Choir 25 Funnies

At breakfast one morning Martin complains that he should be in P4 class (Grade 4) at school. After he has finished his breakfast he says, "Thank you Auntie for the dinner, please may I be excused?" I point out to him that he has been on tour for nearly six months now and he still doesn't know the difference between breakfast and dinner – that's why he’s in P3. After dinner that night he says, "Thank you Auntie for the dinner, please may I be excused?", and turning to me, "Now can I be in P4?"

At lunch one day after we had been digging into the kids ears with Q-Tips (kids the world over don't wash in their ears!), someone asked Moriah a question. "Pardon?" she said. Alex quickly butts in, "You should be able to hear now that you’ve just had your ears cleaned."

Alex sometimes doesn’t push himself in concerts and sometimes I can see him on the stage to opening his mouth and rarely smiling. One day however, it was different; he was singing and dancing with a huge smile on his face. Abraham said, "He’s having a good concert tonight." Later, I mentioned it to Alex about his smile. "Ah," he said, "I had the joy of the Lord!"

At summer camp it was Scott's day to have a lie in, Alex, one of the boys, thought it would be a good idea to wake him up by tickling his feet. That night Alex climbed up the ladder to his bunk to be confronted by the head of a plastic dinosaur poking out from his sleeping bag. Alex let out such a wailing, Scott pulled it out and stamped on it with the rest of the kids shouting "snake, snake, snake!". Alex was embarrassed when he found out the truth.

Martie was dressed in his concert clothes and decided to go to the toilet - the rules say that they should go before they get changed. As he was looking down to see what he was doing his cloth hat fell off his head into the toilet bowl. The church was a big modern one with fancy automatic flush toilets. As Martie stepped back and reached down to retrieve his hat the sensor tripped and his hat quickly disappeared out of sight!

At each concert we have a time when the children recite memory verses from the bible. A couple of times Genesis 3:12 has been quoted, which has caused much laughter - check it out yourself to see what it says.

Also during the concerts the children are asked what they would like to be when they grow up. Besides the usual doctor, nurse, pilot, engineer etc. we have had the following:

Martie	"Forest Fire" (he meant Forest Fire Fighter)
Martie	"Cookerman" (it was later explained to him that a man who cooks is a chef. Guess what, at a later concert when asked what he would like to be he said "Chefman"
Martie	"A Spiderman" Oh no! not again!
Gladys	"Vice President" (she doesn't aim high enough - we have had someone once say President)

On a more serious note...

Lawrence had a problem with his fingers - he couldn't stop them from pushing buttons.
One of the strict rules of the choir is that the children are not allowed to watch television, use computers or electronic games. The reason for this ruling is that we want to keep the children from becoming westernised while they are away from home. We want them to stay in Uganda when they have finished school and build up their country, not want to leave it to live in the west. He was a hopeless case, temptation was too much for him and he was always getting into trouble. This made he miss many of the fun things that the children did like playing out, watching movies on special days etc - all this made him sad, but he used to say, "Uncle, I can't help it". I taught him to pray when he felt tempted and if that didn't work to come and get me and we would pray together. The situation started to improve - such is the power of God.

Frank was a lovely child, well behaved and quiet - in fact he seemed to be in a world of his own most of the time. At night however, Frank would sometimes wake up screaming - he had really bad nightmares, sometimes even at night when he was trying to get to sleep. It was always the same - something was trying to strangle him. The cause? Some of his family in Uganda were involved in witchcraft. One night when he was in my care it was particularly bad and I advised his to call on Jesus for help. I should have explained it better that I meant he should pray, for about half an hour later I heard him shout out JESUS! JESUS! I went in and prayed with him and he settled down and slept peacefully.