Mary Remembers

Last year when I was here, there was talk of putting on a Christmas cantata for the people of the community. I spent about a week learning what a cantata was and putting together ideas and backbone… wishbone… whalebone… bare boned? … whatever—rudimentary plans. (Welcome to my brilliant English major’s mind. For the record, I also misspelled “English” four times before getting that one right. I might be tired.) After a week or two, there was no more talk and the cantata slipped through the cracks.

At that time, I did not imagine I would be here to actually see it through the following year. Nevertheless, three months ago a group of us sat down to determine whether a Noah’s Ark cantata seemed feasible, and the consensus was to give it a try. So we did.

The goal was to provide a way for the people in the surrounding community to hear the Christmas message and to invite them to our Sunday church services the rest of the year. Here, most people celebrate the holiday with new clothes and a large meal with family, but that is often where it stops. Watoto church in Kampala puts on an elaborate cantata every year, and while we knew we could not hold ourselves to their professional standards, we started scoping out whom on the compound could make this happen. This was most entertaining when we had one of the guards belting out “We Three Kings” at the compound gate.

Somehow—well, not exactly somehow, since I blame Warwick, but that’s neither here nor there at this point—I ended up as a director and one of the four overhead people preparing the event. Since my acting and directing résumé was limited to American Girl Doll plays with the cousins and camp skits, it was very much a learning experience. 

We held auditions, had meetings with the group of women who volunteered to make costumes, had about six different rehearsals each week, searched for props, tried to figure out how to make two grown men look like a semi-realistic donkey, decided on music, rewrote a script, pulled bags and bags of donated fabric from containers to make costumes, yelled at people for being late to rehearsal, and occasionally pulled out our hair in stress and frustration.

Oh, and on the day of our dress rehearsal—two days before the first performance—I got malaria, so that was fun.

In the early brainstorming stages, I said I would be willing to teach a group of children ballet so we could have different kinds of dance in the performance. Doing so was more difficult than I anticipated. Because of my trip to Chicago, we were not able to start rehearsing until late November. Trying to teach ten people who have never done ballet an entire dance in three weeks was… well, at times it seemed stupid, but they worked hard and in the end it came together and we had a blast.

The cantata, called Mary Remembers, was told in two different time periods. The gospel writer Luke was interviewing Mary as an old woman, having her give an account of that first Christmas from her perspective. As she described each part, other characters came onstage and told the story through dance, drama, and music. There were some soloists, a choir, a children’s choir, an African dance group, my ballet group, several actors, and exquisite costumes made by a volunteer who is a couture designer in Europe and came here at the perfect time. Seriously, God is good.

Schedules were packed and stress levels were raging (for the mzungus, anyway) in the days and hours leading up to the first performance. Our plan was to do three performances, one each on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before Christmas. Since this was the first time we had ever done something like this, we had no idea what kind of response to expect from the public. The man who organized most of the advertising said to expect about 300 people each night, and that prospect thrilled us. We made 900 small goodie bags as giveaways to last us all three performances.

But God had other plans.

Thursday afternoon, the crowd exceeded expectations. It not only surpassed the 300 people we hoped would come that day—it surpassed the 900 we hoped would come in all three days. I’m not sure how, but more than 1,000 people packed themselves into what used to seem like a spacious church to watch the show, after which all the children in attendance were given an Operation Christmas Child shoe box to take home.

The performance the next day was scheduled to take place at 5:00 p.m. By ten in the morning, there were already 200 people waiting outside the gate. I have no idea what they did all day. By the time afternoon rolled around, there were so many people waiting we decided to start early—and in Uganda, nothing starts early because no one shows up less than an hour late. Late, not early. Basically, hell froze over.

There were so many people waiting for the Friday show that we couldn’t fit them all in the church and had to turn hundreds and hundreds away. As a result, we decided to add another show on Saturday morning to give more people an opportunity to see it and hear the gospel. With two shows, Saturday turned into a long, chaotic day, but by the grace of God we managed.

After letting in as many as we could fit for the Saturday afternoon performance, there were so many people waiting outside the gate we talked of adding more shows on Sunday and Monday. We decided against it only because with two extra shows we still would not have been able to accommodate them all. There were 2,500 people waiting on that narrow dirt road.

So instead of putting on three shows with 300 people at each one, we ended up doing four shows with about 1,200 people at each. In three days, nearly 5,000 people from the surrounding villages came to our Noah’s Ark church to hear what Christmas is all about. I didn’t even know that many people lived within walking distance. We hardly knew how to process it. Further encouragement came the following Sunday when a few dozen new faces showed up at our church service.

All in all, God did so much more with this than we ever imagined. I am 100 percent thrilled it is finished and part of me never wants to do it again… but the other part of me already has a Word document labeled “Cantata 2015 Ideas.”

(Photo credit goes to Natalie, Ingrid, and Jacob, a wonderful volunteer family here for a few months.)