on to gulu

sunday (july 19th for those keeping track)

we went to our last service at University Christian Fellowship, an awesome church in Kampala that Jesse and Andrea got connected with. this church is rockin — fantastic worship with powerful preaching right from scripture. doesn’t get much better than that!

after the service, we piled back into the van and headed off towards gulu. 5-hour car ride. 15 people. 15 passenger van. no leg room and everyone’s bags packed in between our legs in the non-existent leg room. awesome!

most of the ride i spent just watching the scenery and trying to take pictures while hanging out the window. the highlight of the 5 hour trip was the speed bump zone where Uganda deemed it a smart idea to lay down speed bumps every 20 feet to keep the speed down of cars on a newly paved road. i believe it was just over 200 speed bumps later and we finally were back on normal road. yes the first 30 bumps we were laughing but by the 80/90 mark no one was laughing…

around the 3-hour mark, we stopped at a gas station to get out and rest for a moment, fill up on gas. i started feeling really tired and felt a headache coming on. i didn’t really say much about it. just drank water and kept hanging out the window. as we drew closer to adak village (IDP camp right outside of Gulu), i started feeling really “heavy.” something almost seemed to be in the air, pushing down on me. it wasn’t until a couple days later that i realized that i was feeling the “spiritual weight” of the war-torn area. what we were driving into was an area that had thousands upon thousands of displaced persons, almost all being tragically affected by the violence of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army).

i was excited to get to adak and spend time in the village there. i really wanted to experience life in these camps and knew that what i would experience that would change me, break me. when we arrived, there were mixed emotions. all of a sudden, we are in a completely different world than Kampala. language barrier, sadness, raw poverty, oppression – both physical and spiritual.

we walked around the camp within the first hour of getting there just to get a feel for what we’d be a part of for the next 3 days. in all honesty, i did not enjoy the first tour of the camp. there was very little interaction with the people there no matter how hard we tried. you would hear a giggle but by the time you turned to see where it came from, it was gone. same thing with smiles. you’d see one but then it was gone.

the IDP camp in adak was filled with spiritual warfare and we were only seeing the beginning of it. this had been going on for 20 years and over the next couple days, i would feel a small dose of spiritual attacks that are a daily occurrence here.