Lira, Uganda, February 2008
10 day school and trauma workshop
By the time the Flame International workshop team arrived at the partially built St. Augustine Church in Lira, the first phase of a week’s teaching on forgiveness and healing had taken place with many people finding release from bondage in their lives - a demonstration that Jesus Christ came to set the captives free.
Lira is in northern Uganda. It is an area which, over the past twenty years, has lived in fear of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has abducted men, raped women and captured children to use them as soldiers. It is also an area steeped in traditional witchcraft and idol worship.
The countryside is not hilly, but dry, dusty and undulating. Roads are dirt tracks, apart from major routes which are better tarmaced but frequently seriously potholed, making travel perilous; overturned lorries are a part of everyday life. People live very much at a subsistence level, fetching their water in yellow plastic oil containers from wells and carrying it on their heads or on bicycles, cooking over charcoal fires, sweeping their compounds with reed brushes, surrounded by rickety tin huts or round mud houses. Yet, despite the desperate poverty, everyone appears with dignity in clean pressed clothes.
The rainy season no doubt brings radical changes to the landscape but at the beginning of February the red dust rises from the ground and coats everything. The street and waste areas are strewn with half-buried plastic bags, abandoned by the occupants of the surrounding houses, all adding to the general feeling of neglect.
The shops are brightly coloured concrete buildings with their wares spilling out of the front and down the steps, piles of coloured trays filled with eggs, neat stacks of foam mattresses, wooden furniture or coffins, exuberantly coloured clothing modelled on dummies, plates piled neatly with vegetables and fruit; and amongst all this roam the chickens, goats and the cattle.
In the classroom we are using at the back of the scaffolding-filled church the morning praise starts with much merriment, Ugandan and European voices singing together. Some songs we recognise and join in with confidence, others we clap heartily and listen, enjoying the combination of locally made instruments being played to accompany the harmonising voices.
Laughter is a crucial part of our relationship. It joins us together with exchanged looks and actions when words cannot be found, but beneath the smiles there is often a submission to fear and the power of the spirit world. The role of the witchdoctor is significant in the community, as is the worship of local spirits that expect children to be offered to them or regular libations given. This is deeply intertwined with daily life.
The Bible-based teaching of Flame International takes the delegates (a mixture of clergy, full-time lay-readers and youth workers) through an understanding of how we are made in the image of God. We are triune beings too: body, soul and spirit. It’s easy to see and understand that life damages our body and soul, but rarely do we consider the damage done to our spirits through events such as rejection, grief, trauma and also through sins inherited from our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. For in the same way that we can inherit physical traits and characteristics our spirits have their own relationship with our forebears. Jesus brings healing and release from our past and our families’ past. Forgiveness plays a crucial part in this liberation.
The trauma school finishes with two days of prayer ministry during which time each delegate receives an hour and a half of prayer into a particular trauma in their lives. This is done in small groups so that everyone has the opportunity to practise leading the ministry, as the point of the school is to take this healing back to their parishes.
The physical changes in the faces of those delegates prayed for on the first day show us that God has worked deeply, bringing comfort to the broken-hearted.
Becca Benfield