From Richard Kinney

The Africa Outreach and Mission was amazing as well as being the most physically demanding trip I have been on. It’s taken me this long to recover and to process to some degree the complete “otherness” of Africa. I have never been in a place so foreign. At the same time there is a powerful basic centrality to the country that makes it easy for me to believe that the Garden of Eden was in Africa and that man developed from there and spread out all over the world.

I began my trip to Africa at 7 a.m. in Atlanta on Monday. I arrived in Kampala, Uganda on Tuesday at 8 p.m. with stops in New York and Amsterdam. After a good nights sleep in a hotel, we started a bus ride to Gulu that ended up lasting about ten hours. The bus had no air conditioning, no toilets, and only stopped for rest stops two times along the way. The main roads of the country have no center line, huge pot holes and who has the right-of-way is determined by fast moving games of chicken with “dodge the pothole” thrown in just to make it interesting. The roads would arbitrarily stop being paved, giving way to red dust that filled our bus with hot, choking clouds and then on to black top again. On the way, a super-double-decker bus shoved our little bus out of the way. This caused an accident involving our bus. A man on a bicycle who was 6 inches too close to us was knocked off his bike by our bus and his sleeve coat caught on the mirror and he was dragged along the road at 40 mph banging into the side of our bus. His hand was about 1 foot from my face as I sat in the front passenger seat of the bus yelling to the driver to stop the bus. We got the bus stopped and the man untangled. We had 3 medical professionals as part of our 100 member team and lots of experienced healers. They looked after him as I counseled the bus driver who was understandably shaken and upset. We got the injured man to the hospital and even though the medical professionals knew for sure that he had a dislocated elbow, wrist and shoulder when we put him on the ambulance, the next morning he only had bruises and a mild concussion: Our first healing miracle.

We finished the trip around 10 p.m. at night where I was told I had to take another bus to another hotel where we were greeted by a lighting storm, pouring rain and a demonized man who threatened us. Being in the worst possible mood, I gave his demons 3 seconds to live and he immediately stopped threatening us and left. The next day we started 6 days of evangelistic meetings and daily outreaches into the bush bringing food, healing, and salvation to people who basically were living stripped of everything except the most basic shelter and food.

Uganda is just one year along in a cease fire of an almost 20 year war with an internal terroristic group called “The Lord’s Resistance Army”. Many people have lost everything. Unspeakable atrocities, rape and kidnapping of children to force them into child soldiers, has been up till now, common place. The people are battered and depressed in many ways. They were glad to see us and saw us as a sign of hope and normalization. The children had only recently stopped coming into town every night from the rural areas and sleeping on the concrete sidewalks in front of the shops to avoid being kidnapped as the city is guarded by soldiers and the rural areas are not. Whole rural villages had moved into the city. They were thatch huts made out of mud. There was a whole village directly across the street from my hotel and out my window I could see people cooking on wood fires, little kids running around naked, and chicken and goats.

Later in the week, we broke into small teams and went into the area churches. There I met a middle aged man who had been 18 years in the bush as a Brigadier General in the terrorist group “The Lord’s Resistance Army” making him directly responsible for thousands of incidences of rape, torture and child-kidnapping. He had repented and come to the Lord. What a repentance! The Lord’s grace covers every sin. He had truly converted and brought many of the terrorists out of the bush with him naming the name of Jesus on radio broadcasts directed to them and later he appeared at our evangelistic outreach and spoke to the crowd about the Lord.

The team of 100 people was one of the best I have ever ministered with on a mission trip. We started the morning with our first outreach to the bush. We got on our bus and were joined by a big truck loaded with food parcels and went out into the bush for a pre-arranged time of preaching, salvations, healing and food give-away for hundreds of displaced people, usually for crowds of 300-500 people. One of our team members, Tiffany, was lost in a sea of children just the top of her blond head sticking out as she painted designs on their finger and toe nails. Another huge hit was a Canadian brother, who brought 5,000 balloons to make balloon animals for the kids. The lines of children to see the balloon man were sometimes 80-150 kids long.

I ministered quite a bit to the grown men who looked embarrassed and sat on the sidelines. I talked to them about how I would feel as a man if I was unable to support my family, find meaningful work and had been unable to protect them from rape and violence. Their self-respect was very low. They responded well to another man who could understand how they must feel and to the message of Christ’s love for them even in their bleak poverty. At night we went to a very large out door area with a large steel stage and sound system that wouldn’t quit. Each night there were 6,000-10,000 people, African worship—which is even better than Brazilian worship (which was saying something). It went on for hours.

Then the evangelist, Jim Drown, presented Christ. Healing and deliverance were offered to the crowd and the team went into the multitude to pray for the sick and the demonized of which there were many. I got to join in the popular Ugandan sport of mud wrestling with violent demoniacs. When they started to manifest, the ushers grabbed them and bodily carried them to the stage screaming and struggling. They were then handed over to four or five of us who got to kneel in the mud with them and hold them down against their will until we could deliver them. One of the young girls I helped to deliver later gave her testimony on stage of a life time of being prepared to be a high-priestess of witchcraft. She was set free and accepted Jesus and praised His name. The next night her sister was set free as well. Many people were healed of deafness and all sorts of body sickness, tumors, and blindness.

We basically repeated our days with different groups of people. Many of whom we greatly enjoyed. The outreaches in the bush were really fun and the evangelistic meetings were extremely powerful. I have to comment on the last night of the evangelistic crusade. We had gotten back from the day’s outreach, had a few hours rest and gathered on the lawn of the central hotel—all 100 of us. The sky started to darken and threaten rain and 200 scary looking large black birds swirled over the lines of our group as we waited for prayer and impartation from the team leadership to prepare us for the night’s work. Since the crusade is entirely outside, rain would have made the local witch doctors who were praying against us really happy. We started chanting “No Rain! No Rain!” as the storm seemed to get worse. When we got to the outdoor area around 6,000 people were already gathered and there was a six mile circle that looked like it had been cut by a cookie cutter in the sky. Inside the circle were clear skies and a double rainbow. Outside the circle in every direction were dense swirling grey and black clouds, jagged lightning, and pouring rain. We praised the Lord and proceeded to worship and dance and heal and deliver. It was a great last night.

The next day we departed for another 10 hour bus trip back to Kampala and three days at the Ugandan Children’s Village: An orphanage for former child soldiers, both male and female, ages 5 to 17 years old. Many of the children had been made to kill helpless prisoners with machetes and sent into battle with older troops with AK47s, where they shot it out against Ugandan government troops. Most of the children had had some level of sexual abuse. As a counselor I could see the sexual abuse, but none of the children seemed like killers or someone to be afraid of.  

When we entered the large concrete church of which the children’s ministry is a part, the children were arranged in stair-step, smallest to tallest, all around the interior of the church. The whole team got to greet them. There were about 60 kids. The little girls curtsied and the boys shyly shook hands. The place was run by two Canadians, Luke and Suzanne and was filled with love and warmth as much as any place I have ever been. The kids sang and danced for us and presented a program they had been working on for months and months. Later they served us an authentic African lunch mostly consisting of heavy starches and goo made out of peanuts and a small piece of a very old chicken. I really liked my passion-fruit juice box drink and the love and regard with which the children served our lunch. I believe this lunch was what these people normally eat on a really good day.

A child was assigned to each team member to show them around the Ugandan Children’s Village. The boy assigned to me was Morris, an eleven year old boy who showed me his school work and some of the classrooms and talked me into buying him a transistor radio in a very round about way. “Do you like to listen to radio? I like to listen to radio.” We had fun with the kids. We saw the common areas, the outdoor kitchen and pictures of the land on the outskirts of Kampala that we would visit the next day. I loved the Ugandan Children’s Village. The love there was so thick; you could cut it with a knife. I had really good talks with both Luke and Suzanne, who are responsible for the Village. Suzanne is very tall and prophetic. Luke is hard working enough to impress the Africans who work very hard indeed. Suzanne had a beauty salon plus four boys of her own. Now she has gained 60 Ugandan children. I asked how it had been for her to do this incredible amount of work in just two years time. She started to give me the “humble-the Lord-does-the work-and I have a great-staff” routine. I said, “Don’t lie to me!” (Prophetic people are not altogether tactful with each other). She said, “All right! It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life,” in a loud exasperated voice. If you want to send money or go on a short-term mission for as little as one or two weeks up to several months which only costs $20 a day for room and board if you want to stay with them, here is the contact information.

Uganda Jesus Village
P. O. Box 16534
Kampala, Uganda
ugandajv@live.com