Bloody Lane, Antietam, VA

I am standing in a place where thousands died in a single day.  They were brothers, and they killed each other.  The dead were so many, one witness observed, their bodies seemed to be stacked like cordwood.  The name of this place is Bloody Lane.

I have come on pilgrimage.

On my way home from the airport in Washington, I have pulled off the highway and driven the ten miles to Antietam.  Here, in 1862, Americans tore one another to pieces, with 23,000 casualties in less than twelve hours.  There is a terrible site called simply the Cornfield, where the carnage was nearly indescribable.  But the Bloody Lane is the whole day in miniature.  You can stand here and feel where the bodies fell, and you can also feel what one poet would later call “the sadness of war, the sadness war distilled.”  It is a kind of darkness that goes beyond the physical cost of so many brothers and sons taken away in their youth.  It is a resignation that becomes more concentrated with each one lost, distilled into a nearly perfect despair.  Here, it seems, any possibility of life is overwhelmed by death.  I just stand and take it in.  I am trying to remember where I have felt this before.  And then it occurs to me. Continue reading →

Me and Dr John Senyonyi of UCU

The Rev. Canon Dr. John Senyonyi is the first Ugandan Vice Chancellor of Uganda Christian University.  I have always wanted to meet him, but two years ago, when I was last in Uganda, he had just been appointed and I couldn’t get in to see him.  But now, with Teso University looming closer and Pilgrim having to solve the real logistical issues of building a campus and launching a school, I have an even better reason to meet with him.  So, at dinner with the board on Tuesday, I wonder aloud what the odds are on making that happen in the narrow window I have Wednesday morning.  It was an abstract question; I had written it off.  Next time, I think.

Hellen gets up from the table with her phone and goes outside.  Five minutes later, she walks back in and says, “My Lord Bishop, you have a meeting with Dr. Senyonyi tomorrow morning at 9:30.  Is that all right?”  My jaw drops.  Turns out she and he were in grad school together.  Whom does this woman not know? Continue reading →

It is almost exactly 24-hours later that we meet with the folks from the U.S. Embassy.

I have been trying to get this appointment for two weeks, and after an incredibly frustrating series of missed phone calls back and forth, have managed to arrange a conversation with two senior USAID staff in Kampala, along with a member of our board, Dr. Ben Khingi, plus Hellen and Calvin.  Anthony has been taken away for a funeral way up in Gulu and is not able to make it.

R to l: Dr Ben. Calvin Echodu and Hellen Grace Akwii from Pilgrim Africa. Dr. Seyoum Dejene and Dr. Kassahun Belay from USAID.

The meeting takes place in a lovely restaurant called La Petit Café.  I know it should be Le Petit Café, and I’m annoyed every time I have to write it, but that’s really the name.  When we’re all gathered, I start to introduce the agenda in the usual strolling Ugandan way.  But these guys are thoroughly Americanized and waste no time.  They want to know our anti-malaria credentials, and they want to know them now.  When Calvin begins to describe the pilot protocol in Katakwi back in 2009, they pepper him and Dr. Ben with technical questions, mainly around the mass distribution of antimalarials, a highly controversial approach.  But as we talk, they seem convinced that Pilgrim is a serious player, and they offer a hand in partnership, describing the USAID grant application process and giving us some other very useful information.  This is more than I was expecting from an initial meeting, but of course, we are all delighted.  When one of them has to leave, we are left with Dr. Kassahun Belay, who offers himself as our major contact with the agency. Continue reading →

No matter how many times I walk into a pediatric malaria ward, I cannot get used to the sight: the listless children, the mothers at once afraid and resigned, the staff laboring with so little to pull kids back into life.  It is the reminder that health policy is not an abstract set of strategic objectives.  It often means life or death.

Dr. Christine Ondoa

The person in charge of health policy for the entire country of Uganda is the Honorable Minister of Health, Dr. Christine Ondoa.  Hand-picked by the president, she is relatively new in her post; young, very bright, very dedicated, with an extensive background in malaria intervention and community health.  Dr. Ondoa really wants to get something big done; she wants to eliminate malaria in Uganda.  Unfortunately, there are many forces set against her.  Undeterred, and with the support of the president, Dr. Ondoa has brought in major partners to design and implement a long-term strategy against malaria.  These include both the Global Fund and Pilgrim Africa. Continue reading →

The post-colonial period in Uganda through the 1960s was troubled but relatively functional. With the ascent of Idi Amin in 1971, however, the country spiraled into a prolonged period of violence.  Within seven years, the careful infrastructure left behind by the British had been destroyed, dismantled or sold.  Inter-tribal rivalries, carefully regulated by the colonial powers to enhance their own security, boiled over in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.  For the next 35 years, the peoples of Uganda were set against each other and tore each other to pieces.  It was madness on a scale of millions.  Children were made to kill their parents and then trained to view their new commanders as their true fathers.  Twelve-year-olds committed atrocities against whole villages. Wild tribes from Karamoja rustled cattle and murdered the herders, sometimes with government help. Whole families were slaughtered for rebels to gain a bicycle or a chicken.  Hundreds of thousands fled to camps where they often died just as quickly as they would have at home.

Meeting Papa Ilukor

Papa Ilukor was the Bishop of Soroti during most of this turbulent period.  He has a first name, but nobody ever uses it.  He is simply Papa.  Nearly alone, he had the integrity and courage to hold together the people of Teso even as the rest of the country was falling apart at the seams.  He is sometimes called the Mandela of the North.  More than once, he simply walked into rebel encampments and persuaded them to put down their arms.  He convened talks between parties who had vowed to kill each other.  He brought about reconciliation where there was simply no possibility of it.  He flew abroad and presented the crisis in Uganda to a world that didn’t want to hear about it, and he returned, miraculously, with planeloads of food, blankets and medical supplies.  He saved the lives of thousands. Continue reading →

The Right Reverend George Erwau, my Lord Bishop of Soroti, is a cheerful, ebullient man, built like a rugby player, with a strong evangelical faith and an active and creative mind.  He presides over a diocese of 70 clergy serving 48 parishes, which comprise a baptized membership of roughly 700,000 Anglican Christians.  Yes, you read that right.  Each parish may be divided into four or more congregations, each in turn, under the immediate care of a lay reader.  On Sundays, the priests get around from service to service on a bicycle.  You know you’re a cardinal rector when somebody gives you a motorbike.  At ordinations, each of the priests is solemnly presented with a new set of tires. Continue reading →

The worst road in northern Uganda may well be the road to Kumi. This road has been a disaster since before I came to Uganda.  Over the last seven years it has been more or less in a constant state of reconstruction, and if anything, it has deteriorated.  It really does put the route to Katakwi unequivocally in second place — potholes you could drown in, ruts the size of river beds, heavy traffic with massive, overloaded trucks headed mainly to southern Sudan.  The road to Katakwi is just poor and neglected, but the road to Kumi has been made worse by years of government attention.  According to Dr. Mwanika, “In Uganda, every man behind a desk is a problem.”  So, here, corruption, poor planning, substandard construction, countless inefficiencies, turf wars, and the like add up to a traveler’s nightmare.  Thank God for our driver, Francis, who manages to get us past the bad section in little more than an hour. Continue reading →

The road to Katakwi

The road to Katakwi is about forty kilometers of washboard and potholes that will test the quality of your dental work.  This is one reason why you don’t want to think about driving in Uganda.  Francis seems to have radar for parts of the road that seem innocent until you get right over them.  As awful as the trip is, I have a special love for this road because of where it leads.  Katakwi is the district that includes Usuk, the first IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp I ever visited.  Six years ago there were still several thousand people there, and there I preached my first sermon in Uganda, to several hundred hopeless farmers.  I preached on the parable of the sower and the seed, and in my first words realized I had stumbled by God’s grace into a text they all knew more deeply than I ever could; then I pulled out a couple of puppets and did a homily for about three hundred kids with simultaneous translation into Ateso. 

The camp is gone now, and the people have almost all been resettled into traditional lands.  Since then, Pilgrim has concentrated on the task of helping them become food-secure.  There have been floods and drought and crippling financial pressures that made us pull staff from the fields.  Somehow, by the grace of God, we have managed to keep going, and the original vision is at last slowly becoming a reality. Continue reading →

Wherever you travel in Uganda, you will meet schoolchildren.

In Teso, they are almost always dressed, especially the girls, in the colors of their local primary school: dresses of yellow, green, blue, or purple are the most popular.  They almost always walk to and from school on the dusty clay roads.  They are unfailingly polite, smiling and curious.

Especially when they have a chance to meet a mzungu.

Mzungu is the universal African word for a white person.  It is Kiswahili, but every tribal language I know of has imported it.  Some say it comes from a Bantu expression meaning “here and there”, which describes the impression East Africans had of their British colonizers, that they were always rushing up and down.  Small children in rural areas of Uganda are particularly smitten by the chance to touch the skin of a white person. They have always been told white people really are ghosts. Continue reading →

At Soroti Hospital, with an insufficient number of beds in the pediatric ward, mothers and children are forced to camp outside for the duration of their medical treatment. (Photo courtesy Pilgrim Africa)

A footnote to my previous post on Malaria.

Today in Soroti, on ridiculously short notice from the district officials, and with help from the Bishop’s Discretionary Fund of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Pilgrim set up a diagnostic and informational tent as part of the grossly underpublicized  local observance of World Malaria Day.  Dr. Okwana from our clinic, two of his technicians, and our trauma counselor Susan Akwii, manned the outpost.  They screened 150 walk-ins, none of whom were experiencing signs of malaria, but who were merely curious.  27 of them were found to be carrying the parasite.  This is an infection rate of nearly twenty percent, from a small, random, and asymptomatic group.

I first heard of Teso University when the vision for it occurred to Pilgrim’s founders several years ago.

Part of my job, as President of the International Board, is to be skeptical.

Me:  “So, you want us to start a university in an area of East Africa that has absolutely no record of success in higher education, in which we are barely able to sustain a secondary school, on property we don’t yet have, with money that isn’t there?”

Answer: Yes.

Under such conditions, what can one do but pray? Continue reading →

In the afternoon, I visit Beacon of Hope clinic, and talk with its director, Dr. Okwana, and his staff.  We have high hopes this ten-bed clinic will evolve into a real hospital, and include a regional psychosocial trauma center covering northeastern Uganda and southern Sudan.  Here they handle everything from infections to viruses, and undertake a lot of basic education in hygiene, pre- and post-natal care, and help families with the traumatic issues endemic to the rural poor.

But the abiding enemy is malaria.

Down the hall lying on a cot is a woman afflicted with cerebral malaria.  She alternates between delirium and unconsciousness.  As I stand by her bedside, I can see another malaria patient with an IV drip, and two mothers with sick children.  I remember some of the facts. Continue reading →

The children at Beacon of Hope gather for their assemblies and worship under the shade of a huge tree, related to the fig tree, that has become holy ground to us all.  If you drive up after they have begun their worship, you can hear them singing from several hundred feet away.  These kids are so full of joy and so grateful to be here, I can never think of them without feeling joyful and grateful myself.

When I arrive this morning they are all standing around in a neat semi-circle.  I greet old friends in the administration and faculty as chairs are set out for the “distinguished visitors” and a typically ceremonious program of introduction follows, with an opening prayer from a student, very brief remarks from several of the team, until I am asked to preach. Continue reading →

We’re glad to be on the road out of Kampala.  I almost got caught up in a national anti-malaria colloquium at the Sheraton for which our senior staff was invited to present on short notice.  Anthony jumped in to make the presentation, and by about 1 p.m. it appeared there was no point in tossing an American bishop into the mix.  So William and I left, and hoped to make it to Soroti shortly after dark.

Besides flying, or driving over open bush, there are two roads from Kampala to Soroti, the heart of the Teso region.  One goes west and north through Mbale, famous for its coffee.  The road is equally famous for its potholes and construction delays, so we choose instead to head north toward Lira, cross the Nile, then drive east.  We immediately run into unreported jams and closures, but after patiently navigating the obstacles, our driver Francis has us sailing on a good road through lush countryside.

We’re in the rainy season and the green of the mango trees, cassava fields, and sawgrass is stunning.  We drive for several hours, much of it a long stretch through Lango, William Omara’s tribal area.  Just before we cross the Nile, we come across a troop of baboons on the roadside, mingled with a couple dozen black-faced monkeys. Since we’re obviously not eating, they’re not very interested in us.

At one point, William points north.  “This is the place where God saved my life,” he said, matter-of-factly. Continue reading →

You have no idea what it means to pray until you have driven in Kampala.

There are no signs. The rules are unwritten. The most dangerous driver is a cautious mzungu (white person). Francis, our driver, is fast, nimble, and seems to have a prophetic gift for knowing when there will be enough space in traffic to get through what seem to be countless obstacles.

One constant fixture is the Toyota taxi-bus overfilled with passengers, usually with colorful names (such as this one) emblazoned on the back window. Most of these are the same model. If two of them run into each other, the rule is they both pull over and exchange parts by the side of the road, the one at fault giving up a new fender or door to the victim. Most of the time they work it out because they know if they have to get the police involved it will be expensive for everybody.

Another is the boda-boda; these are motorbikes that carry individual passengers hanging on to the driver for dear life as they thread through the other traffic at high speed. Yes, people die. Don’t ever take one anywhere.

And remember the words of Saint Paul: pray constantly.

If you come to East Africa, you must be prepared for the frequent invocation of these seven words.

I’m always interested to see how Americans react to the frequent shifts in schedule brought about by conditions on the ground in a country like Uganda, where poor infrastructure, rapid-fire cellphone communications, and a cultural disposition generally toward the flexibility of time, all combine. Schedules are, at best, estimates, sketches of leading possibilities, which may be altered drastically at any moment. Some Yanks get completely undone by this, others easily go with the flow. The best way to view time, here, is as an ongoing portal for the Holy Spirit. Time is not something inanimate to be carved up into chunks. It is more like an inseparable element in a jazz composition that can only be written down after it has happened. You know where you were and what you did, more or less, but not really where you are going or what you will do. If you can’t live with that, you might want to explore mission in Switzerland instead.

Hellen Grace Akwii

Yesterday began as planned. I met with the Kampala leadership staff of Pilgrim for their weekly Monday morning devotions, led by our in-country co-ordinator, Hellen Grace Akwii. Hellen is the former Anglican Observer to the UN and is able to handle just about anything anywhere at any time. I am constantly impressed by her competence, resourcefulness and good humor. She is co-ordinating all the aspects of my visit, and I simply could not be in better hands. So, I led a meditation on 1 Thessalonians 1: 6-8 on how God has used Pilgrim staff to broadcast His glory even in a time and place of such affliction as post-war Teso, through the joy of the Holy Spirit which I see in their work and in their faces, and which I hear about everywhere. Continue reading →

I arrived at three in the morning, Kampala time. After a couple of hours’ sleep, I was up and dressed and on my way to church in Namuwongo. This is fairly typical of the urban slums in East Africa: small earthen huts with corrugated iron roofs jammed together, sewage running in ditches through narrow alleys, children everywhere, garbage everywhere. The walk from the main road to the church takes about five minutes, unless you are Pastor Wilson Opio.

Pastor Wilson is in charge of Namuwongo Revival Church, a Pentecostal congregation he founded in 1993.  On Sunday mornings, he dresses in an immaculate dark suit, white shirt and bright tie, his shoes polished, and he walks through the mud and the garbage to the church.  The trip takes him easily a half-hour.  People come out of their homes to greet him.  He stops to talk with nearly everyone he meets, including several small children, shakes their hands, asks how they are doing, sometimes lays hands on them and prays for them.   Today he is in Rwanda on mission, so I am walking with his assistant, Brother William Omara.  Even though we take our time, it takes seven minutes.  People are polite as we pass, but they do not give us their hearts as they do Pastor Wilson.  They do not know me, but they all know him. Continue reading →