Dodie October 25 visit report #3

Report # 3

I have come up to the North East side of the diocese to a place called Kiboga. It is now a huge town and the hotel is one I have stayed at before and is very upmarket. My room has a shower! Back to the Enro Hotel in Mityana I always have a tiny room, a bathroom round the corner and a shower that doesn’t work. So it’s a basin and mug effort. The water just doesn’t come out of the taps. The tank (of hot water) leaks on to the top of the cistern and then drips down all over the floor behind the loo. I am hugely grateful someone gave me a kettle so I can boil the water for the mug and basin wash! This all means a much lower accommodation bill I hope and actually you get used to it pretty quickly. But I have to say tonight I broke my four-minute shower rule!

Another place we called in today was at Kibubula – the link school with Overton. It now has over 600 pupils and the government has only given them six paid teachers so out of their budget they have to employ private (usually unqualified) teachers. I have been going there for over 20 years and I always hate saying goodbye.

We have now covered six of the ten visits to lay readers in their homes. The variety in homes is enormous. From mud huts in very rural areas along grass and dirt tracks to ‘proper’ Ugandan houses in a town. Today’s was the latter – a lovely girl called Esther Kanweri. Kanweri means born on Christmas Day if it is a girl. If it is a boy he is called Emmanuel!

Esther lives with her sister and husband and two children. Her father died some time ago and her mother is still alive but lives a long away, away. In her family there are five girls and two boys and she is the youngest. Her sister is called Scholar (!!) and she has a little shop in Kiboga, where they live. Her husband is a farmer.

Esther’s church is about 4 kms away from her home. She is taking two courses at the College. Kindergarten teaching and the lay reader course. This is a real struggle for her financially, but the positive thing is that she will have a qualification to get a job after she finishes and can teach. That has to be a good thing.

She was very sick when she started the course and suffer from malaria and typhoid. And she told us the bed bugs are a real pain!

The visit was very humbling and as we left, she apologised that she had no gift for us, next time she said! But said thank you because we had helped her so much. She was so grateful that we had been able to visit her home.

And then I took the book, hit the bed and slept for an hour – bliss!

Onward and upward as they say. The next lay reader we visited is called Isaiah. He has struggled all his life, losing both parents by the time he was three, being looked after by two sisters still at primary school (14 and 11) and the three of them survived by digging other people’s gardens for them. Then at secondary he made bricks for the school so his fees were reduced and at the end of secondary made chapatis to fund his final two school years. We don’t know how lucky we are!

When we chatted, we were joined by two other clergy, Samuel and Edward. Samuel has five children and I have known him since he was eleven. Edward, I have not known for as long but hugely attractive with a wide smile. I met his wife and mother of his six children. How they pay for their children’s education I do not know. There was a men’s conference and Samuel was the speaker. When he arrived, he found there were lots of women were in the church. Obviously crossed wires somewhere along the line.

And finally, we met no 7 of the ten lay readers called Douglas. He took us to visit six women who we were giving a food parcel to. These are made up of matches, oil, sugar, salt and rice. All the women were over eighty. One was 98, another 93 and one 103. This meant she was born in 1922! She remembered her parents and grandparents wearing traditional dress, the clergy being African except for the bishop who was white.

She walked six miles to school each day (and home again) and can remember one brother going off to fight alongside the British in what was then Tanganyika against the Germans. She was one of nine children, I think. Then in the civil war in the 1980s she had to flee from Obote’s soldiers back to Kampala. They did atrocious things in the rural communities. People would run to the church, in her case the closest was the RC church, where they would feel safe. By the end of the war the soldiers attacked the churches as well, refusing to acknowledge them as safe havens, killing as many as they could. Mirab just shook her head remembering the awfulness of it all. When I asked about her mother, she remembered her very warmly.

Off on another bumpy jaunt or two this week!