![\"baboon250\"](\"http:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/baboon250.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWe\u2019re glad to be on the road out of Kampala.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So William and I left, and hoped to make it to Soroti shortly after dark.<\/p>\n
Besides flying, or driving over open bush, there are two roads from Kampala to Soroti, the heart of the Teso region.\u00a0 One goes west and north through Mbale, famous for its coffee.\u00a0 The road is equally famous for its potholes and construction delays, so we choose\u00a0instead to head north toward Lira, cross the Nile, then drive east.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We\u2019re in the rainy season and the green of the mango trees, cassava fields, and sawgrass is stunning.\u00a0 We drive for several hours, much of it a long stretch through Lango, William Omara\u2019s tribal area.\u00a0 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\u00a0we’re obviously not eating,\u00a0they’re\u00a0not very interested in us.<\/p>\n
At one point, William points north.\u00a0 \u201cThis is the place where God saved my life,\u201d he said, matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n
He was, at the time, a student in a Roman Catholic boarding school about 30 kilometers to the north.\u00a0 In 1996, William was 19, and in his last year.\u00a0 October 9th<\/sup> is Independence Day in Uganda, and the students at the school were allowed a party.\u00a0 The girls came over from their compound; there was an evening of carefully supervised dancing, friendly conversation, snacks and sodas.\u00a0 The children were allowed to stay up very late, with the latest retiring shortly after midnight.<\/p>\n At 4 a.m. the rebels came.<\/p>\n The boys were awakened by their priest.\u00a0 \u201cHe kicked in the door to our dormitory, and started shouting in English, \u2018The rebels are here!\u00a0 Run to the south.\u00a0 Only go south.\u2019 So we did, just like that.\u00a0 We knew which way to go, because the school faced to the south, and we already knew all the \u2018soft spots\u2019 in the wall and the fences.\u00a0 Thank God the southern grounds were full of the school gardens, because we could run in and out of the plots, and it was very hard for the rebels to shoot us.\u2019\u00a0 There were about thirty in my group, almost all of them younger than I.\u00a0 We ran in the dark through the bush and we did not stop running until we came to this road.\u201d<\/p>\n At this point, William\u2019s face changed.\u00a0 It became very soft and very sad.\u00a0 \u201cYou see, we got out because the rebels were occupied with the girls. \u00a0They had hit their compound first, and had to get through it to get to us. But they stayed on the girls\u2019 side long enough for us to get away.\u00a0 Some of the girls were raped, and others were killed.\u00a0 In the end, the rebels took one hundred twenty of them away with them into the bush.\u201d<\/p>\n I was silent, the way I always am when I hear such stories.\u00a0 I was praying for my friend.<\/p>\n In a moment the light was back in his face.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t think the rebels had considered our headmistress.\u00a0 She pursued them.\u00a0 She caught up to them and made them listen to her. She insisted on negotiating.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think anyone had ever talked to them this way.\u00a0 She was a nun from Italy, and I think they really did not know what to do with her.\u00a0 So, in the end, they agreed to take only thirty, and they let the rest go.\u00a0 And the headmistress took them back to their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n True to Francis\u2019 promise, we made it into Soroti shortly after dark.\u00a0 Tomorrow morning I will be preaching to an assembly of kids at Beacon of Hope College, the residential junior high and high school Pilgrim operates for the war affected, poor and orphaned children of Teso.\u00a0 When we started it in 2006, every kid in the school had a story like William\u2019s, and most of them far worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019re glad to be on the road out of Kampala.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Anthony jumped in to make the presentation, and by about 1 p.m. it appeared there was no point in tossing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pilgrim-africa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3rrkF-cb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":961,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions\/961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.episcopalpgh.org\/bishopsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}