FRIDAY, JUNE 15: PRESBYTERY AT KASANDA

An earlier morning. Ray met us in the breakfast room. I was feeling a bit under the weather, so I didn’t want anything but toast. Ray was excited. There had been a storm in the night and the rain had brought with it a swarm of termites. The outside areas of the hotel were covered over by them!

The van arrived at exactly 7:30. Lisa and I weren’t quite ready, but we made it down by 7:45. We had our longest day ahead: the presbytery meeting at Kasanda, a rural village about 50 miles from Kampala.

Traffic was much lighter at this time of the morning, and we made quick time to the Hot Stop. We loaded up on samosas, meat pies, and our favorite strawberry coconut cookies. Back on the road, we cleared town in no time and re-traced our route to Mpigi. At the round-a-bout where the road forks off to Mpigi we stopped. Pastor Jimmy and two of his elders were waiting for us. So the van had the four Muzungus, four from Kiwatule, and three from Mpigi. Only 11 of the 14 capacity.

The drive to Kasanda is amazingly beautiful. We drove along ridges that gave us views of the valley below and we dropped down into papyrus swamps leaving us to look up at the undulating hills and ridges. With the rainy season ending everything was unbelievably green and bright yellow, red, and purple flowers shown from the top of trees. Living conditions grew steadily more depressing. We didn’t see the round houses from Jinja. Here, the people lived in mud homes with tree branches supporting the mud. Many had cracks in them that had to let in rain.

In the past, the road to Kasanda was under construction only a few miles from the Mpigi turn off. That project is finally done, so fair to good pavement now covers about 2 hours of the nearly 3.

But the last is still dirt, and although it is smoother than it once was, it is still challenging dirt. We passed an amazing number of people, cattle, and goats as we flew along the unpaved surface. Vincent tried to break every time he saw a bump and he was often successful in limiting the pain to all our backsides!

Even though they have owned property for half a year, we still met at the old property. The reed walls and thatched roof were exactly as I remembered it. As always, there were kids waiting outside to greet us and to play. We hurried inside because we had a very long agenda.

After a brief worship time, Joseph called the meeting to order. There were many things to discuss. A new church was asking to join the presbytery and the pastor wanted to be accepted into presbytery. This produced a very long discussion about the whole acceptance process. It seems their goal is to have 10 churches in the presbytery soon, so they felt it very important to establish procedures. Once that was done, they had to examine the pastor. Many of the questions had to do with his relationship to the church they all come from, John’s church in Ntinda. In fact, there were more questions about that than about this man’s beliefs!

Once this was over, it was time for the election of a new moderator and clerk. There was very much discussion about who should be nominated and whether Joseph could serve another term. Their initial minutes didn’t make the reelection question clear, so they discussed and decided only one term for a moderator without a break. After much discussion, it was decided that a ruling elder should be the next moderator and Daniel Kato from Kiwatule was eventually elected.

Michael could be reelected as clerk, but that wasn’t the way things went. A nurse from Kasanda pushed for the job and she beat Michael in the election by several votes. There seemed to be a very strong sense of wanting to get part of the administration of the presbytery away from Kiwatule.

There was another disturbing thing in the discussions. Several times, one of the rural attendees made reference to interference from outside Uganda and to money from outside Uganda. We were never mentioned, but it appears that some of the churches see us as a hindrance rather than a help.

We broke for lunch around 3:00. Pastor Fatuma had cooked for everyone at her house. Joseph had advised us to be careful about the food because he wasn’t sure about the water used in cooking, so we sat in chairs on the front porch of the house while everyone else went inside and ate Pastor Fatuma’s food. As we were finishing our cookies, Pastor Fatuma came out and tried to get us to come inside. We declined, so she brought out a plate full of fruit. We told her we didn’t want it, or any of the other food either, but she wouldn’t be deterred. She brought out a second plate covered with gray chicken and greens.
The fruit was awfully tempting, and we finally gave in and ate some. It was pawpaw straight from the tree and very fresh pineapple. I ate a bite of the greens because I love Ugandan greens. These had some sort of red leaf in with the green and the combination was wonderful. David finally ate a bite of the chicken, so I did, too. It was gray and it had the skin still on. And it had been cut through the bone in large chunks rather than in the pieces we know. But it actually tasted quite good!

After lunch, we rode back to the church. David was scheduled to speak on servant leadership, so they gave him the floor. While the other attendees read Bible passages about leadership, I could only think of all the water I’d been drinking in the hot sun. Like Lisa, I try to limit my visits to native bathroom facilities. Lisa, actually, is the master of this. I believe she channels a camel when we come to Uganda because she seems capable of going 24 hours without the use of a facility!

David gave the group something to discuss in their church groups, and I decided it was time for me to revisit the toilet facilities. It was partly made of wood and partly of metal, and there was a metal privacy screen across the door. It stood on a slight rise above the rest of the property, just enough of a rise to make you aware you are going up to the building and down when you leave. The roof is low, so I knew I would need to be careful or suffer Alan’s fate a couple of years ago, a nasty scalp cut from the roof.

So I went in and found an elongated slit rather than the traditional round whole. It smelled terribly and there were substances I didn’t want to think about around my feet, but I began the process of getting out of there. As soon as the stream hit the hole in the ground, there was a buzz and a black cloud flew out of the hole directly at my face. I was sure it was a bee nest or worse, so I yelled and turned to run. I cleared the door and the privacy screen before I realized I had done nothing whatsoever to make myself presentable before taking leave of the bathroom! I covered, spun around, and ran back into the toilet. The mysterious winged creatures were merely 30 or more huge horse flies. One took a liking to my beard and continued to try to land on it as I finished my business. As far as I know, no one saw any of this!

Lisa was surrounded by small kids over near the van. They were laughing with her in absolute joy as she taught them the Hokie Pokie. I made photos, but I didn’t have the video camera with me.

David was finishing up when I got back. As soon as he was done, Joseph dismissed us to go and look at the new Kasanda property made possible by a gift from Grace Presbyterian Church. The property isn’t on a road. It is down a very narrow path. A school surrounds the plot on one side and a farm on the other. We learned that the church was renting to the land to the farmer who owned the surrounding land as a way to make money. So the property still has not been cleared at all. In fact, nothing had changed at all since I was there in December except that we were told they had deepened the trench for the latrine to 40 feet!

When we got back the meeting had just ended. We went in where I was immediately hit by Pastor Fatuma. Fatuma is a widow and she has a daughter in the program. We had trouble earlier when she suddenly decided her daughter should be in boarding school. She signed the papers to make her a boarding student with no plan at all about how she would pay for it. This term, she had suddenly moved her daughter to a very expensive school. We have all explained to her repeatedly that she can’t move her child outside the Project’s approval because there is no way to fund this.

“If you move your child to a new school and it costs more, you MUST pay the difference between what the sponsor is paying and the total bill,” I explained for the umpteenth time.

“I know, but the people here won’t tell me what I owe. Can you tell me?”

“No,” I said. I was quickly getting tired of this. “Michael or Vincent will have to do this. Since they’ve told you the
amount on the phone twice already, I believe any of them can give you the amount. And remember, either its due on Monday or you need to pull your child out.”

I turned from her to see the new clerk. I offered my assistance if she needed it. “Elder Jim, I must have your phone number,” said the girl.

“You will have to work through Joseph or Vincent,” I said.

Pastor Jimmy also told us that his landlord is preparing to evict him from his church. He says he must buy the land to keep this from happening.

So in a matter of a few hours, I was hit by two of the three churches for money!

We climbed into the van for the long drive home. We now had a total of fifteen people, plus they had been shopping. We had a huge bag of sweet potatoes, a bundle of kasava, and I didn’t get a good look at what all else they’d bought. It was a frightening drive home. I was very sleepy, so I kept dozing off. Vincent was in a hurry, and he flew all the way home. He almost hit another van at one point and a cow at another, but we finally made it to the turn off for Mpigi. We left three of our gang there. The road into Kampala was at a standstill. It took us nearly an extra hour for the drive.

We didn’t invite any of the van for dinner. This time, it was only Lisa, David, and me in Indian Summer. There was a huge group of Muzungu there in front of us, so it took us forever to get our food. We weren’t very hungry so we snacked on kabobs.