Another Paul, Another Story

While we were in Uganda this past year we were able to meet and build relationships with a lot of awesome people. One person I am particularly blessed to have gotten to know is Paul. Paul is a nineteen year old awesome man of God, and our next door neighbor while we stayed at Morris and Aida's. We spent a lot of time hanging out with him. He tagged along on a lot of our adventures. He was our translator, our Lugandan teacher, and our right hand man. Needless to say we built an amazing friendship with him and he blessed us in so many ways on our trip. Every night we would have conversations about school, life, friends, and laughter was always involved.

The four of us decided we wanted to show our thanks to him for making us feel so welcome and helping us to understand the culture a little better by doing a little something for him. Two things we often talked to Paul about was his worry for paying his school fees and not having food that day because there was only enough for his mom and siblings. At first, we thought of maybe helping pay his school fees with the extra money we had left over for ministry costs. We decided against this because we weren't fully comfortable with handing over about $400 and not knowing for sure if it would end up being used for what we intended it to be used for. We then came up with buying food/ingredients so he would be able to eat as well as his family. Unfortunately, one thing we did not learn how to do while we were there was shop for food to make meals for a family of six. So we thought it would be fun to have Paul "help us"/pick out what he thought would be best to feed his family.

On our last day, we went for a hike to some waterfalls and had lunch with our friends, and when we we finished, we told Paul to meet us in town for some shopping. Little did he know we were shopping for him. When he arrived we told him our plan. We had 50,000 Uganda shillings ($25) that he could use to buy food for his family. I'm not sure I had seen a bigger smile on that boys face. Instantly, he took off towards the market. It took all that we had in us just to keep up with him. Once we got to the market, Paul began his shopping spree. We were told to stay behind him a little so the people selling the food would not see us with him and charge him the "mzungu price". With his $25 he was able to buy a bag a rice, two bags of potatoes, fish, meat, and a bag of sugar. With the extra money he had left over, he bought us bananas. It was a fun and crazy experience, and we enjoyed every minute of it.

On our way home we decided to carry the bags the way the Ugandans do.

 We got quite a few looks,

 as well as a lot of comments,

accompanied by some clapping and cheering.

It's funny how whenever you try to bless someone else, you always seemed to be the one more blessed. This was the case with this story. We love our friend Paul, and I'm so glad for the friendship we built this summer.