The Muzungus go to church

Sunday was a happy time in our corner of the world- the Church of Kanyasohara (one of the communities we work in near the park) had a ceremony baptizing a dozen infants. We walked to the church with our friend Aleia, trying not to get shoes and pants/dresses too muddy. We purposefully arrived late, since we knew that the service was supposed to last several hours, but we forgot about how hard it is for 3 white people to be inconspicuous in a room of a hundred Ugandans. The three of us squeezed into a wooden pew in the back of the church, and as soon as we sat down a powerful wind and rainstorm broke loose and hit the church like a hurricane (it had been calm and overcast up until that exact instant). The banana trees outside were waving violently, and the rain and hail on the metal roof (which we were worried might blow off) drowned out the singing and drumming. The rain also forced half the church members to move their pews away from the open windows as it blew in. It looked so much like we had brought the wrath of god with us that we were all crossing our fingers that the locals wouldn’t think that we were bad omens or punishable delinquents for getting there so late. (But we were told that the service would last till 3pm, so 1pm seemed like a very reasonable time to get there... never mind that it started at 11.)

When the storm finally passed, half an hour later, the singing
and drumming and praying resumed. The songs and the clothes and the children
were all very beautiful. It was fun to see all the community members dressed up
in their Sunday best (really brightly colored and pretty fabrics) and they were
equally surprised by us since Andrew was in his jacket coat and tie and we
normally bump into people when we are all out in their fields and looking
pretty scruffy. The service was in the language of Rutooro, which added a
certain mystique. One of our field assistants came over to sit by us and at one
point when we thought we had just said a prayer he leaned over and informed Jess
that it was an announcement about a lady who was missing her cell phone after
last Sunday’s service. Another “prayer” turned out to be about how it might be
a good idea to plant some trees on the west side of the building to keep the rain
from blowing in so hard. Another unexpected twist was that the ‘offering’ was
followed by an auction- people who don’t have money to offer bring things like sugar
cane instead, and these are auctioned off to other members of the church right
on the spot in order to liquidate the value into more monetary offering. We
went home with a bunch of bananas and a bag of avocados. The chairman of the
village kept buying things on our behalf and giving them “to the visitors in
the back”, so we also bought him a pineapple.

Unfortunately we had arrived so late that we missed the actual baptism part, but the parents took
their children up to the front again for a final presentation. After the
service there was lots of hand-shaking and picture-taking. Then we were invited
to two separate dinners and present exchanges, in one case because it was our
field assistant’s baby, and in the other case as best we can figure, mostly
just because we are white. It is hard to blend in. We were basically the only non-family
guests at the first luncheon and Aleia and Jess were the only women sitting at
the table and not sitting on the floor (the traditional place for women, we are
told). The other gathering was for a wealthier family and half the church was
there, but even though we did not really know the family and had just met the
baby that day, we were still referenced in all the speeches and generally made
a spectacle of. But we are on the lucky side of looking different- we look
different and people automatically treat us well, which would not be the same
if we were Indian or Asian, and which would also probably not be true if we
were a Ugandan visiting some places in the U.S. Being white here is like an odd
free-pass, where you are automatically made welcome and important (despite all
historical events that should make this not the case, from colonialism to
commercial exploitation), and on the one hand we feel really grateful for the
way that people give us the benefit of the doubt, and on the other hand we feel
just very awkward- not being sure what the customs and expectations are, not
being sure how to earn the way that we are treated. We gave baby Martha a bag
of sugar with a bow of pink flagging tape and an origami giraffe. Everyone else
gave money. But I think she liked the giraffe, until she smushed it.

One of the reasons they have big joint baptisms here (and our
Ugandan friend Richard told us that they have 3 or 4 of them a year) is because
of the huge number of kids in Uganda. We had heard that Uganda’s population was
growing fast- so Andrew looked it up and the country has the 2^nd
highest birth rate in the world, the 3^rd fastest growing population
overall, and half the population is under 15 years old. So basically a tidal
wave of new Ugandans are coming along and it isn’t clear what that’s going to
mean for the country, especially given the current shortages of food staples
like sugar or if everyone decides that they’d like to have meat with every
meal. We were slightly encouraged by the fact that the importance of family
planning and education was talked about at both celebrations afterwards, with
the family patriarch standing up and giving a speech about it at the second
one. It seems like there are some big transitions happening here now, both in
terms of expectations and in terms of philosophies, but there is so much that
people here are up against, and the playing field is nothing close to level, and
it is really unclear to us what sort of hopeful future is available to this
part of the world where the people themselves are quite “developed” but the
country is still “developing”.