Help Them Do Something for Themselves: Reflections from Uganda

From June 20 to July 1, I was part of a Catholic Relief Services (CRS) delegation to Uganda. As part of my work as campus minister, I registered my high school with CRS as a Global High School, silver level. This means that our school commits to doing CRS Rice Bowl annually as well as one other school-wide project, for which we created Respect Life Week to build awareness of marginalized people and the ways we can better uphold the consistent ethic of life.

CRS often assembles delegations for educational immersions to countries where they work, and this summer, the Global High Schools were invited to participate. Our group included CRS' national coordinator of the program, a CRS regional relationships manager, and five other teachers/ministers from other Global High Schools (two from Albuquerque, one from Philly, one from NYC, and one from Fort Wayne, IN). The eight of us spent a day in Baltimore at CRS national headquarters for orientation, and then we traveled to Uganda for nine days.

Our time in Uganda was spent with the CRS Country Representative, Liz, an American who lives and works full-time in the country with her family, and manages the national operations. She supervises a staff of over 50 people, including everyone from finance and HR workers to program and project managers and field agents who implement and execute the development work.

We started our trip at national headquarters in the capital city, Kampala, where we met some of the staff on learned the basics of their operations and the active programs they have going. We then traveled to various parts of the country, accompanied by Liz and different staff members, to learn more in depth about particular projects and to visit sites in the field to meet with partners as well as the local people participating in the projects. Amid the travels and visits, our trip also included a bit of extra time to see the country, learn about its culture, and reflect on the experience.

Gathering at CRS Uganda HQ in Kampala.

A lot about this experience will marinate for a while within me, and a lot of what I saw will have a lasting impact on my personal sensibilities and on the way I strive to teach and form teenagers. While things are still fresh, I wanted to share a few major takeaways from this immersion.

Welcome and Wonder

From start to finish, I can say without exaggeration that every single person we formally encountered, from restaurants and craft shops to local residents of far-flung villages, shared a profuse and profound welcome. Ugandans' way of saying hello was to tell us that we "are most welcome." The manner of phrasing and cheerfulness behind it reminded me of the Irish, with their culturally inherent sense of welcome. Before we moved to any kind of conversation or questions-and-answers with anyone, we were always first greeted with their lengthy welcome.

Meeting with SEPSPEL staff, the partner to SILC work in the Jinja area.

The hospitality was thorough in both words and actions. During our site visits, each time we came to a new village, people scrambled to gather any kind of chairs, benches, stools, or seats to insist that we sit down and make ourselves comfortable.

I often felt bad as people moved about to gather seats. It made me feel like we were an imposition - which as a group of white people in a bus, we to some extent certainly were. I felt like we were inconveniencing them and causing stress with our presence. So I tried to decline my seat once, as people nonetheless continued bringing chairs and inviting repeatedly us to sit. And I realized that if I were hosting guests, I would probably not sit until they had made themselves comfortable. And I knew then I needed to accept their hospitality because it was more important to show my gratitude and comfort than to worry about perception. Each group we visited truly was delighted to have us as their guests.

Colleagues sit on one of the benches provided by the local villagers.

This welcome set the perfect tone for all of our encounters. As we traveled to a country whose GDP per capita is barely 1% of our homeland, their hospitality helped focus me on the moment of our interactions to simply be greeted with such warmth and welcome. It didn't block out the profound disparity of those economic realities, but it helped me focus the fundamentality of encounter in these interpersonal moments.

In this sort of wonderfully human way, there was also a great sense of curiosity. Whereas we could only really meet their welcome with gratitude, the sense of wonder was more mutual and reciprocated between us as we spent time together in these places.

When we arrived, driven from place to place in our small bus by our Ugandan driver, our bus always attracted eager glances from those in their homes and along the road, all the way into the villages. As we disembarked and walked to our meeting place, people would gather to see us. Then when we circled up to talk or took our seats in a particular area for conversation, people from the village, especially children, would start to trickle in, a handful of people at a time, until the gathering of onlookers gradually swelled to a sizable crowd.

The object of so many people's attention - our chariot awaits.

We were met with combinations of curiosity, timidity, trepidation, confusion, skepticism, respect, gratitude, excitement, and much bashfulness. I don't think of any of this is negative, but just reflects the variety of feelings amid these authentic encounters. And for as much as all these things swirled in the reactions of people, just about every one of those things was present in me, too.

The wonder and curiosity was thoroughly mutual, and I enjoyed the simple human elements of our time with so many different people.

Sustainability

Teaching about social justice the past year, I have started to learn more about the difference between charity and justice. Charity is what we do to respond to a social problem and care for those who it affects. Justice is what we do to transform the system and structures so that a problem is addressed at its roots. Typically, we should always strive for justice yet do charity until justice can be realized.

Participating in this educational immersion with CRS took the buzzword of sustainability and made it wonderfully concrete for me. Rather than being a word thrown around for how good it sounds, sustainability is lived out tangibly in the programs and projects CRS implements. They take an idea, hammer out its process, find support from private organizations and charitable foundations to secure funding, and then team up with a local partner in the country. Together, they work to educate and empower local people over a fixed term (that is occasionally extended). After that time, they step away and leave the work in the hands of local people who can take the skills, systems, and education they have gained to continue their work themselves.

Rather than coming with expertise, supplies, and resources that local people wouldn't have, rather than building something local people might not understand, rather than having to come back to fix something when it breaks down that is totally other to locals, these sustainable projects are meant to empower people to sustain themselves. We saw three projects at work, and I want to explain briefly functioned in a way that can endure well beyond the horizon of its implementation.

First, we learned our SILCs (Savings and Internal Lending Communities). This outreach targets rural areas that lack access to financial institutions and are culturally ignorant of savings and investment. SILCs bring together up to 30 community members form a village who elect a chair, secretary (bookkeeper), treasurer, and lock-key holders for the safe-box. They then gather regularly to donate to an emergency social fund, make deposits to personal savings accounts, and request and communally approve loans to peers for anything from school fees to health-care expenses to small business pursuits. The SILCs are initiated and supported by a field agent (FA) or private service provider (PSP), to whom the SILCs pay a small service fee at each meeting.

We spent an afternoon observing a SILC meeting.

Partnering with different organizations in regions around Uganda, CRS identifies locals with enterprise potential and empowers them as FAs. These people train thoroughly to learn the mechanics of SILCs and then visit nearby villages to pitch the idea and process and mobilize the people. After success in pilot villages and additional training, reporting, and monitoring, FAs can become PSPs, certified by CRS and partner organizations to extend their reach to new villages and spread the idea of SILC to new areas.

This idea is sustainable for villages: local people gain the knowledge of savings, gain access to emergency funds, better their situation by applying their savings to capital improvements, often to their house or livestock, have the ability to borrow at low interest (often 5%) for personal enterprise, and benefit financially from the communally shared lending proceeds (often 25% or more annually). This idea is sustainable for PSPs: these individuals gain a marketable skill that provides them structure and direction for their livelihood and a steady that can support their families. With enough villages perpetuating their savings and lending cycles and enough PSPs working effectively as support professionals, CRS will step away having shifted an economic paradigm in Ugandan culture.

Next, we visited GAIN (Girls in Agricultural Investment). This program partners with the local staff of Caritas in the west of Uganda as an extension of the Church. The local diocese and its parishes donate land to GAIN, who mobilizes cohorts of young women, aged 14 to 20; many of these women have completed their schooling or have stopped going to school in favor of family considerations. The girls spend six months learning basic farming skills as they work on the church land with passionfruit crops.

We met the women of a GAIN cohort in their half-finished local church.

CRS, Caritas, and local corporate partner, Kad Africa, team up to train the girls in agricultural skills while also educating them in work habits, income management, personal career planning, and more. Each cohort works through their six-month cycle to cultivate their passionfruit crop and sell it into the market, supported directly by Kad Africa.

This project is sustainable because Church land is securely owned and freely given for usage by rotating cohorts, group after group. This is sustainable for the young women because they gain these skills under quality supervision and can bring them home to their families. Their passion is even pushing them to develop rudimentary improvements, such as water collection in the fields, and asking for growth in their agricultural practices, such as water pump access. In fact, early returns show up to a 500% growth in personal income after their time in the program, and some families are giving parts of their land to these young women to continue their agricultural work. This is sustainable for local villages because these young women are going on to participate in local SILCs, to acquire animals, and to work toward starting small businesses, such as second-hand clothing sales and sewing and seamstress work.

The women and their partner rep, Immaculate, led us out into their passionfruit fields.

Finally, we spent time with the Revitalizing Vanilla project, which works with the RFCU (Rwenzori Farmers' Cooperative Union). This program partners with Ben and Jerry's, which on a corporate scale is working toward completely fair trade coffee, chocolate, sugar, bananas, and vanilla. This project is aiming to improve quality, productivity, and efficiency in vanilla farming while building fair trade markets with co-op farmers.

One RFCU co-op taught us about their work.

The farmers working with this vanilla are being trained by CRS field staff and peers to implement best practices on their plants. For example, at the time when the vanilla flowers, the yield is maximized if farmers manually pollenate the plants. So farmers recruit bands of children, teach them to identify the flowering plants, and have the kids mark them throughout the fields; meanwhile, trained farmhands move plant by plant to pollenate the flowers individually. Additionally, the market for vanilla is tight, as only certain areas grow and harvest it well, with Madagascar leading the way; these cooperative farmers work together to make standards of quality uniform and ensure that only fully matured vanilla is picked and marketed. They are currently facing theft trends in which people harvest and sell vanilla early and sell it for whatever they can get, even though premature harvesting leads to lower quality; the co-op's are striving for wider, clearer laws against theft while they collegially unify the market and standards.

The "demo" farmer had a teaching area, where best practices, like vine ties, were shown.

This is sustainable for the farmers because their best practices will last beyond the term of the program. In fact, we saw an example of a "demo" farmer who maintains a part of his field as a teaching area, with perfectly tied starter vines, carefully mulched bases, and properly wrapped vanilla vines. These practices are taught to new co-op members and will also be shared with Farmer 2 Farmer participants, foreign farmers who will come for weeks at a time to work with co-op farmers and share best practices; this "demo" farmer was itching for training from that sub-project so the co-op could begin hosting foreign visitors in their fields. The commitment from Ben and Jerry's is laying the foundations for these farmers to be the first in a gradually growing commodity market that will more justly distribute profits and create fairer outcomes for these people.

These are just a few examples of development work that goes past charity to strive for justice. Certainly, no program goes off without a hitch. Crops can be stolen. Some people can be unreceptive. Local partners may waffle. But the blueprint for the deepest, most lasting impact comes in empowerment and systemic change. These programs strive to educate and enable people to, as the priest who directs the local Caritas operations said, "help them do something for themselves."

Perpetual Discernment

I was continually impressed not just but what I saw but by who I met. In local people participating in these sustainable projects, I saw ambition, entrepreneurial spirit, self-advocacy, resourcefulness, and amazing competencies. In CRS Uganda staff, I saw humility, excellently relevant expertise, a patient attitude, and best of all, pastoral sensibilities. And in watching our American country rep, I saw an incredible combination of development chops, interpersonal leadership skills, and spiritually motivated vision. It was quite the smorgasbord of awesome.

A farewell picture with Robert, a project manager who traveled with us to show us his work.

And what was clear to me early on, and increased in clarity as we went, was that this type of work was not my call. Having had the privilege of studying abroad in London and living abroad for a year in Ireland, I valued my time but struggled mightily. I loved the people and the core of my studies and work but was challenged by the day-to-day lifestyle.

I love American sports; I love American cities, suburbs, and towns; I love interstates, carefully gridded streets, and smart traffic patterns; I love the four seasons, the heartiness, and the diversity and neighborhoods of Chicago. So the flow of daily life was a struggle.

We briefly visited an all-girls secondary boarding school and chatted with some students.

Added to that, I love Campus Ministry. I love taking things from the world like these immersion experiences and putting it toward service outings and social justice education for teenagers. I love forming student leaders. I love directing retreats. And outside of the US, and maybe Canada and parts of Europe, the school systems don't often include this, or if they do, it happens with priests or in parishes. I fill an oddly particular need in American Catholic high schools that I love and feel uniquely gifted and suited for.

So as I marveled as the CRS staff, at the excellence of how compatible their gifts and dispositions are to this development work, to this ministry that is faith living out justice, I can cooly recognize that this life is the right fit for them. And my ministry to my teenagers in the United States and the life that surrounds that is the right fit for me.

This is the beauty of our universal church. This is the enfleshing of global solidarity. Sitting on my couch in Chicago, I have experiences that actualize the oneness of the call of solidarity; I have names, faces, and stories, countrysides, villages, and active memories that make me mindful of all people as my brother and sister. And my call is to bring this into my ministry.

Our cohort walks between SILC villages, as locals show us the fruits of their collaboration.

As my cohort of eight justice- and ministry- motivated Catholics moved about the country, our conversations were ongoing, never really ceasing (except when I frequently fell asleep on the bus). Getting past formal reflection processes, we were always commenting, asking, comparing notes, and helping each other grasp the palpability of the solidarity that was being enfleshed in our midst.

As we realized the human bonds we share with our peers in CRS, with the staff of the partner organizations, and with the people of the Ugandan towns and villages, we had that spark that a good retreat or a powerful prayer experience brings. And our fire was the fuel from the Holy Spirit that proceeded from all these people and all these encounters.

This morning, my parish pastor shared a phrase that his friend brought back from South Africa, and I smiled as I thought of these many people who are the freshest faces of global solidarity to me:

If you travel alone, you can travel fast; if you travel together, you can travel far.

Our ham of a boat guide, Alex, flexing his guns, after he took us out on Lake Victoria on the source of the Nile River.