3 Weeks and Counting...
Welcome everyone to the beginning of our trip bloggings during the journey through East Africa during the months of December and January! Our team is pictured in the image above at our recent team dinner. We have many goals during our time spent visiting the good friends in Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania - and one of those is to connect the readers on the blog here to our experiences as we travel.

We've been preparing ourselves by studying the culture and history of the region, and by learning from local voices here in Portland who are involved in AIDS work and ministry in East Africa. We have also spent time in several homes sampling East African food and learning from our hosts.

Kenyan Meal
Our first location was with a Sudanese family living in Portland. Our second meeting was with our Kenya friend Obi and the East African cuisine cooked by my sister - Goat meat, Ugali, Chai, Samosas, Sukuma Wiki, and Chapatis. Most of the food in East Africa is simple and the staple is usually a corn paste called "posho" or "ugali". There is also a heavy Asian influence in the region with Tea, Samosas, and Chapatis worked into the very fabric of the culture.

During the evening Obi shared with us about Kenyan culture and his wife Angela shared about the problem of AIDS in Kenya and her experiences teaching school kids about prevention and treatment.

Rwandan Meal
Our third meeting was this past Saturday. We met at the home of Emmanuel Sitaki, who is a Lahash partner living in Portland . He heads up ERM which ministers to widows and orphans in his home country of Rwanda. He also survived the Genocide in 1994 and is on a personal mission to promote healing through the good news of Christ.

His wife cooked an amazing meal of Rwandan delicacies including cooked bananas and tea with ChaChai spice. Emmanuel shared his story of facing the option of turning over a list of his family's killers to the authorities to have them killed for revenge. "The voice of God won over the voice telling me to take revenge," he told us. "They thought I was crazy to not seek revenge, but I said, 'what is the difference if I killed the people who killed me?' God says 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay'."

We have one more meal to share before our first team takes off on December 11.