Our first Ugandan wedding.

Today we went to our first wedding.  A young lady from our church got married to an Anglican man from the Uganda/DR Congo border.  It wasn't until yesterday that it was confirmed that it would take place - there had been some issues over the dowry:  12 goats, a blanket and a hoe is the standard bride-price that the Groom's family pays to the Bride's family (the opposite way round from Indian dowries).  This morning we headed off with the maximum of 8 people in our car (we have 8 seat-belts)- all dressed in our finest.  The wedding was supposed to start at 11am, but some confusion over who was actually going, and which of them was going in our car meant that we didn't arrive until 1130, which was fine because the wedding started at 12.  The service was concise at a mere hour and a half and featured some great singing with the wedding party dancing down the aisle, rather than processing. For some reason, the clapping in between each section of the vows was accompanied by random sound-effects from the keyboard - amplified through a massive sound-system. The bridal party didn't smile though, as apparently if the bride smiles it will offend her family who she is now leaving to go and live with her new husband's family.

While we were in the service someone decorated all the cars all over with white and orange ribbons and we were instructed that we were to be the penultimate vehicle in a wedding convoy of four vehicles to drive to the reception in the Groom's village.  We ended up with a different 8 people from the ones we'd started with, and the other cars seemed to be carrying even more.  We then proceeded to the reception venue at a snail's pace with hazard lights flashing, horns blaring and following a weave along the road like warships in a zig-zag pattern to dodge torpedoes (sorry, old metaphors die hard!).  Our procession was joined by some motorbikes who decided to weave amongst the cars, so it was all starting to get a bit silly as we approached a barrier with police/soldiers blocking the road - which turned out to be the first stage of crossing from peaceful western Uganda into the chaotic DR Congo.  Fortunately we swung right onto a dirt-track just before the barrier and stayed in Uganda, but then stopped soon after as the front car carrying the bridesmaids (all 7 of them I think) ran out of petrol.  They were two trucks full of bricks and builders coming the other way so this caused a bit of roadblock - and not a subtle one with all the ribbons, lights and horns! - Eventually the bridesmaids were pushed up the road and we arrived at a primary school bedecked in tarpaulin and more white and orange fabrics and kitted out with a stupendous sound-system,  the ubiqituous plastic chairs, and hoards of raggedly-dressed local children who the "event oragnisers" kept trying to shoo out of the photographs.

The wedding party danced their way in and there were several speeches before we all tucked into a feast of carbohydrates: - a mountain of rice, a hillock of steamed matoke (plantain), boiled potatoes, dry-roast potatoes, beans and some chewy meat, slopped with "soup" (meat-gravy) all eaten with fingers (which saves a lot of expense and washing up when hundreds of people are being fed!) At an African wedding everyone gets fed, there's no guest list or seating plan, just a massive communal feast.

After this the bride and groom fed each other wedding cake and and then we were invited to present our gifts to the happy couple.  By this point young Sam was exhausted, so we headed home (somehow with a different car-load again?!).

Every culture celebrates weddings in different ways, and we enjoyed celebrating one in Ugandan style. 

Wanawake wa Habari Njema (Women of the Good News) (By Bethan)

The Wanawake, as we now call them, are a phenomenal group of women within our church.  One woman in particular, Mama Esther (so called because she has a daughter called Esther, as I am Mama Samuel thank goodness because Bethan is too difficult!), is very wise and formidable.  When I arrived only six weeks ago and was told about the women’s prayers on Wednesday mornings, I didn’t know what to expect.

I turned up on time at 8am to find one woman sitting on the back bench of the empty concrete church building.  I said my greetings in KiSwahili and then we sat in silence, reading our Bibles.  Gradually a couple of other people arrived and when there were four of us, Mama Esther began to speak.  To be perfectly honest I don’t know what she said because our pastor’s wife (my personal translator!) Alice, was not there.  But the meeting went something like this: a lot of speaking and gesticulating followed by singing.  More speaking then suddenly everyone bowed their heads and I remembered that I did actually know the word ‘tuombe’ (we pray) and got my head down quickly too.  Hearing the word ‘Amina’ I realise that praying has finished.  More singing, more talking, some mentioning of my name (well, Sam’s name!) then the women began picking up their Bibles, so I assumed we had finished.

I have really come to appreciate these times of fellowship together, especially as I understand more of the language and the culture.  The women are so friendly and welcoming.  Mama Esther doesn’t speak any English at all so she is the main reason why I am fervently beavering away at learning the language: she is my impetus because I want to know what goes on in her life.  I was sitting in the women’s prayer one morning and was lucky enough to have a sentence translated for me.  It was a good job because I heard that it had my name in it so I was curious!  The translation came across like this: “Mama Esther says that it is important that you do not deny your husband in the bedroom.”  I had not even considered that this piece of advice would come from a morning prayer session!  It reminds me how much I am missing by not being able to speak KiSwahili.

August 1^st was a special day.  The Wanawake had decided that on the 1^st and the 15^th of each month they will get together and spend a day praying and fasting, with a break in the middle to do crafts together and teach each other their respective talents.  I was apprehensive about a whole day fasting and praying, and especially a whole day sitting on a wooden bench!  Luckily, I am a crafty-type of girl so I had plenty to take with me (I decided on starting a hand-sewn patchwork bag with local material) but the issue of leaving Samuel with Gareth all day was a tough one because he has not been without me that long at least since being in Uganda.

This particular morning I had a very heavy black cloud hanging over my head.  Maybe you know that type of mood?  I couldn’t bring myself to even clear up the breakfast things so there were ants everywhere!  Luckily Samuel wanted his morning nap early so I could dwell in my black cloud.  I sat on the chair inside Sam’s mosquito net with him while he slept and I just stared at the net.  When Gareth got home from Swahili at 10am I had to think about going to the Wanawake’s prayer meeting.  This prayer meeting was the last thing I wanted to do!  But I got on my bike and free-wheeled down the road, stewing inside at the people pointing at me and gawping at this mzungu on a push-bike with an empty baby-seat on the back.  I was not in the mood to be a freak show this morning!

I arrived at the church to find some eight women seated on mats on the floor or on the benches deep in silent prayer, except for a gentle worship song coming from the lips of Mama Esther, also the choir mistress.  I sat down on the floor in silence and prayed that God would enable me to focus on him, not on my current state of mind.  I shed a few tears because it is these moments of closeness with God and other Christians that make me feel that I don’t need to pretend anything: God already knows it.  After a few minutes the women began to sing together and someone said ‘amen’.  We came together and Alice spoke in both KiSwahili and English so that I could take part in the proceedings.  They were taking 30 minute blocks of prayer for each specific thing that had been mentioned at the beginning of the day and a song marked the beginning and end of each 30 minutes.  (Incidentally, Alice asked to use my phone as a clock because she was using hers which couldn’t be put on silent and had the Venga Boys ‘boom boom boom’ song as a ring-tone that would ring at the most inappropriate times!) 

At 2pm we stopped praying and got out our crafts.  We sat on the reed mats each doing our own craft, but showing interest in the one next to us.  As we sat, words, laughter and more gesticulations were thrown back and forth between the women and Alice threw me tit-bits of translation that kept me in the loop.  It seemed that Love (said ‘Luvay’), a Congolese young woman, is going to get married in August and Mama Esther was giving her the advice that typically the paternal aunt is supposed to give such as how a husband should be treated and what a woman should do in the bedroom.  Suddenly, I heard my name mentioned and everyone was looking at me!  I looked hopefully at Alice.  What were they asking me about this subject? Apparently it was my turn to offer marital advice to Love.  Everyone else had already said their piece and now I had to add a nugget of wisdom.  I didn’t know what area of marriage I could talk about (from her gesticulations, I noticed that Mama Esther had already covered the bedroom!) so I told her that she should never go to sleep at night without resolving a conflict with her husband.  The women seemed pleased with this advice and Mama Esther was off again on a wise lecture involving more acting out of bedroom scenarios as I carried on with my patchworking, pleased to have been a part of this momentous occasion.

After an hour of doing handiwork, Mrs Baluku, wife of an elder (mzee) at church and also the other member of the choir (with Mama Esther) asked- no, told- me to teach the women a song.  Well now I was on my home ground!  I taught the women ‘Freedom’ and ‘Ihparadisi’, and they loved them, immediately breaking off into the harmony parts that would have taken me an evening to teach to the On Board choir.  (No offence to On Board; Ugandan ears are trained from birth!)  After teaching the songs and having the pleasure of hearing someone burst into ‘Oh Freedom!’ after every few minutes of silence, we went back to praying in 30 minute slots.

I felt so much love from these women and feel so privileged to be a part of their ministry.  They are so active in church: they have clubbed together to buy a portion of land next to the church and plough it to grow cotton and start a co-operative so that each woman can start her own business.  They look out for each other, they visit each other when there are concerns, they pray as though their lives depend on the answers, and they accept newcomers like myself.

Needless to say, my black cloud had lifted by the time Gareth called me at 4pm to say that Samuel had grown tired of their ‘boy-time’ and wanted his mum home.

Meetings.

We're making good progress here after a couple of busy weeks. We've learnt four tenses in Swahili and four of the eight or nine noun classes (each of which uses different prefixes for adjectives, pronouns, demonstratives etc). Now we just need to learn hundreds of words of vocab (and the other noun classes and some more tenses).....
Sundays at church continue to be a headspinning 3-hour immersion in Swahili, but each week we understand a little more than the week before, which is very encouraging!

Last Sunday (24^th) was lovely, we had an official welcome at church, so after the service there was a little party with a special "welcome" cake and sodas for everyone. It's a poor church so the generosity of this gesture (by the dedicated women of the church) was very touching. Luckily we knew something was going to happen so we turned up with the biggest of our papayas and were able to share that with the whole congregation after the cake (both the cake and the papaya were cut into very small pieces to ensure that each of the hundred people there got some!) Then I was able to give a quick thank you in my poor Swahili and Bethan led everyone in a joyful rendition of "Wipolo Bot Banga" (an Acholi song which has national popularity) to much ululating, dancing and clapping - from the women, - Ugandan men are generally less lively. Had this happened on our first Sunday we might have been a bit embarrassed and confused by it, but after over a month it felt genuine and was really special.  In fact it felt like communion.

Over the last two weeks we’ve also been getting out and about meeting people, mostly for work and also socially: - 2 or 3 local and international NGOs and a couple of local government officials, and some other Mzungus who live up the hill in Kilembe (where it’s much cooler) for an evening of playing boardgames, speaking English and even wearing jeans, jumpers and socks for the first time in a weeks!  We’ve also found another Mzungu baby for Sam to play with – Jack is a 9-month old Australian who lives in the compound for staff at Kasese Cobalt Mine, which has a swimming pool and a wood-fired pizza oven!

Most important of all, however, was the meeting we held yesterday (Sun 31) in Alpha’s school hall in Acholi Quarter.  Having heavily plugged that there would be a community meeting at 1pm on Sunday and prayed fervently that people would come, I was very pleased when we finally started at about 3pm that people representing 50 households had turned up – and by the end of the meeting at about 5pm there were over 80 people there.  As the average household size there is 6, we were therefore able to hear representations of the concerns and aspirations of approx 300+ people.  We asked questions in English, which Alphonse then translated into Lukhongo and Rotoro (the two local tribal languages), then people raised their hands and we counted and recorded the number of hands raised.  After many of these questions to establish a baseline of numerical data about household size, employment etc then we opened up the meeting to hear the voices and opinions of those present. 

The answers have given us much food for thought and will inform our first project proposals.  In a nutshell they revealed a community that is desperately poor, has very large families but no salaried employment, much illiteracy, no electricity, little (and costly) healthcare, has to walk and pay to get water, is troubled by crime, and leaves toddlers and young children to fend for themselves for most of the day while their parents work at subsistence farming.  There had been three deaths in the community in as many days.  They are especially concerned about their youth – many of whom benefitted from Uganda’s implementation of Universal Primary Education but have become despondent since leaving school with so few opportunities for further training or employment.  Unfortunately these despairing youth didn’t turn up to the meeting to represent their own views, so I will be attempting to meet them on Thursday at the football grounds where the young men practice most evenings. 

What we also gathered from the meeting was that the people of Acholi Quarter are united in their desire to improve their situation and seem willing to contribute what little spare time/resources and skills they have to doing so.  As with so many parts of Africa where government provision is lacking, the work of Alpha Ministry and the local churches seem to be the cornerstones of social provision in this community.

For those who pray:

·         Give thanks that so many turned up to the meeting and participated so actively.

·         Give thanks that we were fit to go ourselves – Sam had a suspiciously high temperature the night before and we mobilised a UK prayer chain by text message – by the morning he was fine again!
·         Please pray that Gareth is able to meet with the youth of Acholi Quarter on Thursday.  Despair, drunkenness and drug use add to the list of their difficulties.  Please pray that we can engage with them and help them find hope for a more constructive future.