"Welcome, prof! Long time you have not come to us!"

I encounter such greetings in so many places here, on returning after nearly five years away. This one was from Agnes, the older woman who oversees a fruit and vegetable stand where Susan and I used to shop regularly, halfway from the Legon campus to the center of Accra (across from Maxmart, if you know Accra). The stand is just as wildly colorful, just as crowded with carefully arranged stacks of every imaginable fruit of the tree and the vine and the bush, as when we last shopped there in 2005, but it has grown to three times its former size. The young women are mostly new, though some slip me shy smiles of recognition. The older ladies are the same, and seem no older. “Welcome!” they say, with a firm handshake: “Have you been well? Why have you not come longtime? How is Madame? Why she is not with you today? How is your beautiful daughter? Is she still in Ghana?”

I always come home with twice as much as I intended to buy—partly because it all looks so enticing, partly because they throw in a generous “dash,” often without even telling me what it is. Once it was several passionfruit, another time a third pineapple. Yesterday when I bought two avocados Agnes dashed me three more and also slipped in four custard apples. The avocados are not the little 6-ounce Haas avocados you can find at Meijer—they are big mamas, the size of small cantaloupes. And all five are hard as rocks. I wanted to use them for the supper I made for the students last night, but they need several days to ripen. At the end of this week—when Susan arrives—we’ll be eating avocados for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But it’s really my fault that none are ripe. I should have said when I wanted to use them. I asked for a pineapple for today and another for tomorrow, a large papaya for today, and bananas for later in the week, and that’s exactly what I got. I am not buying many veggies yet, except tomatoes, because my stove is an extremely finicky and temperamental appliance. When the maintenance supervisor from Commonwealth Hall came to troubleshoot, the burners lit instantly and stayed on for several minutes; but as soon as they left, they went out. When Abraham was here (yes, the same Abraham we visited in London) yesterday and tried to see what might be wrong, it worked flawlessly. After he left, no dice. The principle seems to be that it works only when there are at least two people in the kitchen. So maybe after Susan arrives we’ll have no more problems. (More prosaically, I suspect that it has a bad LP gas regulator, with some sort of intermittent blockage.)

The same scene of welcome has been played out over and over again. The receptionist at IAS, the ever-cheerful Jamimah, greeted me warmly by name the first time I walked into the building, as did many of my onetime faculty colleagues at the Institute. At Legon Interdenominational Church, many people welcomed me back and expressed surprise that it has been as long as five years since I was last there. The proprietor of Wiltex café, located outside a residence hall on my walking route from Commonwealth down to IAS, greeted me warmly when I stopped there for lunch on Friday and said he was sure he had seen me walking past earlier in the week. And when we took the students to the Art Center, a sprawling craft market in central Accra, the vendors from whom Susan and I bought some of our favorite pieces of sculpture came out immediately to welcome “Prof David” back to Accra. And of course they wanted to show me some especially fine pieces, remembering our interest in older pieces from a variety of traditions, on which they could offer me a very special price. (Yes, I did succumb: I bought a small Dan mask and a Yoruba twin figure, both exquisitely pieces that fill some gaps in our collection. And one more touristy akwaba figure that caught my fancy.)

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. On arrival on August 7, the faculty coordinator from the Institute for African Studies who said he would meet my plane was nowhere to be found. But John and Victoria Sackey were there, unannounced, to welcome me “home.” Dr. Osman showed up fifteen minutes later—and it’s fortunate they both came, because my luggage and that of the one student who traveled with me from Dulles would never have fit into one car with the two extra people. When we arrived at the flat that Calvin has hired for the past few years, adjacent to Commonwealth Hall in a lovely spot far up the hill from the main campus gate, there was Ben Asiedu of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, to be sure I had the keys I needed for the flat and for the Calvin car that had been stored at ACI since last December. What a warm welcome!

The flat, which I saw and had doubts about last November, is exactly as I remembered: adequate in size (if not nearly as spacious as the house in Haatso), ideally located within a half-hour walk of the Institute for African Studies and the International Student Hostel, reasonably well equipped (after the porters brought over the furniture that was stored at the hall, and Ben delivered the printer and kitchen equipment that was stored at ACI)—and dark and airless as a mausoleum. At some point—whether before or after Amy Patterson first occupied it as Calvin director in 2008 I don’t know—Commonwealth staff decided to enhance security by nailing down every shutter on every window, except two that open onto a front veranda that is pretty dark itself. And these are very heavy shutters, through which hardly a sliver of light ever penetrates.

If I were to step outside right now (9 pm), I would enjoy a lovely cooling breeze rising from the campus below. If I moved inside the veranda, I would catch just an occasional stirring of the same breeze, through the fine mesh screens. But inside the house, all the stale air of the past week remains—stirred up by ceiling fans, cooled when necessary by a couple of ancient AC units that wheeze and thump and eventually bring the temperature down a bit. Split AC units are standard here—silent in operation, mounted outside with a narrow tube leading to a fan unit high on an interior wall—and are installed in every academic building and office and many homes (including our Haatso house). But when the hall decided to install AC in this flat, they boarded up the only exterior window in the master bedroom and installed a window unit that, from its appearance, appears to have been military surplus from World War II.

I have managed to pry open one narrow shutter in the kitchen, so when I am working there I sometimes get a bit of moving air. I’m working on some others, so far without success. I have asked the maintenance staff of the hall to remove the heavy batten they placed over the shutters for the rear patio doors, but they made no commitment and I’ve seen no indication that they intend to do so. I could not leave those doors open for ventilation, since there is no screening. But if I opened the shutters in the morning, at least I could verify, while sitting at my dining table, that it is day and not night outside.

Sorry—no more whining! In nearly every respect except the shortcomings of this flat, it’s a joy to be back at Legon. And the flat has its pluses. The kitchen (assuming the stove will eventually work) is much roomier than the one in the Haatso house. There is only cold running water, as is usual here (I use an electric kettle for washing up), but it has never stopped running on the weekend, as it often did in 2009 before the hall installed a new rooftop tank. And the point-of-use hot water heater for the shower works well. The students are jealous, since there are only cold showers in the campus hostels. They warned me that they may ask to use the restroom at my flat when we meet there and come back half an hour later with wet hair.

My biggest worry after seeing the flat last November has proved to be unfounded: we really can gather all 16 students here for Sunday evening socials. (In Haatso I held one of my class meetings at the house each week, but I’m not going to attempt that here—the students would have to balance books and notebooks on each other’s backs.) Our routine is to spread out comfortably inside and out on the veranda while we eat and chat, then pack the chairs tightly into the living room for our discussions, hoping that none of those seated near the kitchen will need to cross the room to use the bathroom before we are finished. We could just pass them over our heads across the room if necessary.

And as for those 16 students, 15 of whom arrived on August 11: they are coping admirably with all the stresses of living in West Africa, negotiating trotros and markets and the badgering of craft vendors with aplomb, and in general showing a commendable level of maturity and curiosity. I think it’s going to be an outstanding semester. They are flexible and patient, not even complaining when (as on Friday) the bus that we were told would arrive at 9 am arrived at 10:40. They’ve learned to carry a book everywhere.

A worry for recent directors has been students’ insensitivity to local modes of dress, insisting on wearing what’s comfortable even if when standard American campus dress would be conspicuously informal, verging on indecent, by local standards. But this year’s group has erred on the side of caution instead: “Prof, do you think this top will be OK for the festival? Will we be meeting the chief, so I should cover my knees and shoulders?” And they are thoughtful and considerate young people, toward me, toward each other and toward Ghanaian friends and hosts.

I will not know til later how seriously and consistently they will take their academic work, but early indications are encouraging. Shared textbooks are passing from hand to hand all the time. At the two sessions I have held of my class on “Ethics of Development and Cultures of Africa” nearly all the students have come to class well prepared, with good questions about the assigned readings and interesting observations from their first weeks in Ghana. I had only email contact with these students in the spring while I was in Kenya, and the interviews with applicants were conducted by Off-Campus Programs staff and returning Ghana students. Indeed, there were half a dozen students I had never met in person until they arrived in Accra. But every one of them is an active and constructive contributor to our discussions, and I look forward eagerly to helping them come to know West Africa more closely.

Let me close this entry with the thought that went through my mind one day last week—“what a joy it is to live among Ghanaians again!”—and the incidents that motivated the thought. I went out to shop at the fruit and vegetable stand, and the young woman who waited on me insisted on carrying all my purchases to my car, parked some distance away. Even at Maxmart, a big Lebanese-owned supermarket catering to expats where courtesy and hospitality can sometimes descend nearly to American levels, the stockers and cashiers were friendly and helpful. Driving back to campus, I needed to make a left turn across traffic, and an oncoming driver—a trotro driver, no less, a breed known for their brazen defiance of every law and every courtesy—signaled by flashing headlights that he would wait for me to do so. When I let a taxi driver slip into the traffic in front of me on campus, he waved a gesture of thanks out his window.

Arriving back at the Institute, Jamimah greeted me with a broad smile and a warm word of welcome as always, as did each of the lecturers and graduate students who were standing around in the entrance area. Samuel Abokyi, our grad student assistant, came to discuss his difficulties finding lodging for next weekend in Cape Coast but said he would travel there on Friday to find rooms and place a deposit. (He was successful.) A student knocked on my door by mistake, looking for another lecturer, but then asked me a number of questions about Calvin and thanked me warmly for the information, saying he would look at Calvin’s website and consider applying to study there.

In the morning I had brought my sheets over to the porters’ desk at Commonwealth and asked for clean ones, and they told me to return in the afternoon. They brought out a clean set, but would not give them to me: instead the porters motioned to another staff member to carry them over to the flat for me. When he arrived he asked, “May I put them on the bed for you?” He worked and worked at it (it’s a king-size foam mattress, very tightly squeezed into a wooden frame, and there are only flat sheets, not fitted) and got the sheet very taut. (But even though I had requested two sheets for each bed he left the other one folded up: Ghanaians don’t use top sheets and don’t seem to get the concept.)

None of these helpers expected a tip, and each would have behaved in just the same way to a Ghanaian buying fruit or picking up sheets. And I just remembered another example: on the way from IAS back to my flat I picked up a load of laundry from an on-campus laundromat. (Yes, there are mechanical washing and drying machines in Ghana now! Mostly in laundromats.) The parking attendant at Akuafo Hall, an elderly man seated on a chair near where I parked, called out to me to be sure to close my windows and lock my doors, so I did so. When I returned with my basket, he apologized: “If I had known you were picking laundry, sir, I would have carried it for you.”

Life in Africa is about relationships, it is often said, not about priority lists or schedules or individual entitlements. This is evident in the way people use their money and their time, in the way families support each other even when scattered across several continents, and in the way births and weddings and deaths are marked. And it is no less evident if you just come to Accra and spend an ordinary day shopping and working. I’m an American, not an African; but this seems like such a sensible and way to live. And that’s one of the reasons why, much as I miss Susan and other family and friends, coming back to Ghana feels like coming home.

Postscript just before posting this on 30 September: I took a student to the hospital early this morning and have been back and forth since. She had a severe allergic reaction to something, causing fainting and weakness and low blood pressure, but she’s been admitted and put on IV antibiotics and fluids, and she’s steadily improving and becoming herself again. I’m sure she will be well enough by Friday to join our first field trip, to the Central Region. But what connected with this closing theme was a little encounter with a compactly built older man who was on duty as parking attendant this morning. He had summoned an aide with a wheelchair to to carry the student, then only half conscious, from car to clinic when I arrived at 5 am, then directed me to a parking space. When I went back to the car about 7 to get some papers, he called out to me, “And how is the daughter doing now?” (Actually he said “son”—many Ghanaians mix up genders in English. He wasn’t suggesting that I am really her father, only linking us as part of an extended family in the traditional way.) I said she was resting and feeling much stronger already. “There is no need to worry,” he responded, with a big smile: “God will do everything!”

First weeks in Ghana (link to Picasaweb album)

Out of Africa, to the West Country and homeward

These entries are going to be a little out of chronological order. I finally completed my account of our travels in Uganda near the end of our time in Michigan and posted it; Susan is still polishing up her account of our trip to Ethiopia—a fascinating land that seems a million miles from all the other places we have been in Africa—and will probably post it after she arrives here in Ghana in a few days. I have been here three weeks, the calendar is just about to turn over to September, and I have a little time to breathe after the first few frantic weeks getting Calvin’s Ghana program organized.

And you are reading this blog (all three of you!) to share our impressions of Africa, not of West Michigan. So this entry will be brief (by my standards, if not by yours). On leaving Kenya in late May we made a week’s stopover in the UK. (The extra cost was only $50 each—when else can you travel to Europe for $50?) Susan did all the planning on the internet, fulfilling a long-held dream of visiting England’s West Country, which I remember in considerable detail from the family trip we made in the spring of 1966, during my father’s Cambridge sabbatical. Using a cottage rental site Dot recommended, she found what sounded like a charming flat to rent in the tiny fishing village of West Looe, on Cornwall’s south coast about halfway from Plymouth to Land’s End. The cost was high, but nothing in the UK comes cheap. Since they required a week’s rental we booked it for all but our first and last nights. Our hope, and our initial plan, was to spend a couple of days with Dot and Roger, but Dot had rehearsals and concerts every couple of days and could not make a trip south, and we decided it made little sense to leave our expensive hired flat empty to spend two days on the train in order to have a day with Dot (who would soon be in Michigan). So we spent lots of time talking on our mobile phones instead.

We did see our friends Abraham and Claire Waigi, whom we met when they were graduate students at the Akrofi Christaller Institute in Ghana in 2004 and 2005. Though they are friends from our time in Ghana, neither is Ghanaian: Abraham is Kenyan, Claire British. While Abraham works on a PhD at Liverpool Hope University, they and their beautiful 2 year old daughter Leslie are living with Claire’s father in Surrey, just outside London. Abraham very generously offered to pick us at the airport and accommodate us overnight. Better yet, they too were planning a trip to Cornwall, to visit Claire’s uncle on the north coast. So we traveled together to the town where we had hired a car to carry us the rest of the way.

I can’t describe what a delight it was to settle into one place for a week and explore the village and the breathtaking beauty of the coastline and countryside. We are nearly always on the move when we are traveling, and now we wonder why.

Getting to and from our flat was a journey in itself. We reached the car park via a circuitous little lane, so narrow that at some points Susan could have reached out and plucked flowers from the steep bank on the right side while I could have gathered other blooms from the window boxes of the houses on the left. Then we trundled our luggage down a steep access road, along another road for a half kilometer or so, then down three flights of narrow steps and another steep walkway to access our flat. It was a narrow three-story unit, in a row that stepped down the slope toward the town. It was comfortable and well equipped, with a balcony up on the top floor from which we could look out over the boats coming and going from the harbor.

To get to the village we descended another five or six flights of steps—the “street” in front of the houses was a staircase several blocks long—and then another steep and narrow lane til we reached the shops at the level of the river. There were only few shops on the west side, but they included a grocer and a charming pub, the Jolly Sailor, which has been a public house since the 14^th century. We were told that the beams in the pub’s family room were salvaged from ships in Lord Nelson’s navy that limped home after the Battle of Trafalgar. During our week the pub’s kitchen was never open—only the taps—but a healthy crowd gathered all the same on Tuesday evening for a song circle, on Thursday evening to sing sea chanties. The singing was lusty, in all senses (my junior high choir sang sea chanties, but none as bawdy as some of these), the ale excellent (hand-pulled, of course), and the company congenial. At the song circle—for which the room was packed, mostly with vacationing Brits—a visitor from Yorkshire led us in his favorite Dylan tunes; others shared West Country ballads; and I shared an American folk hymn.

Each day we plotted out a different itinerary with some common elements—a prehistoric stone circle here, a menhir there, a Norman church or two with interesting gravestones and memorial carvnings, and always a meander along a portion of the Coastal Path, the footpath that winds along the coastline of Devon and Cornwall for more than 600 miles. Miraculously, we brought Nairobi’s weather with us to notoriously rainy and cloudy Cornwall: apart from one rainy morning and some mist, early and late, we had sunshine nearly every day. There was a countywide art exhibition going on, with open houses in a hundred little artists’ studios in the cities and villages and on remote country lanes. We visited half a dozen of these, which sometimes entailed walking a mile or two on unmarked footpaths at the end of which, if we had guessed correctly, we would find a painter or potter or sculptor waiting for the occasional visitor. Once a chance remark about our recent travels led to the disclosure that the mother/grandmother of the mother and son whose paintings were on display had spent many years with her late husband, a physician, working in clinics in several areas of Kenya and Tanzania.

We ate well, usually taking one meal in a restaurant or pub and another as a picnic to economize, and we savored half a dozen fine pub ales made in St Austell and elsewhere in Cornwall. In the evening we would often wander across the town’s only bridge to East Looe, the commercial center, and watch the daylight fading from the waterfront and quay.

If only airfare to the UK weren’t so expensive! It would be delightful to spend a week in the very same flat each summer, hiking new stretches of the coastal trail each day, sampling the Cornwall ales we did not have time for, and perhaps making a foray farther afield to Stonehenge or south Wales. But we would want to get a few of our close friends to hire the adjacent flats, so we could share the delights of the West Country. And we’d need to arrange a repeat of our exceptional weather. Dot reported that, in the week after we departed, Cornwall was enshrouded in heavy rainclouds every day.

And then on to home, after a scare at the airport when British Air insisted we had to pay a $300 excess baggage fee. The free baggage allowance is four bags for travel between the US and Africa, two for travel to Europe, and our travel agent had assured us that on one continuous ticket there would be no problem with four bags. But BA insisted that because of our stopover the Europe rules apply. Fortunately, the supervisor agreed to make an exception this time. We had a short layover at Dulles, a long one at O’Hare, and arrived home on the afternoon of June 7. Everything was in good order at our house, thanks to Ken and Jan Sink, who lived there for a month before we returned and did lots of garden cleanup and the like.

And then followed exactly two months, for me, or nearly three months, for Susan, of more or less normal life at home. Among the highlights were a grand celebration of my 60^th birthday on our first weekend home—thirty friends were able to come despite the short notice—and a week’s visit each, at different times, from Klaas and Krista and from Janna and Barb. Klaas rode the 24 Hour Challenge again, but since I had clocked no more than 100 miles on my bike since 2009 I skipped the ride this year and volunteered at the checkpoint instead, punching riders’ number cards from 4 to 8 am. Klaas did well—more miles than last year, and fewer digestive problems in the afternoon and evening. Krista had just gotten over a long bout of morning sickness, and was adjusting reasonably well to her grueling new schedule of three 12-hour night shifts as a nurse on the medical-surgical floor of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. (This is old news to anyone in our family: our first grandchild is expected to arrive in mid-November.) At the time Janna and Barb came up for a week Janna was just winding down her work as children’s book manager for Barnes and Noble—a job she enjoyed but for which the pay was just a smidgen over minimum wage—and preparing for her new position as Program Director for Asheville Community Theater. She’s worked with their summer children’s program for many years and knows the organization well, including its severe financial problems and its difficulty finding the right supervisory staff. So far she is finding the job challenging but also rewarding, and although it’s officially a part-time job (a polite fiction, of course) the pay is considerably better than in her previous full-time job.

In July we had an unexpected opportunity to gather all four Hoekema siblings for a weekend at our house. Dot had come to give a presentation at a conference at Calvin (sponsored by an independent software testing organization), Jim was in the middle of a lengthy Accenture project at the Chicago home office, and Helen was back from the Oregon Bach Festival, and we found we had a free weekend when we could gather by the lake. It was a delightful couple of days of swimming and sunning and catching up. We hosted a lunchtime gathering of Brink cousins, which lasted all afternoon as most of the guests enjoyed the warm lake water (see below). On Sunday morning Dot and Helen and I sang two trios at our church—always a joy!

For Susan summer was a time to reopen her studio and reacquaint her hands and eyes with the ceramic arts. In the past month she has been amazingly prolific, putting out kilnload after kilnload of wares to be put on display at the annual Art on the Riverfront art show in Grand Haven. It took place a week ago. Sales were not what she had hoped for, especially of her best (and most expensive) majolica lake scenes, at which she has been working so hard, but it was a good chance to think about how to display her work in her own solo display. And she had a terrific crew of friends (some from our Grand Haven church, at least one from our former Grand Rapids church) helping to set up and tend the booth and take down. Some visitors urged her to submit her work for sale through the Muskegon Museum of Art--not only a good suggestion but a recognition of the quality of her work.

For me, the summer months were a time for review of my Fulbright work at Daystar (including some frustrating and so far unsuccessful attempts to sort out the source and rationale for alterations in the grades I had submitted for my students), submission of several articles and book reviews (on topics related to philosophy, theology, and development in Africa), and a long list of projects around the house. We had decided last year that we should replace all the front windows of the house this summer, since thirty years’ wear and some shifting of the structure have made most of them inoperable. That was a huge financial commitment (about one-third of what we paid for our first house in Northfield), and it took time to get the units in, so in the end the project was done after my departure but before Susan’s. We have a friend staying in the house for the fall, which means fewer worries about freezing or other system breakdowns. And Susan decided not to shut off the heat in the studio, as we had for the spring, so we didn’t have to drain all the plumbing and move all the clay indoors.

One of the most remarkable features of this summer—will it ever happen again?—was the seemingly endless weeks of warm Lake Michigan water. Already in June the water warmed up to nearly 70 degrees F, then dropped down to the low 60s for a week or two, but then reached 70 again before the month was out. We hosted the Bosma family Fourth of July picnic once again, a commitment we made as part of our purchase agreement for the house (informally, not in the sales contract). Last year the water was so frigid that only the youngest kids ventured in, and not for long. This year it was in the middle 70s and nearly everybody was out swimming and kayaking and throwing frisbees. Week after week through July and early August, and for the two weeks after I left, the temp never dropped much below 70, and several times there were official temperature readings of 80 or 81. Storms came and went, but the common effect of swapping warm surface water for colder water from underneath never happened. It was pure bliss to be able to swim morning, noon and night when the air was hot, and to enjoy the shimmering stars overhead at midnight without feeling the least bit chilled. A wonderful gift—maybe a consequence of global warming, maybe not, but I’m lodging no complaints.

And then, on August 6, I left home – in order to return to what has become our second home, Ghana. That warrants a new entry and a new heading. (Didn’t I warn you that this one would be brief only by my standards?)

Traveling in Uganda

Note 1: Just after I finished writing this much-delayed blog entry came the news of the senseless bomb attack on July 11 in Kampala, taking the lives of 76 people who had gathered at two sites to watch the World Cup final. One site was a rugby club on the north side of the city; the other was an Ethiopian restaurant located about a hundred yards from a small market area to which Susan and I walked one evening when we were staying at Bishop McCauley House. Responsibility was claimed by the Somali group al-Shabab, supposedly in retaliation for Uganda’s participation in UN peacekeeping work in Somalia.

Uganda has 3,200 troops serving in the UN force, alongside 1,000 from Burundi. Promises of additional forces from Nigeria, Ghana and other countries have not been fulfilled, probably because the situation in Somalia, with no functioning government and numerous private and religious armies, is so dangerous. According to BBC reports Ugandan military leaders, far from suggesting a pullout, have said that this act of vicious cruelty against the innocent only underscores the importance of the UN’s work of restoring order and restraining terrorist groups.

This is the very worst sort of globalism: one country falls into utter chaos which is exploited by religious and political extremists; other countries send their soldiers to the rescue and their citizens become targets of attack for that reason; and the result is 76 funerals this week for Ugandans, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Indians, Congolese, Irish, and Americans who were watching the finale of a great celebration of global cooperation and of Africa’s emerging place in the world.

Please keep the Ugandan soldiers, the families of the 76 victims, and all the people of Somalia in your prayers this week.

Note 2: Now that I am back in the US where “wide bandwidth” means what it says, and I don’t need to go make a cup of coffee while waiting for an image to load (if I start by harvesting the beans I’ll be back at my computer just about when it’s finished), I have inserted a few photos into this overlong blog entry, but you can view lots more here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dhoekema/EightDaysInUganda?authkey=Gv1sRgCLXezN6Mr-mYJg&feat=directlink

“Come to Uganda before you head back home. You’ll be my excuse to travel to some of the most beautiful parts of the country that I never get around to visiting.” So said our longtime friend David Burrell when we saw him briefly in Nairobi in March. “I have a car—I’ll do the driving, you buy the petrol. Is it a deal?” How could we say no?

David is a Holy Cross priest who spent most of his career teaching philosophy and theology at Notre Dame, interspersed with overseas assignments: teaching seminarians in Bangladesh, leading the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem (which he transformed from a place of bilateral Jewish-Christian dialogue into a place of community and exploration for Jews, Christians, and Moslems), summers studying Arabic in Cairo (so he could understand how much medieval Catholic philosophy borrowed from medieval Moslem philosophy). Then his superior sent him off to Uganda to teach in the ethics and development program of Uganda Martyrs University and assist in curricular planning. This year, his third, there was some miscommunication about his schedule and he was assigned no courses. So he has been free to do more planning and program development, schedule other travel (he was just back from two weeks in Jerusalem), and serve as tour organizer for visiting friends. Our plan was that, after my Daystar duties were finished and we had returned from Ethiopia, we would explore Uganda together from 10-18 May.

(As it turned out my Daystar work was not quite finished, owing to a major error on the university’s part: despite a very formal and seemingly foolproof system for submission and distribution of final examinations, my students were given the wrong exam. After we returned from Uganda, with the advice and help of my head of department, I was able to make appropriate adjustments in exam and final grades. But it still made for a difficult ending to an otherwise very rewarding experience teaching African students in Africa.)

Our Uganda adventure began with a 13-hour marathon bus trip from Nairobi through Naivasha, Nakuru, and Kisumu, skirting the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, and then through the border town of Busia, across the Nile at Jinja, and on to Kampala. It was a beautiful day’s ride on a reasonably comfortable bus, the “Akamba Royal” with three-across seating. But the roads were rough, and it felt as if the bus’s suspension had been borrowed from a donkey cart.

Uganda resembles Kenya in many ways, including extraordinary scenic beauty, a rich variety of cultures, exceptionally hospitable people, generally excellent roads (better than in Kenya on some main routes), and well-run national parks and preserves, with most (if not all) of the same varieties of wildlife that people travel half the world to see in Tsavo and the Maasai Mara. But far fewer tourists come here, and those who do pay a lot less. Nonresident admission to the national parks is $30 a day, not $60. Rooms in comfortable and well-staffed smaller hotels run $30-$50 a night (outside Kampala), half to three-quarters the cost across the border. Restaurant meals are comparable (under $5 for local food, under $10 in many places serving both locals and foreigners, the sky’s the limit in fancy resort hotels), and fuel is a bit higher (it cost $60 US to fill the 10-gallon tank of David’s Toyota Corolla). But overall it would be a lot easier to spend a week on holiday in Uganda than in Kenya if you are on a tight budget. They should launch a tourist campaign with the slogan, “Half-price East African safaris!” (Judging by the steep visa and park fees, and the exorbitant lodge rates in places like Ngorogoro, Kenya could make the same claim in comparison to Tanzania.)

Arriving in Kampala just at dark on Monday, about 7 pm, we got a taxi to Bishop McCauley House, the Holy Cross novitiate on the southern outskirts of the capital where David has his lodgings. The differing cultures of Protestants and Catholics in East Africa were immediately apparent when everyone gathered for conversation before dinner over beer and popcorn. Joining us at two round tables for dinner were half a dozen novices, African young men from several countries, and the house director, Cleophas Kyomuhendo, a Ugandan. Also at dinner that night were a visiting Holy Cross priest from Massachusetts and a young Holy Cross nun, a resident of a community in the north who had an early morning appointment at the US Embassy for a visa interview. The food was delicious, the company welcoming, and we felt immediately at home. Indeed, the room we were assigned, a spacious dormitory-style room with beds with mosquito nets, a desk, and a small corner lavatory (bathrooms were down the hall), became our home base for the week. We could pack for each trip out of Kampala but what we didn’t need in the room to await our return.

Our first destination Tuesday morning was Uganda Martyrs University in Nkozi, about 80 km southwest of Kampala. It’s a beautiful campus on a hillside overlooking the northwest corner of Lake Victoria, bright with flowering trees and shrubs, with an eclectic mix of old buildings carried over from its former function as a school and new buildings to house expanding programs. Its initial offerings—like Daystar’s—were in professional fields such as business and community development, but in the 17 years since its founding it has added programs in health sciences, agriculture, microcredit, and education. David’s responsibility has been to teach in the ethics and development program, expand the Holy Cross presence on campus, and plan for broader offerings in theology and the humanities. There are now about 1200 full-time students in residence (paying fees only a quarter of Daystar’s—Uganda has bargains in higher education too). Three times that many are enrolled part-time, here or at two sites in the capital region. A student led us on a campus tour, including the area of bush in a recently acquired plot of land where the Holy Cross fathers hope to establish a house. (David now commutes from Kampala.)

We had a lively lunchtime conversation with students and faculty whom David had invited to meet us, ranging widely over religion and politics and academic priorities. Well-informed Ugandans seem to have little hope that the Museveni government will ever yield power willingly, or that rampant corruption will ever be seriously addressed. “Uganda is an ethnic time bomb, ready to explode,” said former ambassador Samuel Baliginde, now a lecturer in UMU’s newly established program in diplomacy, “but it’s not openly discussed.” Certainly Kenya cannot be upheld as a model of good governance or peaceful conflict resolution. But David’s colleagues were lavish in their admiration for Julius Nyerere of Tanzania—“a genuine leader who really believed in his ideals, not in power.” He was a deeply committed Christian who attended Mass daily and worked on a Swahili translation of the Bible, they said, but he adopted the custom of wearing a Muslim hat to show his support for religious toleration.

At the end of our week we also visited Uganda Christian University (UCU) in Mukono, 25 km east of Kampala, and I will insert a few notes on that visit here. David had arranged for us to meet Mark Bartels, coordinator of an overseas study program of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities that brings a dozen American students to Uganda each year. UCU evolved from an Anglican theological school, the Bishop Tucker School of Divinity, and was rebaptized as a university in 1997. Its 2004 government charter was the first given to any private university in Uganda. Enrollment is now nearly 6000, and new buildings are springing up left and right on its spacious campus. We had no formal meeting with faculty, only a few brief conversations in passing, so I didn’t get a very clear picture of its theological profile and curricular options. But it seems to be similar to Daystar, which was an important model in its formation. The former Vice-Chancellor at Daystar, Stephen Talitwala, whom I met there in 2001, left shortly thereafter to take up the same role at UCU for a few years before moving on once again.

I asked Mark whether there had been an active debate on campus regarding the infamous Parliamentary bill to impose the death penalty for homosexual acts, a bill whose advocates have received financial support from some American evangelical groups. Mark said there had been informal discussion, but only out of the public eye. The current VC, an Episcopalian from the US, had reportedly wanted to speak against the law, even though he holds a very conservative position himself. But Mark was told that he had been cautioned by the board to keep quiet. It appears that, at UCU as at Daystar, some faculty and many students have lots of questions about the church’s handling of controversial issues such as this but few opportunities to explore them in each other’s presence.

Jumping back a week to our first day of travels, we drove on from UMU for about 200 km to the southwest, skirting (and occasionally glimpsing) Lake Victoria’s shoreline, then inland to the town of Mbarara, passing through forests, rolling grasslands, and farms. As in Kenya the lower elevations are planted in wheat and maize, the higher elevations in coffee and tea. Unlike Kenya, there are also endless expanses of banana plantations, serving the limitless appetite of Ugandans for matoke, a starchy staple made from green cooking bananas.

We arrived at our destination in a torrential downpour. The Ribeka guesthouse was inexpensive ($30 for a double), and rather worn (small rooms, shabby furniture)., The staff were friendly and helpful, though, and our dinner there was tasty. Lacking electrical power, we ate a fine meal by candlelight, were given a jerrycan of hot water for showers, and retired early to bed. In the morning we drove the remaining 100 km to Queen Elizabeth National Park, a vast reserve of savanna and forest on the shores of Lake Albert and Lake George, on Uganda’s western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has been a protected reserve since the 1930’s, a national park since 1952. The name memorializes a royal entourage that came for a visit in 1954.

Although animal populations suffered greatly from poaching, especially during the disorder of the Amin years, they have mostly recovered. There are 95 mammal species in the park, including about 2500 elephant and 200 lions. QE Park is incredibly rich in bird species: more than 610 species have been recorded, “possibly the highest total for any national park in Africa, if not the world,” reports the Bradt guide. Among them are 54 different raptors, every waterbird of East Africa, and a huge variety of forest and grassland birds.

Among the birds we saw were fish eagles, hawks, kites, and vultures wheeling overhead; brilliantly colored sunbirds and bee-eaters, and long-tailed flycatchers, in the trees and grasses; weaverbirds popping in and out of their hanging nests in large colonies on the acacia trees; black-headed herons and yellow-billed storks in the shallows by rivers and ponds. (See the pics of a few of these in the Picasa Web album.) And we heard dozens more species that we could not spot. While we sat eating our lunch, on the shady porch of the stunningly situated Mweya Lodge overlooking Lake Edward, a Marabou stork—a huge, ungainly carrion eater with bizarre wattles and a penetrating gaze—strolled across the lawn right in front of our table. Later a large family of striped mongoose came scampering out from under the porch to scrounge for scraps.

Our most dramatic encounter with the animal kingdom occurred on the way to the lodge, a drive of about 15 km on a rough dirt track, meeting only half a dozen cars along the way. Quite suddenly we found our way blocked by a family group of elephants, about six adults and three juveniles, who were grazing on both sides of the road. After we looked on for a few minutes, drawing no attention from the animals, David began to move slowly forward, expecting that the group would part to let us pass. But one of the matriarchs turned right toward us, flapped her enormous ears, and gave us a stern look, as if to say: “Don’t even think of coming closer! These are my children, and this is my road!” So we waited several minutes more until the entire group moved away into the grasses and shrubs.

We caught glimpses of waterbuck and bushbuck and impala here and there, and a few zebra. We took a long loop drive in the savanna after lunch hoping to sight giraffe and lion, but in the intense midday heat all the mammals except us seemed to be napping in the shade. So we returned to the tarmac road and proceeded another 125 km to the town of Fort Portal, where our accommodations were in a beautiful church-run guesthouse, the Lisieux Center. Once again afternoon rains began just as we were arriving at our lodging, but this time they were brief. From the balcony of our room we could look out over lush fields and hills nearby as the sun pushed back the clouds. Also in Fort Portal is Virika Cathedral, a beautiful church in the round built by the Holy Cross fathers shortly after they were first dispatched to Uganda in 1958. Two Notre Dame students, Kathleen Stanley and Anna Dwyer, phoned to say they had just checked into a hostel adjacent to the cathedral. We had dinner together, and on Thursday we all set out in David’s car to visit a Holy Cross residence and retreat center at Lake Saka, just outside town.

And there—in a location that the Bradt guide describes as very scenic but off-limits to tourists—we enjoyed a leisurely day of conversation, reading, swimming, and hiking in one of the loveliest settings we have seen in all of East Africa. There were no novices in residence at the time, only the resident director, Dick Stout, a Holy Cross priest who recently celebrated his 80^th birthday, and a few staff members. The view across the volcanic hills and river valleys when we hiked up along the crest of a nearby ridge was stunning. Later, when the five of us dove off a small dock for a swim, the only other living things in the water were the shore birds fishing in the shallows.

Our next destination was Masindi, 250 km to the east and north according to the map. But David had learned from friends that the direct route was an unpaved and unimproved road in such poor condition that our Corolla would probably get us only partway there before it became stuck in a rut or sunk in the mud. So we detoured all the way back to Kampala instead, doubling the distance but avoiding the risk that we’d spend the rest of the week in a ditch awaiting rescue. David let me drive the long stretches of well-paved two-lane road from town to town, but when we got to a construction zone just outside Kampala—a 20-km obstacle course that took us longer than the previous 120 km—he took the wheel. We arrived at Bishop McCauley House just in time to join the residents for dinner.

We made an early start on Saturday, getting through Kampala morning traffic with little delay or difficulty. The countryside was as beautiful as on our previous cross-country drive, but a bit less lush, with some arid regions. Masindi is a lively little town, a gateway to Uganda’s north, and our lodgings were in another church-run hostel, Kolping House. It isn’t quite as comfortable as in Fort Portal but seemed more than adequate—until a large group of Indians, arriving en masse for a wedding the next day, rolled in at 2 am and conducted loud arguments in the hallway and outside our window until 4.

A highlight of Masindi was our visit to Aunt Joy’s Fabric Shop, whose owner, Joyce Nnanyonga, is a sister of Cleophas Kyomuhendo, director of the Holy Cross residence in Kampala. There we were introduced to the distinctive styles and patterns of Ugandan kikois (much larger than the Kenyan variety, with an interesting pattern of weaving at each end), even though the power was out once again and the colors were difficult to make out in the darkness of the shop. The shop was filled with customers, and every nook and cranny was stuffed with different kinds of fabrics. And on its veranda of the shop, no more than five feet in depth and twenty feet wide, half a dozen men and women sat working at foot-treadle sewing machines. They are not Aunt Joy’s employees, but rent the space from her and take orders from her customers. A couple of them were eager to make clothes for us—delivery by evening would be no problem—but we declined.

Living with Aunt Joy just now and helping out in the shop is her daughter Resty (Restetuta Kunihira), who joined Susan and David and me for lunch. She is a beautiful young woman with a university degree and lots of energy and ideas who hasn’t been able to find suitable employment, except for a temporary job working in the Masindi area on voter registration. She and her mother invited us to their home that evening and served us supper by the light of candles and electric torches.

Sunday morning—uncertain if we could pull this off, since we had been advised that reservations were essential but none of the telephone numbers we had were answered—Father David and Susan and I departed early for the Kanyiyo Pabidi Forest, a reserve that is home to an enormous variety of birds and several large communities of chimpanzees. (The two students were staying a few more days in Fort Portal.) Like all the northern Uganda reserves, this one suffered grievously from neglect and rampant poaching during the 90s when the northern part of Uganda was engulfed in a civil war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the government. After order was restored about ten years ago, the government turned over management of the reserve to the Jane Goodall Institute, whose staff stopped the poaching, helped rebuild bird and mammal populations, and also undertook to “habituate” one of the chimpanzee groups to human observers. One of the guides described the process: “We just go to wherever they are in the forest, follow them when they are moving, and sit down when they stop to eat. After a few months, the chimps ignore their visitors and go about their lives.”

Amazingly, they even include human observers in their security arrangements. Our guide described one occasion when a sentinel chimp dropped down out of the trees while sounding a warning cry, without any reason they could see. Finally he alternated between crying out and looking fixedly in one direction, until the humans at last noticed a gigantic python lurking in the shadows nearby. But the chimps are in no way tame or domesticated. The guides never give them food, never approach closer than ten meters, and give them no encouragement to hang around near the park lodge.

Despite our lack of reservations, we were welcomed and assigned a guide, who collected our fees ($60 per person) and headed off into the forest with us, walking quietly and listening closely for any sign of the chimps’ presence. (She had a walkie-talkie with her, and their reports helped direct us too.) We heard dozens of birds, all of which she identified for us, but saw hardly any of them in the dense forest cover.

After just over an hour of walking down narrow trails we veered off into the brush, and within a few minutes we saw several chimps on the tree branches over our heads. (Two other parties were there as well, an Australian family of three with their guide and a Dutch woman living in Nairobi with hers.) There was one female chimp twenty feet over our heads, lounging provocatively on a branch because she was in her estrus cycle. Near her, biding their time on nearby trees, were half a dozen males waiting to see whom she would favor with an invitation. They all looked down at us with no particular interest. While waiting for the female’s invitation the males groomed each other, swung from branch to branch, and from time to time erupted in loud cries that were echoed by other males scattered through the forest—a 360 degree chorus of loud whoops, most of its sources invisible. The guide explained that the group had split up into a dozen or more small groups for foraging, but from time to time the males in each group stand up, thrust out their chests, and bellow at the top of their lungs. The purpose is mainly to remind the forest’s other residents of what magnificent specimens of chimpanzeehood they are, while also keeping track of each other’s whereabouts.

There was a year-old baby with the group, swinging from tree to tree and sometimes pestering the grown-ups. A few females who were not in estrus wandered over and perched on branches where the waiting males could groom them. At one point a large male dropped down and sat on a U-shaped hanging vine, at last catching enough light so I could get a good portrait. Not once did any of the chimps set foot on the ground, nor did the female seem to be in any hurry to make up her mind. We watched for perhaps 90 minutes, and she did nothing more than shift her position a bit and look around at her suitors.

It was a remarkable experience, standing in the forest observing and being observed by animals with whom we share 97% of our genes, yet utterly unable to communicate anything more complex than, “Hey, it’s cool watching you—we hope you feel the same way.”

We saw some spectacular birds along the road to and beyond the forest reserve—huge ones like the blue-throated hornbill and the kori bustard, colorful little ones like sunbirds and weavers—but I didn’t catch any with my camera, alas. (The driver and navigator in the front seat were inexplicably reluctant to slam on the brakes and back up a quarter mile in hopes that a bird would sit still and await the photographer’s return.) It was only about 75 more km to our destination for the day, Red Chilli Rest Camp (yes, that’s a common spelling in Africa), a charmingly funky complex of cabins and campsites near the south bank of the Victoria Nile. (Very affordable for park lodging, just $50 a night for our small double cabin.)

Along the way, in brutal midday heat, we stopped to view the upper cascades of Murchison Falls, which in this season carry a deafening volume of water through a narrow canyon, from the Victoria Nile’s source near Mt. Elgon in eastern Uganda toward its outlet just a few miles downstream at Lake Albert. We managed to get through several very treacherous stretches where the road had partially washed away, but when we saw a very steep slope in front of us, deeply eroded, we abandoned the car and walked the last mile or so to the falls overlook. It was worth the walk, with clouds of mist rising from the river’s twisting descent and wildflowers flourishing in the heat and humidity. But driving back to the main road was a challenge, with one stretch that required lots of pushing, spinning, and rocking, and nowhere along the side road to the falls did we see any other people or vehicles. We were tormented by flies, large black ones with an annoying bite, throughout this section of the park. The lodge where we stopped for lunch was blessedly free of them, evidently because they had put out dozens of purple and black banners with traps underneath. Leaving the forest for the more open areas near the river, fortunately, their numbers dwindled rapidly.

From Red Chilli camp Susan and I walked down the road half a mile to the Nile, now wide and placid, crossed by ferries and frequented by wading waterfowl. One can book a boat here either to approach the falls from below or to see the marsh bird habitats downstream, but we decided we needed to make an early start on Monday instead. Dinner at the camp was very tasty, featuring fish caught fresh from the lake and the river. We met a number of interesting fellow travelers, including an Israeli medical student on holiday who joined us at our table. David said a grace over our meal in Hebrew. Our guest appreciated the gesture but admitted that she never prays.

The dark came quickly, as always in the tropics, but here it was profoundly dark, with measureless depths of stars above. Susan and I walked out to the road with our binoculars to get away from the (very few, generator-powered) lights in the camp. Suddenly she asked, “What’s that noise, and why is it getting closer?” In the light of my torch we saw that it was a hippo, followed by three more, heading up from the river toward nighttime grazing grounds at a surprisingly rapid pace. We hustled back past the gate into the camp, very aware that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal. A guard told us the next day, however, that the hippos in this section of the river are quite gentle and never object to sharing their space with humans. One of them, an older male who died last year, would even come when you called his name.

At meals and in the evenings as we traveled, David would hand around a prayerbook from which we would read Psalms and other Scripture readings of the day. And on Saturday night, realizing that we would be out in the forest with the chimps on the Feast of the Ascension the next day, he celebrated Mass with us in his room. He used a glass and plate from the guesthouse restaurant, beds as chairs, a small bedside table as altar. We each read portions of the lessons and the liturgy, and he shared a brief meditation on how this Gospel story showed once more how little the disciples had understood Jesus’s ministry or his identity. It was a moving occasion, unlike any other Eucharist in our experience, but very much of a piece with the entire week. We felt we had been given the gift of sharing the daily life of a religious order. Everywhere we went, David was welcomed by confreres who housed him, sat down for meals with members of his community, and shared news of mutual friends and unfinished projects. For a short time we became part of that close-knit community as well.

In one sense, David and his confreres have no freedom at all. They may not marry or raise a family; all their income goes directly to the order; and a religious superior has the authority to decide where they will live, what they will study, and what work they will do. But in many other respects they have more freedom than anyone else. No matter where they travel in the world, they will be welcomed by extended households of brothers and sisters who will house them, feed them, and assist in their work. The order provides for the education of its newly inducted members—in the US, in Rome, in Belgium, wherever the most suitable program is found—and matches them with suitable assignments in serving in parishes, assisting in missions, teaching in schools or universities, or in clinics or community organizations. Worried about unemployment? We don’t understand that concept. Worried about medical care? That’s our concern, not yours. Roof starting to leak, or transmission problems on your car? We will take care of it. But what about saving for retirement? First of all, “retirement” has a different meaning in a community in which four people, all of them still fully engaged in work that they love, have just celebrated their 80^th birthdays together in Uganda. Second, when it’s time to stop working and rest, the order will continue to look after you and provide what you need.

Perhaps the most remarkable demonstration of what it means to live in this way—in utter defiance of the bedrock principle of modern Western culture, that each human life should be separate and self-directed and acquisitive—came in the half-day we spent at Kyarusozi, a small village between Masindi and Kampala that has long been a center of Holy Cross activity. There we were welcomed by two of the members of David’s order who were part of the four-birthday celebration when they turned 80 last year, Father Richard Potthast and Brother Bernie Klim. (The others were Dick Stout at Lake Saka and Sister Mary de Nardis, head of the Kyaruzozi clinic.) We sat down to lunch with Richard and some other guests, a retired Australian couple who teach village Bible study classes across Uganda. Then we set out by van to visit various sites where the Holy Cross fathers, brothers, and sisters are active in the community: a clinic with half a dozen examining rooms staffed by medically trained sisters and lay nurses; a boarding school (now on summer holiday) where new residences are being built to accommodate growing enrollment; and a large parish church surrounded by several grass-roofed rondavels where small groups meet for Bible study or conversation.

All the buildings have been designed by Brother Bernie, who builds what he designs, sawing beams and pouring concrete and laying out plumbing. On our tour of the new hostels we found him lying prone beneath a lavatory with wrenches in his hand. He also designed a quiet meditation garden adjacent to the priests’ residence, with a stone lantern at the center: he is both a Catholic monk and a Zen master, and he leads classes in both traditions. Father Richard and I sat in that garden for an hour’s conversation before our departure. Wanting to hear all about my research into African politics and political philosophy, he shared his observations about Uganda’s achievements and challenges and asked me lots of questions about Protestant-Catholic and Christian-Muslim relations in Kenya.

Returning home from Uganda was difficult. We felt as if we could happily share the life of the Holy Cross order for another few weeks, and would learn a great deal by doing so. But our departure time was growing near—so we opted for a much quicker mode of transportation on the way home, a Fly 540 plane from Entebbe back to Jomo Kenyatta airport, making the trip in one hour instead of 13. It was a pleasure to be back in our own spacious flat, sleeping in our own comfortable bed, and anticipating a week of packing, saying farewell, and looking back on five fascinating months in East Africa.