For work, sometimes no danger can block Patty

Patty Huston-Holm, the ever-present Communications Director at the UCU Partners NGO, has stepped away from her role after 11 years of volunteer service in the position and close to 14 years of working with the organization. Despite stepping away from her leadership role, she remains a contributor of articles to the organization’s communications platform, the blog. During her recent trip to Uganda, she had a chat with Constantine Odongo.

Patty Huston-Holm is a courageous lady. In March 2026, as many passengers were postponing travel plans because flight costs had risen by up to 30% following the onset of the war in Iran, Patty and her husband, Mike Holm, booked their flights to Uganda.  

Hardly two months later, as the war still raged on, an outbreak of the Ebola virus disease was announced in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), putting the country’s neighbor to the east, Uganda, at risk of the disease. Indeed, on May 15, Uganda, too, declared an Ebola outbreak, following imported cases from the DRC. Despite the danger, the Holms did not cancel their trip.

By the time they landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on June 21, the country had registered two deaths among the 20 confirmed cases. And that was not all. Many airlines had cancelled flights to Uganda and the DRC, as part of the wider safety measures to keep passengers and crew members safe. 

In 2012, when Mike made his first trip to Uganda, it was to understand the work his wife was undertaking in the country. Patty had first come to Uganda in 2009 as part of a church missionary group. Her subsequent trips from 2011 to 2014 saw her take up a writing assignment for the Friends of UCU newsletter, a teaching volunteer job at the Uganda Christian University (UCU) Department of Mass Communication and a mentorship assignment of the journalists of the university’s community newspaper, The Standard. 

The 2015 trip coincided with the April 2 Al-Shabaab attack on Garissa University College in Kenya, leaving 148 people, mostly students, dead. Because the attackers targeted Christian students, there were fears that a similar attack could be replicated at Christian universities in the region, including Uganda. Uganda is a primary contributor of troops to the African Union mission fighting the Al-Shabaab in Somalia. 

Those fears sent many Americans who were on the UCU campus packing their bags to return home. The Holms were not among those who left. Instead, they devised an escape strategy in case the attack on UCU should materialize.

“Mike and I purchased wire cutters and we did a little trial to figure out how we would escape if we heard the pop-pop of gunfire on campus,” Patty said during a July 7 interview she granted UCU Partners at her Tech Park residence on the UCU Main Campus in Mukono. This was Patty’s third of 17 trips, sometimes as long as three months each, to Uganda. Luckily, Al-Shabaab did not attack any educational institution in Uganda as had been feared in 2015.

Patty and Mike during a 2026 visit with Epajjar Ojulu, a Ugandan journalist and former supervisor for The Standard where both Patty and Mike volunteered for six weeks in 2013

It also was in 2015 when Patty retired from her full-time job as the state arts and communication supervisor for the Ohio Department of Education’s Division of Career-Technical Education. She, thereafter, assumed full responsibility as a volunteer Communications Director for the UCU Partners, a Pennsylvania-based non-profit that has been supporting UCU for more than two decades. Through UCU Partners, Patty has also sponsored 12 UCU students with full and partial tuition.

The UCU Partners Communications Director works with the Executive Director and the UCU communications/PR director and coordinates strategies on story ideas and communications initiatives, as well as providing professional advice and work feedback while monitoring the output of team members.

“When I started out working with Mark Bartels (Partners’ Executive Director), I was writing all the stories,” Patty narrated on a sunny July 6 afternoon during a chat in the couple’s sitting room. She has previously worked as a reporter, editor and photographer for four daily newspapers and two weekly papers in the USA.

“I would come to Uganda for three months and develop a bank of stories,” she said.

Sometimes, she came to Uganda twice a year to write for UCU Partners, teach and mentor UCU undergraduate journalism students and tutor post-graduate students in how to write research.  

“I especially enjoyed working with master’s level students in fields outside my expertise,” she said. “While I helped them with writing, they taught me things about theology, technology, social work and more that I wouldn’t otherwise have known.” 

Not long afterwards, she developed a model in which Ugandan writers, mostly UCU journalism students, are trained to write for UCU Partners. Through this initiative, more than 20 students have been trained, with many of them going on to secure journalism and communications positions partly because of the experience they gained through their work for UCU Partners. 

For the current and future interns, including those she participated in interviewing as part of the panel hiring the next lot for UCU Partners, Patty offers counsel: “Be curious and have the intuition to know what extra information you can add to a story to make it richer, rather than just getting the work done so you can get paid.”

“I have also been encouraging them to use AI responsibly; to support them to work, but not to allow it to replace them in their work,” she said. “They can use AI to get tips, suggestions on interview questions and then do unique, independent work.” 

As the Communications Director, she often documented where the interns got employed and what kind of jobs they secured. That information has formed part of the organization’s annual report to its board members.

During her tenure with UCU Partners, in 2022, Patty oversaw the launch of an annual print and electronic edition of the organization’s work, the “Ebenezer.” The publication, now in its fifth year, is a collection of articles in a permanent format beyond the regular blog communications.

After 11 years at the helm of the UCU Partners editorial team, on Dec. 31, 2025, Patty, an accomplished author, teacher and consultant, stepped away from the position.

Patty walking with children in African Village, Kiyunga, Mukono District, Uganda, in 2018

Her resignation preceded the 2026 release of her fourth book, the hardcover version of “Dolls in Trees: 100+ True Stories.” The book provides insights into how ordinary people, including the author, think about and do both extraordinary and everyday things. In addition to this, Patty has previously published “Shattered” – a story of a teen girl who loses the use of her legs and much of her arms and hands; “Kid in the House” – a narrative of a teen boy who is elected as the youngest representative of the Ohio legislature and “Inviting a Giraffe to Tea,” which details how six misfit Ugandan wildlife animals learn to get along.  

On July 15, Patty and Mike returned to the USA under government officials’ scrutiny about Ebola exposure. American customs officials at the Washington, D.C., airport cleared the couple to return home but did weekly phone checks until Aug. 7. On July 28, the Government of Uganda declared the end of the Ebola disease outbreak in the country.

“Up to the day we left for Uganda on June 20, some family and friends were cautioning us not to go,” Patty said. “I tried reassuring them that my ‘family’ in Uganda told me it was safe just like when we were warned about mpox that we were vaccinated for and never got in 2024.”

For Patty, like many journalists, as long as a danger does not block an activity, she chooses to show up, whether in a Ugandan classroom, on a reporting assignment or in solidarity with friends. She did just that on July 3, when she watched her newest “son,” Jimmy Siyasa, graduate with a master’s in strategic communication at the UCU Main Campus in Mukono. 

“If you’ve never been to Uganda or simply do a one-time mission trip to any country, you don’t get to know and trust the people who live there,” Patty said. “While I have certainly seen poverty, I have been blessed to know in Uganda some of the best and smartest people in the world.”

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To support UCU 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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