Life in the Mountains

The Bakhongo are predominantly a mountain people, found either side of the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with the mighty snow-capped Rwenzori Mountain range as the heart of their ancestral lands.  If you’re going to work with the Bakhongo, it really makes sense that you get into the mountains.  Back in March, Alfonse and I spent 3 or 4 days on a big road-trip around Kasese District visiting most of the 36 Baptist Churches and Preaching Points in the Association.  This involved spending a huge amount of time and diesel in low-range gears and 4WD in the Landcruiser, and a fair amount of time, and copious bottles of water, in 2-leg-drive on foot.  Although it was wonderful to breathe fresh and cool air, to see the beautiful mountain views and to meet and greet so many wonderful people in these churches, some of whom had never been visited by a Mzungu before, or even by the leadership of their Baptist Association; those weren’t the main purposes of the trip.  We came back with pages of notes about the challenges faced by these small and often remote communities:  The list of issues they face is considerable but can perhaps be summed up in 3 words:  Food, Energy and Access – with the latter including physical access to water, firewood, schools, healthcare, markets, legal justice and all the other amenities which are often at least 2 hours walk away, if not more.

As missionaries with access to moderate resources and time there’s not much we can do about the lack of physical infrastructure or the appalling state of the mountain roads.  I’m not an agriculturalist and it would take years of dedicated and specialist work with mountain farmers to implement different techniques for farming on such steep slopes, so we decided our focus would be on providing energy, and on forms of energy that also generate income which the churches can then use to help address some of their other challenges.  Three months and many hours of research and proposal writing down the line, I’m delighted to be able to write that BMS has sent funding for solar projects (like the one we piloted at Kahokya) for 7 more village Baptist churches, and charcoal briquette making projects (like the one piloted in Acholi Quarter) for another 14 Baptist churches.  My challenge over the next 6-12 months is to implement them all!

With my innate wariness, verging on paranoia, of getting stuck on a mountain in heavy rains (which you’d understand if you’d seen the flooding in May or ever slithered a car through Ugandan mud), I decided we’d better start with the most inaccessible churches while it’s still so hot and dry.  Last weekend myself, electrician Amisi, and the ever-trusty Isaiah headed to Kantare Baptist Church to do the first solar installation.  We left Kasese about 8am and drove 60km, mostly on tarmac roads, to Kathasenda Baptist Church where we parked the car and met Pastor Michael and 3 members of his church.  From there we loaded a 60W solar panel in a welded frame, 2 heavy batteries, a wooden control box, various other bits of equipment, 2 coils of wire, a heavy bag of tools, our own clothes, nets and camp-bedding, and about 10 litres of water onto our backs, heads or shoulders and started walking up to Kantare.  On my previous visit with Alfonse we’d taken the longer shallower route up and the shorter but insanely steep route down.  This time the young guy we were following lead us directly up the steepest route for a gruelling 1.5 hour climb.  On arrival at the church we got straight to work bolting the control box to the wall (by punching holes through the mud and then putting U-bolts around the eucalyptus poles which frame the church), bolting the panel in its frame to the roof and then wiring the lights. 

Although we’d carried plenty of water as there is no piped water in Kantare, you never take your own food to an African village.  We were given “breakfast” of coffee and bread at 1.30pm, and lunch of beans and rice at 3.30pm, with a final evening meal at 10.30pm just as were all 3 starting to fall asleep!  The habit of saying grace has lapsed across much of Britain, but I’m always so thankful when I get fed in a Ugandan village, partly because you never know just how much labour or expense has gone into gathering and preparing the ingredients involved (eg someone carrying a sack of rice on their head up a mountain), but also because you never know what you’ll get or at what time, or even whether what you’re eating is in fact your only meal for the rest of the day, or just something to “push you” until a later meal.   Fortunately the hyper metabolism of my youth is gradually slowing with age!

The inevitable crowd of spectators grew through the afternoon as children returned from school (down in the valley, so they climb the mountain daily), and adults from tending their coffee-plots or other crops.  By the time we had the lights working there was an atmosphere of tangible excitement.  The wonders of LED technology mean that two 3W light-bulbs inside the church and another one outside over the door are enough to provide more light than anyone was previously used to with kerosene lamps.  Unfortunately12V phone-charging is proving more problematic.  Just as the first chargers at Kahokya caused us trouble, the same has happened at Kantare.  Cheap Chinese made chargers of the type you plug into a car cigarette lighter are easy to buy here.  Kasese has almost a dozen shops which sell them, and you always test them first in the shop, where they always work.  Sadly they have a habit of not working for much longer after that.  By the time we left on Sunday afternoon there was only one charger still working at Kantare of the four we had taken up with us, which was even more annoying as this time I’d bought more expensive ones on the mistaken logic that they might be more reliable.  Having just preached a sermon which included suggestions of some of the ways that the church could use the income from phone-charging to improve their ministry and serve their community, it was then embarrassing to leave them with only one working charger – and therefore to have to commit ourselves to climb up there again fairly soon to fit some more!  I know I shouldn’t rant about shoddy Chinese manufacturing, but I will because it really annoys me, especially here in Africa where alternatives are not easily available, and where the people who can least afford it are so often ripped off with poor-quality products.  We are considering getting small inverters and then using standard phone chargers at 220V, but that also poses other challenges and more expense.

Ironically although Pastor Michael runs Kantare Baptist Church at the top of the mountain he lives near Kathasenda at the bottom, while his brother Pastor Moses, who is establishing Mailo Kumi Baptist Church and belatedly finishing his secondary education down in the valley, lives near the top of the mountain.  Having carried stuff with us to sleep in the church, we were invited to stay at Pastor Moses’ house, so at about 9.30;pm we gave up fiddling with the annoying Chinese chargers and slithered our way down the steep slope in the dark for about 15 minutes.  Pastor Michael and some others had stayed in the church so the lights were still on, a gratifying white glow which we could see from hundreds of meters down the track, and a fitting reminder of Matthew 5.14-16. 

After all our labours we “slept like lizards” to quote Isaiah, although Pastor Moses woke us in the dark at 6.30 to pray with us before he headed down the mountain to his church.  I confess I barely woke up for this and slept on until the sun shone through the window after 7.  As I blundered out of the house to use the latrine, which offered an amazing view over an almost sheer drop, it was easy to revel in the beauty of the morning with the cool mountain breeze, amazing views, and the clean-toned sounds of Congolese-style guitar playing reverberating off the slopes from a big church down in the valley.  But then I saw an old woman with a hoe on an opposite slope digging away at her crops which seem to defy gravity as they cling to the mountainside.  Then another woman walked past with a 22l jerry-can on her head carrying water up from the small spring half-an-hour down the mountain, and it was not yet 7.30am.  It is easy to romanticise a brief trip into the mountains before returning to my usual world of hot water on tap, a reasonable electricity supply and a car and good roads with which to get to anywhere I need.  However, the reality for those Bakhongo who live up in the mountains is that life is hard work; everything they grow has to be coaxed out of the mountainsides with huge effort and considerable risk, and everything they buy, sell or use has to be carried long distances on steep slopes.  When things go wrong there is no help available other than prayer, and they often feel forgotten and neglected by most of the outside world.

The Bakhongo don’t dance like the Acholi or run like the Karamajong, they may not have the political skills of the Buganda or the cow-herding prowess of the Ankole, but they are a tough people, and I for one have a huge respect for them!

Prayer Requests: 

Give thanks for the BMS funding for the solar and charcoal projects.

Give thanks for the electrical skills of Amisi Kathaliko on which this solar project depends.

Pray that the system at Kantare will keep working reliably and that we can find a practical and affordable solution for the phone-charging, not only for Kantare, but for all 7 Baptist Churches.

Pray for Pastor Michael and his ministry in the mountains.

Pray for our safety as we keep travelling to rural villages by car and on foot.