in God. I put my trust in relationships; these children, having already seen relationships fail, put their trust in the Lord. This nation is blessed beyond any place, any people I have ever encountered. God has not forgotten them. In fact, I believe He has loved them just a little bit extra.

  I sit here freezing and wet in this pitch-black room as the rain beats on the roof, and God is so close I feel I can touch Him. My deepest prayer is that I could know the Lord as well as the first grader next to me. All my senses are full of His greatness. God’s glory has fallen down into this place and is soaking us even deeper than the rain. I never ever want to be dry.

  3

  ENOUGH TO GO AROUND

  As the overwhelming contradictions became more and more apparent to me, they also began to bother me in a way I could no longer ignore.

  The plight of people had posed a problem for me for as long as I could remember. Somehow, as a young child, I was aware that there was a world beyond the comfort of my own neighborhood. My parents had taught me that my family and I, and the people around us, were some of the “blessed ones.” I understood that people all over the world were hungry and poorly clothed and living in ramshackle huts or under bridges. And these realities broke my heart.

  Now the human tragedy that had captured my attention as a child was weighing on my heart in a greater way. The people who had once been anonymous in their suffering were now my friends.

  When I thought about the children, these little ones who were my students and my new friends, and those back in America, the contrasts were unimaginable. For example, I remembered many years of the first day of school. As I entered each new grade, my parents bought me a brand-new “back-to-school” outfit. I had new school supplies, every item on a typically extensive list from my teacher. I was so excited to take them to school! But what I loved most was a new box of crayons—perfectly shaped points, with nice paper wrappers, in every color I could imagine. For a young schoolgirl, new crayons were bliss.

  In the United States, the back-to-school season is a retail event—just as much as Easter or Halloween. Stores are filled with brightly colored notebooks, backpacks and lunch boxes, and stacks of pens and pencils and paper. All but the least fortunate students have a significant stash of new belongings with which to start school each year. But in Uganda, a tablet is expensive. A new pen or pencil is a treasure. Many children don’t get excited about going to school because even if they have the money for school fees, they may not be able to buy their supplies.

  As I thought about the discrepancies between the culture I came from and the one I now lived in, I could not stop thinking about my life and the lives of many of my friends in the States—and being appalled by our luxuries when people on our same planet were living in such poverty and need. I began to realize huge flaws and gaps in my faith, a wide chasm between what I proclaimed to believe and how I was actually living.

  I had to do something.

  I didn’t know what to do. In fact, I didn’t know much at all, but I quickly became convinced that I could not simply live in a room in an orphanage in Uganda and teach kindergarten. As much as I enjoyed what I was doing, I had to do more to help the people around me.

  There were so many needs to be filled, so many issues to be addressed. There’s more HIV than medicine to treat it: There’s a growing population of children who need a warm bed and a hot meal because their parents have died; there’s a need for basic education in matters of hygiene and sexual behavior, education that could reduce disease and improve the quality of everyday life. I could have chosen anything and done something about it—and that would have helped. But I wanted to be strategic, and I wanted to do something with the power to bring significant, long-term, positive change to individuals, families, and the village where I lived.

  I remember the day well. With such great pride the tiny, barefoot and bald, coffee bean–colored little girl showed me, her teacher, the closet-sized room she calls home. With great excitement she introduced her new mzungu (white) teacher to her mother who, upon seeing a white person for the first time, shrieked with glee and examined me closely. Immediately a feast of rice and matoke (boiled, unripe plantains), Ugandan staples and probably all this family had to eat for the day, was prepared. A younger sibling ran to get a mat woven out of banana fibers for the teacher to sit on, but everyone else sat on the dirt floor. The family did not apologize for the fact that there was no table or chairs for the meal, or the fact that all seven of us could hardly fit comfortably in the house. They fed me like a queen and wished they could give me something more.

  They rejoiced in what the Lord had given them, this tiny house and a few kilograms of food for the day, and they were happy to share. I wondered what could happen if the rich of the world would share with the poor the way this darling family had shared with me: without holding back, giving their all and believing that the Lord would provide more as needed. I was learning so much from my students. I was learning from these people who seemed to have nothing and yet had everything they needed in their hearts full of trust and grace.

  Every day after school, I walked my kindergarten students home, just as I had walked that little girl home on that particular day. Day after day, I witnessed poverty that was unimaginable. Hungry, naked, fly-covered children lay in the dirt crying for a mother who would never come because HIV had taken her life. I met parents who made cakes of mud and salt to fill their children’s bellies because drought made it impossible to grow food. I met grandmothers who worked from before the sun came up until long after it disappeared beyond the horizon to find enough food for the eight orphaned children they had been left to care for.

  As I walked my students home, I also met other children along the way, school-age boys and girls who, for some reason, were not attending classes. I saw others who had come to school for the first few weeks and not returned. In the limited Luganda I had picked up, I tried to ask these children why they would not attend school. What I learned was shocking to me: Their guardians, be it an aunt or uncle, mother, father, or grandparent, could not afford the mere US $20 the school charged to cover operating costs for a three-month term.

  I learned that sending children to school is one of the greatest living expenses a Ugandan family has, and most families have multiple children. School fees far exceed, by about four times, the cost of water or electricity, which most families do without anyway. These realities apply to children who have parents; many children don’t, so going to school is not even a possibility for them. I thought about these things as I lay in bed at night exhausted, devastated, and angry that people were living (and dying) like this while I had lived such an extravagant life for the past eighteen years. As abject poverty confronted me every day, I felt deeply convicted about one thing: God did not make too many people and not enough resources to go around. Because we were living in His world, there had to be a solution.

  Everywhere I looked in the Bible, from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of Revelation, people who believe in God are supposed to share with the poor. Helping the poor is not something God asks H
is people to do; it is something that, throughout all generations, He instructs us to do. Several passages settled into my heart in a weighty, urgent way as I read them over and over again. Every time I read these words, I came to the same conclusion: God wanted me to help the people around me who needed help. This is why His Word says in Deuteronomy 24:19–22:

  When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over to the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.

  And this is why, when people who had known Jesus went about establishing His church on earth, they emphasized the fact that God’s people are to be generous and kind to others, so no one suffers need or lack. The Book of Acts makes this plain (2:44–45; 4:32–35):

  All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. All the believers were in one heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.