(NOTE: The next three days will feature one American woman’s account of a recent trip to Uganda and a first meeting with a Uganda Christian University student sponsored through Uganda Partners. On the fourth day – Thursday – there will be a profile of the student.)

By Linda H. Bassert

(First of three parts – before meeting Daniel)

 At one point in our trip, it was said, “When you come to Uganda, it infects you.”  

In the best sense of that expression, I agree.   

The decision to join others from our church on a trip to Uganda, led by Mark Bartels, executive director, Uganda Christian University (UCU) Partners, was easy.  My husband and I had sponsored a young man, Daniel Edotu, from the time he was six years old, initially through Compassion International and now UCU.  We had never met Daniel who is now in his final year with UCU’s School of Law.

We found out about UCU Partners because a board member is from our church, Church of the Epiphany, Anglican, in Chantilly, VA, and because the UCU Vice Chancellor, and his predecessor, have visited our church.  We had encouraged Daniel to apply to UCU because we knew we could continue to help him through UCU Partners. Tuition payments to UCU are tax deductible donations in the United States, as UCU Partners has non-profit status.

As excited as we were to be able to visit Daniel in person, I could not have anticipated the depth of what our visit would mean to him, and how much more the trip would impact me.

Our flight on Ethiopian Airlines was over 18 hours long, going through Addis Ababa Airport (Ethiopia) where we changed planes, and flew into Entebbe airport near Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There, on a Saturday night after going through immigration and collecting our luggage, we were also able to exchange our dollars into Ugandan Shillings (UGX).  Everyone in our group had created a What’s App account, and this was very useful for group communication throughout our trip.  

We then loaded ourselves into a small bus, which in Uganda is called a “glider,” (or sometimes coaster) for the 40-minute drive to a Church Conference Center, where we would be staying for a few days. Driving in Uganda is on the left side of the road in each direction, as it is in Great Britain, so it was helpful that we were not driving ourselves around the country.

Members of our group each had a small booklet with Morning and Evening Prayer, Psalms and Readings, and journal pages, (a journal that now I treasure), and we gave thanks for our arrival, and prayed Evening Prayer on the bus, as would be our habit mornings and evenings for the rest of the trip.  

Sunday began early:  Up in time for breakfast at 7 a.m. and departure at 8 a.m. To our delight, there were half a dozen monkeys on the grounds between our building and the dining hall.  Every breakfast throughout our trip included offerings of fresh pineapple, watermelon and small bananas  as well as other options.   

Then we boarded our glider bus again to drive to St. Paul’s Cathedral in Kampala and join a joyful worship service there. English is the national language, and I had undervalued the comfort that would bring, to know that anywhere we went, we could understand and be understood.

A team visiting Uganda and Uganda Christian University (UCU) from Church of the Epiphany, Anglican, in Chantilly, Virginia, USA, shares insights and impressions. Included are interactions with schoolchildren and at the October 2024 UCU graduation.

Two others joining our group for most of the rest of the trip were Dorothy Tushemereirwe, from the UCU Development office, and Chris Mogal, a UCU graduate who has a video and photography business that he started while still a student.  Chris was hired by UCU Partners to take photos and video to create a video of our trip experience, both for us and for UCU Partners’ use. 

Our visit to the cathedral included a tour that highlighted some of the difficult early history of the Anglican and Christian Church in Uganda, which reveres the memories of a long list of martyrs who were tortured and executed for their faith.  We learned that Uganda is the country, Buganda is a kingdom and tribe (about 30% of the country), and Luganda is a language.

From the Cathedral and Anglican complex on a hill in Kampala, we then drove to the Kasubi Tombs, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and location of a former Buganda King’s palace, in use from 1856-1884. Any women in our group wearing slacks instead of long skirts were given fabric to wrap around their waists and legs before being allowed into the complex.  We made our way to a large round thatched roof building and throne room, surrounded on the complex by other smaller similar structures, still inhabited and cared for today by descendants of the kings’ wives, where we were invited to sit on woven mats on the floor, as our guide shared the history of this place, and more about Uganda.  

This was our first opportunity to learn more about the Ugandan and Buganda culture:  Kings don’t die – they “disappear.” A king is not allowed to attend funerals, except for his father’s.  And a king is buried next to his grandfather, not his father, so he may rest in peace.  A man is not allowed to shake hands with his mother-in-law or even watch her eating.  A man cannot marry someone in his own clan. The King has no clan, and a former king took a wife from each clan.  Today, the king marries one person.  Even the architecture told a story. The first three concentric rings in the ceiling structure represent Kings, and each subsequent ring represents a clan.  

To my personal delight, the Kasubi Tombs tour concluded at a building where they showed us fabric made from the bark of the fig tree, considered one of the first textiles. This fabric was used as the canvas for many paintings available for purchase. My husband and I purchased two paintings, and I considered that answered prayer, as I had been hoping to find a work of art to bring home from Uganda.  

The next day we visited the Anglican Martyrs Museum at Namugongo, a museum built on the execution site where 13 Anglicans and 12 Catholics were tortured, dismembered, and burned on June 3rd 1886, now honored as Martyrs Day in Uganda.  Other martyrs who were killed elsewhere, and one white martyr, Bishop James Huntington, also are honored here.  Gruesome and graphic sculptures show what happened, paired with a mural on the ceiling showing Angels carrying the martyrs to heaven.  An adjacent building built around a small chapel includes other murals on the early history of the Anglican Church in Uganda. On Martyrs’ Day each year about 50,000 persons make a pilgrimage to this Kampala location.  

Equally impactful to understanding Ugandan history and deep-rooted Christian faith was our visit to Uganda Christian University’s young medical and dental schools. The UCU Schools of Medicine and Dentistry were founded in 2018 to address an acute need for medical and dental professionals in the country. Already UCU’s School of Medicine is renowned for excellence in Uganda.

Currently, only 50 students are accepted annually in the School of Medicine due to space limitations, though many more are applying for the program.  In order to expand the number of students they can take, they want to raise funds to build a location on the main UCU campus, where students could study for their first two years, and then use the Kampala campus for practical studies in medicine for the last two years. To create this building, UCU Partners and UCU will together need to raise $2 to $3 million. Long-term goals include having their own accredited lab, and building an entire teaching hospital complex. Once UCU has its own lab, they can apply for grants.

Uganda has few pathologists, and much lab work has to be sent to South Africa and other countries. I was impressed that UCU’s School of Medicine and School of Dentistry are moving forward in faith, having already written the curriculum for a future Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Technology. They also have almost completed the curriculum for a graduate studies program in medicine.  

For the UCU School of Medicine, the profession is about compassionate care, and making the world a better place. They shared that their mode of training health care workers is quite unique in including the spiritual aspects of health care. Both the medical and dental schools ask, “Can we create a doctor who will be a doctor and remain a Christian?” 

Pediatrics is a major emphasis, because parents will pay money to treat a child who is suffering, rather than to pay for their own care. Uganda also has a young population – due to losses of older generations in previous years of wars and conflict and because the number of children in a family continues as a traditional expectation. There are many young families in Uganda.  

Both here and at a clinic we later visited, obstetrics is another major area of emphasis.  By the time most women arrive at the hospital, they usually are having birth complications beyond the ability of midwives and others in the villages. Both medical and dental schools do some community outreach, going into underserved communities to have clinics and educate communities on health and hygiene.  Complementing the School of Medicine is the main  campus’ Nursing Studies program, which graduated its first class in 2012, and which also has a community outreach component to their studies.

(TOMORROW: Meeting Daniel)

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To support  Uganda Christian University programs, students, activities, and services, go to  www.ugandapartners.org  and click on the “donate” button, or contact UCU Partners Executive Director, Mark Bartels, at  m.t.bartels@ugandapartners.org.

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