Mama Tom is my gift from heaven. I cannot describe to you how incredible this woman is. She lives in the Spirit. Day and night she is on her knees in prayer to God. She is literally an Anna in her mud hut with her 15 orphans. They have no food. She prays and in the morning food is at her door. She has been through the fire and has come out at 65 years a fireball for the Lord, covered in the Spirit. Just the other day as me, Tara, and Esther (a woman we are ministering to) walked into her home she engulfed each one of us individually into a mother's hug all the while praying in the Spirit. I remember as she held me in her arms all I could do was cry and I literally felt my heart still as the words she prayed and covered me in confirmed everything the Father was doing in my own heart and in our team as a whole. She is a woman of great faith and great courage. As we sat in her home (after each of us had bawled our eyes out and had prayed together), she lavished us with the little food she had and insisted on buying each of us a coke. She who hardly has anything lavishing all of us with so much. King David (one of the orphan boys...and yes he is KING David) made faces at us the entire time, and is probably one of the cutest boys you will ever meet. As I sat and talked with her and listened to her story I could hardly believe that people still went through such things. She spoke of her son and his wife being beaten to death over a piece of land. Of how they escaped into Uganda as bullets fell all around them. The road she walked in forgiving these people, of refraining her tribe from attacking for the simple reason that those who had burned and killed her children did not know Christ. As I listened, I sat amazed. Looking into her eyes you can almost see the pain she has walked through, see it in the hunched back, the wrinkles, the bloodshot eyes, the ankle that was sewn back on, yet she walked through the pain  in joy. After every other sentence she will say, "Praise the Lord, hallelujah!" And for her these are not mere words. She speaks them with tears in her eyes, saying, "Blessed be His name" knowing the cost of such a declaration. Here in Busia, from  her small hut she is fighting for Uganda. She comes against the spirit of religion every day with her joy, her passion that has not died down at 65 but has only increased. She can tell you of numerous people coming to her and telling her that she is about to die, of speaking curses to her but she just says that her life is the hands of her God, her Lover. And, probably to their disappointment, she is still going strong. If I take but one thing from Africa it will be the inspiration this woman has been in my life, in my walk of faith with God. I praise His name for her and continually pray for her strength as she provides a place in her mud hut for the widows and orphans and fights for her country, His Bride the only way she can...on her knees.