Shared joys, shared grief – a visit to Kenya and Uganda

On first impressions the churches in Kenya and Uganda looked very similar to those in the UK.   The church services had familiar liturgy and hymns. The songs from the worship group were too loud!  The senior clergy were concerned with their building plans.  The newsletters said that their church had not met yet their diocesan quota.   But there was much that was different too.  The worshippers were black and much more smartly dressed than we, white, visitors.   They were poor (on average living on about 1$ per person per day {compared with the $80 per person per day we live on in the UK}), they were young (over 50% of were less than 16 years old), and their churches, which were packed, were very simple in structure and furnishings.  They were also happy, welcoming and committed to worshipping and serving our same Lord, and serving their local communities.

We had gone to Kenya and Uganda to see the work of some of Tearfund’s partners working with the poor; in particular the Anglican Church of Kenya around Mount Kenya, St Johns  Community Centre in the Pumwani slums of Nairobi, and the Diocese of Kigezi’s Water and Sanitation project around Kabale, Uganda.   And incredibly impressive and humbling their lives and their work were.    Their churches and their lives were at the centre of their communities as they reached out holistically, concerned equally for the material and spiritual needs of all the local folk.    They brought their communities together and in a genuinely participatory way got them to analyse and address their needs, whether it was farming and marketing more efficiently, caring for the HIV/AIDS victims and orphans, providing clean water and more healthy environments, or looking after the most needy.  It was good to see the vicarsrolling their sleeves up, getting their hands dirty, digging, mending cars, building, teaching, counselling, loving as well as preaching.

One memorable day we met Georgina and Kenneth, as we were shown something of the Diocese of Kibale’s (DoK) water projects in the remote, beautiful, mountainous area around Kabale.   We had seen the capped springs, the pipes and tanks and the taps set in the villages and schools, we had seen the harvesting of rain water through home made water jars and tanks, and we were now taken to a village where DoK had been working for some time and where many of the homesteads had introduced ‘ideal home’ conditions, where hygiene and sanitation systems had been introduced in most impressive ways. We had been greeted to the village by all the ladies singing together songs of welcome to us, and we were sitting together talking about their lives and how the DoK projects had transformed their lives.  They were wonderfully hospitable to us, happy and bubbly, until we asked them about HIV/AIDS and then Georgina, a big, imposing women got quite animated.   It was killing their most active members of the community, they could not afford to buy the ARV drugs which would help those with AIDS, she herself had lost ‘several of her children’ to AIDS and was now looking after her grandchildren.  ‘Everyone in this community is affected by AIDS’ said Kenneth, the DoK worker who was guiding us around.   ‘My brother and sister-in-law, and their daughter have recently died of AIDS, and my wife has lost her sister and three brothers.’  He is now responsible for looking after ten children, two of his own and the rest from his siblings.  But he did not complain, indeed on top of his normal job with the DoK water project he was working an eight hour night shift at the local hospital.  The endurance, the resilience of such people is remarkable.  They survive, in part at least, because of the strength they have in each other and in their God.  They rejoice together, they sing together, they work together and they grieve together.  We could learn much from their sense of community, as well as what it means to be Church.  We certainly learnt more about what it means to lead Christ-like lives.

Brian E Woolnough attends Christ Church, Abingdon and is a Tearfund Representative