Christmas Delayed

Mid-March, and great anticipation as we visit the Post Office in Arua to see if there is anything in our PO Box. Often there are letters, or our Guardian Weekly, but at times there’s a slip of paper, a real source of excitement because it means the Post Office have received a parcel or packet for us.

And so it was this day in the middle of March. It always takes some time for the PO officials to rummage their way through the piles of parcels and large envelopes, sometimes having to go through them several times. But always, eventually, they come up with the goods, today a large brown envelope – not the DVDs or chocolates we’ve been waiting for, but exciting none the less, and more so because we have no idea what it is.

We always wait until we get home to open these treasures – it heightens the level of anticipation. So having arrived home, we made a cup of coffee and proceeded to investigate the contents of the envelope. From the envelope that had travelled so many thousands of miles from the UK, we pulled a large sheaf of coloured card and paper, and emblazoned on the front were the words “Happy Christmas”.

The parcel was a collection of Christmas cards ‘To the children at the Church of Kuluva from the children at St Denys Junior Church.’ The Ugandan Postal Service had truly excelled themselves – only two-and-a-half months late!

What should we do with these cards? Leave them until next Christmas? Just hand them over to the Pastor to make a decision? Forget about them? None of these options seemed right. But with the cards there was a poem ‘Jesus and the Donkey’. As far as I could recall, the only place the Bible actually mentions a donkey and Jesus in the same verses is on Palm Sunday: ‘Jesus sent two disciples....”Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there with her colt........the disciples went and did as Jesus instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them.......”’

Of course, that was it! Why not bring Christmas into Palm Sunday and Easter? Why not wish the Children at Kuluva a Happy Christmas, invite them to welcome Jesus on Palm Sunday as King, just as the crowds of Jerusalem welcomed him, not to forget him as quickly as they did, but so that he could be born anew in their hearts to be their king for life?

So here we are on the day before Palm Sunday, and that’s what we’ll be doing tomorrow. Another bridge built across the miles from our home church in Leicester to our home church in Kuluva and a bridge across the Church Seasons to celebrate the greatest bridge of all from God to each one of us.

A singular blessing

A ‘wheelchair blessing’ was not to be found in Common Worship or other service books that Allan had to hand, but that’s what he’d been asked to do. As ever, things were not quite as they seemed. Our friends Mary and Isaac had asked us to come to their house to bless Tom’s new wheelchair. Tom is a young man of 17 years and delightful temperament, but who has been severely disabled from birth. His old wheelchair was ancient and showing its years. The government, courtesy of the Wheelchair Foundation, had provided a new one, quite miraculously it seemed, and for no money. But Tom had refused to sit in the new chair until it had been duly prayed over, and Allan was requested to provide the service.

If it had been me, I’d have just gone with a prayer half formed in my head. Being Allan, he did a little preparation and produced a short service in a mixture of Lugbara and English, so that the whole family could join in. Then it became clear that half the village had actually been invited, our church pastor was also going to be there, there would be food afterwards ..................... clearly we needed to write off the whole afternoon.

But it was delightful. Tom sat in the old chair as we arrived, lapping up all the attention and beaming whenever he caught anyone’s eye. Canvas awnings, tables covered with lacy linen and hideous artificial flowers, floor mats and plastic chairs were all set out in good Ugandan style and about 20 adults came along as well as numerous kids. The service proceeded with some order, thanks to Allan’s preparations, but there was a good deal of improvisation and unexpected speeches too, not to mention the gusty wind that blew up and threatened to sweep all the decorations away. In a moving moment, we all gathered round the new wheelchair and laid hands on it and on Tom – black hands joined with white ones in a symbolic act. We prayed for Tom, who shows such joy and delight in his life, which is necessarily devoid of so many resources that most of us, disabled or not, take for granted.

Then he was lifted into the new chair, and family photos were taken to record the moment. Afterwards we all proceeded to the house for enya, beans, rice, chicken, meat, and fellowship. Our Lugbara teacher threw in a provocative question (in English, luckily) about whether newly converted polygamous men could be baptized in church before renouncing the spare spouses....................................... a good time was had by all.

Outdated, Failing and Redundant (No! Not us!)

At the end of October 2007 we were eulogising about the wonders of our new yellow box. It was a great little piece of technology to get us on to the internet and put us in touch with all you folk. Our lives were transformed – the world was at our fingertips. If we’d had the time, we would have written an ode to the wonderful little yellow box and shared it with you all. At least you were spared that!

In recent weeks, however, we’ve been cursing the terrible plastic yellow thing – a waste of space. It would, tantalisingly, get you on to the internet and just as you were about to do something useful online it would disconnect itself. It felt deliberate, as though The Thing was trying to annoy us. It's interesting to discover just how easy it is to become paranoid.

There we would be, having just started to listen to the omnibus edition of ‘The Archers’ from the BBC, and the nasty yellow object would go offline and refuse to connect again. Or we would just have been ready to send an email (deathless prose that had taken an hour to write) and, again, the nasty yellow box would die.

So the much-lauded technology of yesterday has been declared redundant, and is now superseded by its’ younger brother – the Black Slug.

All this is to say we’re now back on line, and our contributions to the Blog Universe will recommence.

P.S. If we get round to writing ‘An Ode to the Black Slug’ you’ll be the first to know.

Slithering into 2009

New Years Day. 8am. Allan is in the shower. I am making breakfast.

New Years Day is big around here. Its almost bigger than Christmas. We have church services on New Years Day to thank God that we have ‘made it’ into another year without dying or otherwise being attacked by the devil. These are big celebrations. Allan is to preach at the service in our local parish church at 10am. Hence the shower, though he might need another one by the time he has spent two hours or so dressed in clerical robes designed for a cooler climate. Its about 25° already.

I go out of the back door to throw away the coffee grounds from last night – coffee was the tipple during our New Years Eve celebrations, as no alcohol is allowed on the hospital site. But we enjoyed an evening of convivial company with some fellow expatriates nonetheless, and went to bed at a respectable 11pm.

As I throw the coffee grounds on the bare earth, I notice movement – a snake, I thought. Then it registers – A SNAKE! We have seen one before just here, but it slithered away like lightning last time. This time its slithering is decidedly sluggish – nevertheless I retreat to the kitchen and close the netting door. From here I can watch the enemy in safety. Its about 18 ins long, grey and skinny. Its then I notice a large, rather obscene swelling partway down its thin body – it has clearly just swallowed a large meal of frog, maybe, or a small rodent. That would account for the sluggishness. I’ve caught it feeling post-prandial and mellow. Well, maybe not so mellow.

Briefly I consider tackling it alone. All the advice here is to kill snakes immediately on sight. Some are poisonous, some not, but you don’t hang around to find out. Then I decide God gave me a husband for occasions just such as this. While I await Allan’s emergence from the shower – I can’t expect him to tackle the thing naked and wet – I keep an eye on it. We wouldn’t want it to get away again. Its slithering its way, slowly, across the cement outside the back door.
Allan comes out of the shower. ‘There’s a snake outside and we have to kill it’ I greet him. ‘Well, you have to kill it’ - I add – ‘I’ll help.’ What a wonderful fellow I married. We don suitable protective clothing – strong shoes or boots to prevent bites. Allan decides it might be better to put trousers and shirt on too, rather than the dressing gown he was wearing.

We creep out to the store, so as not to announce our presence to the recumbent reptile, and find suitable implements – a rake and hoe are the best we can do. Allan then stands behind the snake, which is still snoozing gently, and brings the rake down on its neck with full force. The snake certainly wakes up, but isn’t killed instantly. It tries to bite the rake, but Allan stands firm. I stand ready with the hoe in case he needs reinforcement, but hoping to be redundant. Eventually he manages to cut off the thing’s head with the rake and hoe combined. That is that.

We throw the two bits of snake onto the vegetable plot (thats a euphemism – not a single vegetable has been known to grow there successfully). There it remains, looking increasingly revolting, until our gardener came the next day and buried it.

But we were very proud of our conquest as a suitably assertive beginning to the new year. None of the snake’s relatives have yet been back to seek revenge. So we trust we will live to thank God for bringing us safely on to the beginning of 2010.

The Big Six-O

One big advantage of living in Uganda is being able to do exotic things on big birthdays. This year took us to Eastern Uganda for my Big Six-0 and to the highest mountains we have yet seen in the country, with Mount Elgon, its highest peak, at 4165 metres. Our destination was Sipi Falls, a modest 1,800 metres above sea level, but high enough to be free of mosquitoes and cool enough to need blankets at night – a real treat.

We were staying at Lacam Lodge, which prides itself in being electricity-free, using gas for cooking and kerosene lamps to light the restaurant and bandas at night. Another feature was the toilets.

Being built on solid rock, digging ‘long-drop’ toilets is impossible, so instead the Lodge provides bucket loos. These look like ordinary toilets, but instead of a flush guests are provided with liberal quantities of sawdust to sprinkle as appropriate. It was ideal, and 100% effective in rendering the toilet odour-free. Every couple of hours one of the staff would enter the toilet via a back door to empty, clean and return the bucket (presumably ensuring the toilet was not in use at the time). This was a job we decided not to apply for, but to show our gratitude, left a healthy tip under the loo seat.

During our stay in Sipi, we were fascinated to be met by several groups of young people jogging and dancing their way along the road, singing, shouting and blowing whistles. We enquired of our local guide, Fred, what this meant and he told us with some pride that they were preparing for circumcision rites. He explained that these usually happen in the month of December in even numbered years. We thought of little babies, but no. Here, in the home of the Bagisu and Sabini tribes, circumcision is carried out on males, generally, between the ages of 16 and 26!

The ritual marks the transition into true manhood and qualifies the initiate to marry and take positions of leadership in the community. Initiates nominate themselves for the ritual in the previous May or June, which apparently gives them time to prepare for the event. I wondered how you could prepare for such an event. Circumcision is performed, with no anaesthetic, in public before family and friends, and even tourists can attend – although these tourists didn’t. Subsequently we noticed a number of young men wearing skirts – they no longer have to prove their manhood. Fred confirmed what we thought, again with great pride. He had been circumcised in his teens. Better to look back on than to look forward to, I thought.

That aside, Sipi Falls is a beautiful spot. There are four main falls, the last and longest of which provides a magnificent setting for Lacam Lodge. From our banda we could both see and hear the long and extraordinarily elegant cascade plunging 100 metres into the river below. It was a glorious view looking down into the valley and the plains beyond, towards the north-west and our home in Arua some 600 km distant.

On my birthday itself Fred took us along the edge of the ridge above the falls, and then steeply down into the valley itself. The slope was precipitous, involving some rather hairy walking/climbing, including an almost vertical ladder down part of the rock face, but it gave us great views of Lacam Lodge across the valley, and then the Falls themselves. As we descended, our daughter, Jo, rang to wish me a happy birthday and I received a birthday text message from friends in Doncaster, UK – a lightly surreal but delightful reminder of home.

At the foot of the Falls, out of the sunshine, it was very wet, muddy, slippery, and a little scary., but as we ascended back out of the valley into the sunshine again, we encountered a girl and young boy. Both were carrying great loads of bananas on their heads from the banana groves growing on the valley side. Being unable to balance anything much on our heads we were much impressed by their amazing ability to scale rock-face ladders with such a burden.

We stopped to talk to them as they, and we, rested on the way. The girl’s name was Emma. “It means ‘God is with us,’” she explained. “Of course, from Emmanuel,” I said, “Jesus’ name.” “You’re a Christian!” she responded with a bright smile, and told us she was a singer in her local church. She then sang us a song about heaven and the truth that if we trust in Jesus we will all be there together one day – ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’.

Our best wishes for a very happy Christmas and joy-filled New Year.

Health care delivery on the edge

Health care in rural Uganda is a million miles away from anything you might imagine if you have been brought up in UK since 1948. Yes, the NHS has plenty of faults and will never have enough resources, but it has an impressive way of swinging into action when anything life-threatening occurs.

Not so in Uganda. There are hospitals, yes, but they rarely have many, if any, doctors in them, and the nursing staff can be hard to find. When you do find them they may not be very quick to respond to patients’ needs, and the care is all done by ‘attendants’ – long-suffering relatives who volunteer to feed, wash, toilet and accompany the patient through 24 hours, sleeping on a mat beside the bed. Such is the tradition of extended family responsibility here.
There is nothing equivalent to a GP, unless you count the private medical practitioners who keep shop in the town and charge high prices for dubious investigations and treatments. And then there are the witchdoctors of course......

But on the ground in the rural areas are the health centres. These small buildings, often in remote locations in the bush, are the mainstay of healthcare for most. Of the five health centres run by the Church of Uganda in this Diocese, none has running water or mains electricity. A small solar panel might run a satellite phone and emergency lighting. Their equipment is old and battered, and they don’t have nearly enough of anything. They are staffed by a couple of nurses, midwives and nursing assistants, with perhaps a laboratory technician, a guard/groundsman and a cleaner. The staff live in at the centre in grass thatched houses like those of the community around. They provide out-patient consultations for everything from malaria to worms, from attempted suicide to HIV testing. They cater for a range of maternal and child health services including deliveries, family planning and immunizations. Some include in-patient facilities, and even those that don’t will put a mattress on the floor to keep a dehydrated cholera case under observation until he or she is well enough to move. None has a doctor or clinical officer.

Visiting Kei health centre for a meeting with staff and community members, I was reminded of the constraints under which they work. Kei is the most remote of the five health centres I help to supervise, but it is also one of the biggest and busiest. It serves an area of rural poverty very close to the Sudan border in the far north of the Diocese, and is reached by a terrible road that is regularly impassable in the rainy season. The health centre, like the region it serves, has seen its share of disturbance in recent years. But at present it is well run by Mary, a nurse In-charge who has a sweet but strong character, and is a very committed Christian.

After the meeting, while we were drinking tea and eating cassava and biscuits, Mary approached me to ask if we could take a seriously ill patient to the nearest government hospital on our way home. There are no ambulances here. She wanted to refer him because he had been an in-patient at Kei for two weeks, was deteriorating, and she felt he needed more specialist care. He has AIDS, and had a serious infection in one leg that was causing much swelling and pain. There were already five of us squashed in a ‘double cabin’ pick-up, which left only the open back of the truck available. But that was what was wanted. The staff and relatives spread blankets on the floor of the pick-up, then lifted the thin, frail man onto the back. One of his sons sat upright against the cab, cradling his father’s head on his lap so that the patient was as comfortable as possible on the rough road. We set off for the 20km journey with five of the family in attendance, together with bedding, cooking pots and personal belongings.

It wasn’t an ambulance journey I would have chosen for myself, but it was the only one available and the family were grateful. We left them at the hospital in Yumbe – the patient might get some medical attention there, eventually, but I doubt he will receive as much care and concern as he did whilst at Kei.

Prayer Mountain

A visit to the Murchison Falls just a week ago saw them at their most dramatic. Now, at the end of the rainy season, the Victoria Nile, wide and languid for much of its course, was full as the white water cascaded towards the narrow cleft in the rocks before plunging 140 feet to the river below and on to Lake Albert. In the brilliant sunshine it was truly awesome with clouds of spray and rainbows in profusion.

That experience was in marked contrast to aggressive and objectionable baboons, one of which decided to leap through the open window of our Land Cruiser whilst we were waiting for the ferry at Paraa. No one was in the car at the time but the intruder was chased out empty handed, and without causing any damage.

Some 10 minutes later, however, we managed to suffer a 3 inch gash in our tyre as a result of a torn piece of metal on the ramp on to the ferry. But even that had its upside as three South African employees of British American Tobacco who were making the same crossing executed an impressive Formula One style wheel change, completing the whole operation in the time it took to cross the river – around 7 minutes! The Parable of the Good Samaritan came to mind!

We had gone to Murchison Park with Emma and Pete, and Laura, British expatriate doctors and a midwife, also living and working at Kuluva Hospital. It was a brief weekend’s break from work, and en route to Murchison Park we decided to visit the Nebbi Prayer Mountain some 20 km beyond the town of the same name. We had heard a great deal about the Prayer Mountain as a place to pray, praise, and find peace and space to gain a renewed and God-centred perspective on life.

The Prayer Mountain is a Retreat Centre built on the Korean pattern and belonging to Nebbi Diocese, Madi/West Nile’s southern neighbour. The foundation stone on the main chapel was laid in 1996 and the whole site was funded and built by a retired Korean Business Executive at a time when the present Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi, was Bishop of Nebbi.

Prayer Mountain is set in a stunningly beautiful countryside, close to the Congo border, and is made up of nine Prayer Points marked by small stone ‘chapels’ located at various places on the mountainside. Each Prayer Point has its own unique and powerfully symbolic design, giving a particular focus which individuals can use to direct their prayer.

The focuses for prayer reflect a global concern, but naturally with a particular emphasis on the needs of Africa. There is also an emphasis on young people, families, and the worldwide need for revival and spiritual renewal. Different arrangements and numbers of windows feature strongly in the design of the small Prayer Points buildings symbolising, amongst other things, the 10 Commandments, the 9 Fruits of the Spirit, the 66 Books of the Bible, the 12 disciples, and so on. Through the windows you can see out to the hills beyond in every direction which gives everything a sense of space, freedom. But the often very strenuous walks between the various Prayer Points prevent any possibility of prayer becoming simply a form of self-indulgence and escapism. Prayer involves work.

On this occasion, ours was simply a fleeting visit; an opportunity to visit somewhere of which we had heard but had never visited. Places to stop and reflect, places to retreat to in order to regroup and move forward again, are few and far between in NW Uganda. Life is full of people and busy-ness, although often not very productive. But even in our brief time at Prayer Mountain we were able to gain some new insights into our work here. Perhaps especially that, whilst living in Uganda, God has not simply called us to work for him with and alongside others. He also wants to work with us and to continue his work of transformation in us.

Murchison Falls has always had the capacity to impress with its power and grandeur, and Prayer Mountain is also about power - the power to transform and change individuals, and so the world. It is just 90 minutes from Kuluva, and God-willing we will return to Prayer Mountain to be empowered for the work God has sent us here to do, and to be transformed a little more ourselves.