First Parish Bedford UU

“White Men Stuck in Mud!”
A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons
On his recent trip to Uganda with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
Delivered on Sunday, November 21, 2010
At The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts


A week ago, in a teeming town called Lira in northern Uganda, our group stopped for coffee at a place named the Sankofa Café and the symbol on the sign out front was the bird that you see on your order of service.

Sitting to write this sermon on Friday, still a bit dazed by travel, my mind drifted randomly back to the Sankofa Café. Sankofa is what this sermon is all about.

Sankofa derives from a West African proverb, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”  The Sankofa symbol is that of a bird flying forward but with its head turned backwards taking an egg off its back.  The Sankofa is an ancient and ubiquitous African symbol and when a burial site in lower Manhattan was unearthed a few years ago, even there the Sankofa was found marking the coffins of free and enslaved Africans.

The Sankofa symbolizes taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress through the wise use of knowledge.

There’s one other African concept with which I want to preface this sermon and it is ubuntu.  Maybe ubuntu also is somewhere in the back of your mind but it is the prevailing African assumption that there is no such thing as a solitary individual human being.  Human beings exist only in the context of families and communities.  I am because you are.

Archbishop Tutu once said, “Ubuntu is the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity.  We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.”

This sermon is all about sankofa and ubuntu (and I’ll come back to this) but, for now, I’ll just tell you the facts.

I returned Wednesday from two weeks on what is called a JustJourney to Uganda sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the UU Service Committee whose Board of Trustees I chair.  The UUA is in relationship with a UU church in the capital city of Kampala and, likewise, the UUSC is partnered with (and provides funding and technical assistance) to a Ugandan organization that is helping refugees return home to their villages in northern Uganda following a two-decades long “forgotten” war.

This was a war which resulted in the death, abduction and disappearance of tens of thousands of people, a war which the world pretty much ignored, which only recently has subsided, and which forced as much as 90% of the north Ugandan population to live in chaotic and fearful internally displaced persons (IDP) camps.

This was the first time that the UUA and UUSC have collaborated on a JustJourney and, in retrospect, I wish that I had encouraged others of you to have joined us because it was an extraordinary experience.

There will be future JustJourneys to Haiti, back to Africa, to Latin America and to other places where UUSC partners with human rights activists, and I will encourage your participation because – along with so many other things we do – the church must leave the building if we are to keep faith with sankofa and with ubuntu.

This was my first trip to Africa and I am not an authority, though I am also told that anyone who begins a sentence with “Africa is…” is likely to be wrong because every generalization is inaccurate.  It is safe to say, however, that Uganda is in east Africa, south of Sudan, Zaire to its west, Kenya to the east, Rwanda and Tanzania to the south.  I doubt that previously I could have placed Uganda on the map but, well, mambo sawa sawa.

The land I saw was lush and green, tropical and beautiful but, even still and despite it being the rainy season, at the end of most days my face and neck were caked with iron-red dust.  Though one day I walked across the equator, the climate was warm but not oppressive.  The food was starchy and basic – rice and potatoes and cassava, ground maize called posho, mashed plantains called matoke, chicken, beef and goat; the beer was light and wet and cut the dust.  Though both Ugandans and Americans had to listen closely to decipher our peculiar accents, the people were friendly and welcoming (“You are welcome” we repeatedly were told) and they laughed easily.  Our accommodations were basic: usually no hot water and often no electricity.  Unlike the locals who careened in traffic in cars, motor scooters and bicycles over-loaded with, well, everything, we traveled by bus (more about that later) and by four-wheel drive vans.

On our first day, we met with members of the UU Church in Kampala who with their minister Rev. Mark Kiyimba – you may recall this from Cathy Cordes’ report to us after visiting a year ago – are courageously challenging the outrageous Anti-Homosexuality Bill that proposes to kill gay people and to jail those who know gay people but fail to turn them over to the government.

At our hotel we met with Thomas and Marie, Peter and Frank, gay and lesbian members of the Kampala church.  And we met in secret as they are always on guard against informants for the government of long-time dictator Yoweri Mouseveni, successor to a long line of repressive dictators, including the notorious Idi Amin.
 
The AHB, it turns out, has been vigorously promoted by right-wing evangelical forces here in the United States such that, were it not for American money and influence, it is doubtful that the issue would independently have arisen in Uganda. Ironically, pre-Christian Uganda was known for its sexual diversities and even the current beloved king of the traditional Buganda clan is said to be gay.

Though world opinion has stalled adoption of the AHB, Ugandan gays and lesbians are still imprisoned, threatened and harassed. One newspaper incites attacks by publishing photos and addresses on its front page.  Thomas and Marie, Peter and Frank told us of being disowned by their families, fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes and beaten.  They evade detection by posing as heterosexual couples, sleep each night in different places, and some make plans to leave the country in search of safety.

Despite this and with support from the UUA’s Standing on the Side of Love campaign and their American partner church, the All Souls UU Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Kampala Unitarians have openly rallied for gay rights and they offer support, refuge and sexuality education to their community.  It was a privilege to meet with them and to witness to their courage.

Mambo sawa sawa. (Literally, this means in Swahili, “Things are getting better.”  When we met with UU’s in Kampala, Rev. Mark periodically interjected this phrase in his sermon with the congregation, repeating it in call-and-response fashion – and to make sure everyone remained awake!)

In Kampala, a city choked with traffic, we visited the traditional Bugandan parliament where we chanced to meet the Prime Minister and also the king’s palace where, in the caretaker’s front yard, there were rusting car parts, remnants of the Rolls Royces given by Queen Elizabeth but destroyed in the era of Idi Amin.  On the palace grounds, we were joined by small children who, like children everywhere, insisted on swinging between our joined hands as we were guided through fields of maize to see the chambers where Amin tortured and killed his enemies.  Giggling children and memories of terror coexist.

In a land so bloodied and corrupt, it is a huge challenge to affirm the common good.  Uganda will have elections in February and everywhere we went there was boisterous campaigning, though it is assumed that Mouseveni will cling to power, every wall was covered by posters for a profusion of candidates.  There is no tradition of peaceful transfers of power and the opposition is the enemy.
 
From Kampala, we headed north by bus to Gulu.  This was a mistake because rains had so muddied the unpaved road that late at night in the middle of nowhere we became stuck in the mud.  With some people up to their knees in mud and others attempting to dig, push or pull us out, we attracted the attention of villagers of all ages – who were vastly entertained – and, after a while, there appeared the Honorable Representative, a local official who got on his mobile phone and appealed for help, exclaiming into the phone, “White men stuck in mud!”  When women in our group cast him a glance, he added, “White ladies too!”  Our African-American companion felt overlooked.

Eventually we abandoned our bus (a road grader rescued it the next day) and we were ferried by SUV’s to our destination, arriving just before dawn at a center established by the Italian Comboni missionaries in Gulu.  Thereafter we traveled by four-wheel drive vans.

Mambo sawa sawa.

We visited the ruins of Fort Baker, an early center of the slave trade that supplied slaves, not to America, but to the Arab Middle East.  Amidst beautiful scenery, we were shown the human holding pens and a wide expanse of flat rock where those deemed unfit for slavery were beheaded, leaving a proliferation of axe-marks gouged in the stone.  Beauty and horror, again, coexist.

We made our way to a place called Pader, a once most dangerous place in the war, now a bustling market center that looks like the Wild West with broad dirt streets filled with animals, bicycles, carts and lorries, shops and storefronts.  Pader is home to UUSC’s partner in Uganda, Caritas, known in the US as Catholic Relief Services.  It seems like common sense but many relief agencies do not make use of local organizations that are already in place on-the-ground.  Part of UUSC’s model is to partner eye-to-eye with those most familiar with local conditions. Not an aid organization but an advocate for human rights, UUSC fosters, not dependency, but empowerment and, around the world, always views its work through a lens of race, class and gender.

In northern Uganda a majority of the population is Catholic, but it is a Catholicism that blends eclectically with traditional African religion.  Drums are customary at mass, for example, and rituals blend.  In a war-torn environment, the church can be a more stable and trustworthy institution than any other; and thus we spent much time with fathers, sisters, monsignors; we sang What a Friend We Have in Jesus and How Great Thou Art; and we did so gladly, enthusiastically.
 
Beginning in the 1980’s, the world dismissed the war in northern Uganda as but a tribal conflict but it was much more, ultimately involving ethnicity, oil, megapowers, and terror. Sudan and others funded the rebels: a woman named Alice Lakwena and her successor Joseph Kony of the LRA, the Lord’s Resistance Army – terrorists who made a toxic brew of Christianity, witchcraft and a mystical spirit cult of personality.

Its military goals obscure, the LRA preyed on civilians, killing, raping, and mutilating the people; stealing and brutalizing their children; hurling babies against trees and displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process.  Typically, boys were made into child soldiers and first ordered to rape their sister or mother, or kill their parents.

We visited the Aboke Girl School where in the middle of the night in 1996, 139 girls were kidnapped.  Pursued by a fiercely heroic Italian nun head mistress, 109 girls were released while the others were assigned as wives to LRA commanders, murdered or disappeared.

We heard the story of a mother who was offered the release of her daughter but when the rebels refused to release others, the mother turned the deal down.

The main victims of the LRA were the Acholi people, though the Acholi were equally vulnerable to attack by government forces.  As a result, more than a million Acholi moved to camps.  Unable to plant their crops, hunger was widespread, as well as disease (AIDS rates as high as 20%), despair and cultural decay.

After years of conflict, negotiation and sheer exhaustion, the war has now subsided though Kony and the LRA remain at large in the Congo or Central African Republic where they survive as an army-for-hire with no agenda and no purpose other than its own survival.

Today the Acholi people are returning to their villages but their challenges are immense.  Often the villages were burned and only bones remain.  Children whose parents were killed return but do not know the boundaries of their family land (orally described as, for example, “from this tree to that anthill.” Land disputes abound.  There is no livelihood.  Victims and perpetrators must coexist.

It seemed the world forgot.  There are as many casualties in northern Uganda as in Darfur, yet Darfur received 30-times the amount of aid.

We visited remote villages deep in the bush, walking through fields of cotton, cassava, sesame and sorghum.  I was the first white person to visit some villages; in one a baby was named after me.  We met with widows and orphans. We visited adult literacy classes.  We met farmers who, with oxen supplied by UUSC, were making a sustainable living.  We visited an appropriate technology center where, again with help from UUSC and MIT’s design lab, we saw simple devices for shelling corn, for winnowing grain, as well as bicycles made into tool-sharpening grinding wheels or bicycle ambulances.

In village after village, we were welcomed with exuberant dancing, drumming and songs – often with messages encouraging communal life, celebrating return and resisting stigmatization.  Dance troupes met us a mile or more outside their village, then slowly led our processional of vans to the thatched huts of their villages.

We heard how, when they returned, rituals were performed to cleanse the villages of bad spirits, to bury bones and to reconcile victims and perpetrators.

We heard from a woman named Jennifer who, after her village was attacked in 1996 by the LRA, spent two days hiding in the bush with her young children until the rebels were gone. Moved to a camp, it was attacked in 2000 by the LRA.  Trapped, she watched as LRA members sorted and butchered her companions, some of whose body parts were boiled in a kettle.  Before she was forced to eat this, however, the government army entered the camp and gave chase to the LRA soldiers and Jennifer, taking her four-year-old with her, made a 3-day journey on foot to her home village. There she learned her family members had been killed and she too was targeted.  Eventually, Jennifer came to the attention of UUSC and now works as a social worker with Caritas.

Jennifer supports not only her own two children, but seven of her sisters’ children as well, because her two sisters were killed — one by the Ugandan Army, one by the LRA.  Her story is typical, but now when Jennifer engages with her clients, they learn that she is truly standing with them, having experienced many of the same horrors and hardship they endured during the long time of war.

We heard from a man named Mons Simon who was captured by the LRA and kept captive for 8 years.  Taken to the Sudan for training, he traveled with 200 others, of whom 150 died of cholera.  He survived by eating leaves and tomato vines.  Forced to fight, he joined those who pillaged and ate the livers of their victims to appease their commanders, and he killed lest he be killed.  Escaping, he returned home where – afraid and traumatized – he stayed inside for six months but eventually made his way to a Caritas reception center for rehabilitation.  Caritas changed his life by entrusting him with a job as night watchman and now he has a second-hand clothing business.  Asked how he was sustained in captivity, he recalled praying.  Knowing, however, that God had died or abandoned him, Simon prayed, “God, do you have a brother who can help me?”

Over and over we heard of horror and trauma, but also of amazing courage, hope and the resilience of the human spirit.

Mambo sawa sawa.

After our time in the north, we took a break and visited Kabarega National Park and Murchison Falls along the River Nile.  Refreshingly, we saw herds of water buffalo, oribi, Jackson hart beast, astonishing giraffe, elephants, hippos, warthogs, exotic birds.  It was a welcome refuge from the war but even there we learned that the owner of the camp where we stayed was murdered by the LRA in 2005.

And so we returned to Kampala where again we met with LGBT activists and, last Sunday, attended the open-air slum New Life UU church with exuberant gospel praise singers, a sermon by Rev. Mark on unity and diversity, and a full-course starchy lunch.

On our last day, we visited a rural school the church sponsors outside the city of Masaka with 500 students who danced and sang to our delight and that of their dressed-to-the-nines parents.  And we enjoyed another starchy lunch.  It is this New Life School where soon we at First Parish will be adopting some students, thus expanding our educational assistance to include others in Transylvania and the Philippines.

So, yes, this is a sermon about sankofa and ubuntu.  The war in northern Uganda, we hope, is mostly past and yet the people move forward.  To do so they must recover their health, their dignity, their livelihood, the traditions of their communal life and commitment to the common good.  It is not wrong to go back for what you have forgotten.  They must look back, to what was awful as well as to what is good that they may be whole.  Perhaps, in solidarity with those like Caritas, the UUA, UUSC and us, God’s sisters and brothers will help answer their prayers.

As we journeyed, our group was periodically asked what we noticed: the colors, the sounds, the similarities and differences from home.  Extreme though the differences appear, they are to me increasingly illusory and unreal.  I am because others are.  I am because of parents and grandparents, including relatives I never knew.  I am because of family and friends and the communities whose commitment to the common good included me.  I am because of Thomas, Peter, Frank and Marie.  I am because of Jennifer and Simon.  I am because of so many remembered and forgotten, living and dead.

When we were asked, “Who is in your family,” the answer was never limited to biological relatives but included many adopted and extended members.

On Thanksgiving, we’ll hold hands and give thanks for one another and life and its bursting plenitude, but as well for the great cloud of witnesses from around the world who remind us that we are because others are.

It is a great interconnectedness that binds us together, in spite of time and death and the space between the stars.

May we give thanks.