Howdy y'all, John here with my first report.

Let me begin by expressing my appreciation for everyone's support and encouragement, which has truly been overwhelming. Thanks most of all for your prayers, which are vital and tangible. My deepest gratitude go of course to Heidi, without whom none of this could have happened and who has been a creative, connective dynamo in all aspects of this adventure, including this blog.

So much has happened -- let me just quickly flip through the past few days. I have to be brief because the internet connection here is slow and unreliable. As everyone knows, I'm participating in a workshop on documentary filmmaking with Uganda's NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, the UN's term for groups like the Red Cross or World Vision). It's led by filmmaker Bill Megalos, run by the Maine Photographic Workshops at Rockport College and hosted locally by Outside the Dream, a US NGO.

Heidi has told you about my visit Saturday at the orphanage with Doreen and the other events of the weekend. In addition to attending worship on Sunday at the Miracle Center (Kampala's largest church), I went to the nearby town of Jinja and visited the Bujagali Falls (pics up soon, I hope).

We kicked off the workshop with a dinner Sunday night and got to business Monday morning. So far, it's been grueling, intense and extremely informative. Most of the action takes place at a hotel about ten minutes away, so I have very little time to do things like, say, update this blog. We go from 8:30 every morning until around 9 or 10 at night, then have dinner as a group. We split our days between technical training on shooting and editing and practicing our skills in the field. In between, we talk one on one with the instructors about the projects we'd like to film. Our goal is to shoot two movies while we're here: one this week and one next.

Although I am probably the furthest along in terms of choosing a subject for my first film, I still feel as if I could work 24 hours a day and still not have enough time to achieve all of my objectives. Yet it feels like I've already been here a month.

Uganda is amazing. In some ways, it's a lot like Kenya, where I spent years as a teenager. It smells, tastes and feels almost like home. In other ways it's so starkly different -- much poorer, wartorn, ravaged by AIDS but a focus of much humanitarian effort and furious spiritual battle. How can I put into words what it feels like to cross the vast gulf that separates our cultures? But when I visited Doreen's orphanage, one of the young girls in the disabled children's wing came up and slipped her hand into mine. And I heard the Lord say, "this is where you are supposed to be."

There is so much more I want to say, especially about the spiritual aspects of this journey. For now, let me share just one example of how powerfully God is moving here, even at the mundane.

On Monday, I loaned my camcorder to one of the instructors for a training exercise. She came back at the end of the day to tell me that the camcorder was broken. The motor that operates the optical image stabilizer no longer worked. When we tried to turn the camcorder on, an error message flashed on the display and it wouldn't operate at all (either as a camera or as a VCR). She had done some research online and had learned this was a very rare and expensive problem that had to be fixed at the factory. In other words, I was through.

I took the camera back to the hotel that night and prayed over it. The next morning, I turned the camera on and off several times, each time getting the same error message. I then called Heidi and told her what had happened. She instantly said, "let's pray again." We agreed in prayer that this was the work of the enemy and that God's will was that the camera function perfectly. After we prayed, I turned it on again -- and it worked. No trace of the error message or any other evidence that it had ever been broken.

I rushed to class that morning and told the instructor and other students what had happened. One of them asked, "did you put a tape in and record and play back? You won't now it's fixed until then." That was an interesting moment -- I had just told them that God had healed my camcorder and now his reputation was on the line. Sure enough, the camera worked perfectly.

The instructor who had "broken" the camera hugged me at the news. Then she pulled me aside and said, "you know, I'm really not religious at all. In the U.S., we have so much materially that you can sort of pretend you've got everything under control. But over here, things are so beyond your control that when they go right, you can't help but think there's a higher power at work."

Amen, sister -- you're not far from the Kingdom of God. :)

I can't wait to blog more but I am already behind schedule for the day. Today, I am going to shoot my first scenes for this week's film. Please pray for me. I love you and miss you all.