By Peter Ferrarone | Observer Contributor
This summer I spent three months volunteering in Uganda. Mbarara is in Western Uganda, about four hours from where Lake Victoria flows into the Nile, and three hours from Mount Rwenzori, one of the highest peaks on the continent. If life is a series of chance events then going to Uganda is one such event.
About a year ago I met a Catholic priest on an airplane. His name was Father John Baptist Bashobora, a Ugandan. He told me about his organization, the Father Bash Foundation, which gives financial and educational support to countless young orphans. He runs three schools and a Catholic hospital. When he asked me to come and work with him, I booked my ticket.
This was volunteering on a small scale. It wasn’t the Peace Corps or the Jesuit Volunteer Corps or any other well established volunteer site. There was no bureaucracy and things got done quickly. When an abandoned infant got dropped at the Foundation’s doorstep, they found it a home within minutes. When a student needed money for tuition, the cash was there in two days. The Foundation is run by Ugandans, for Ugandans. Father Bash is just one man, with a few dedicated people around him, doing great work to improve people’s lives.
The volunteer experience I had was atypical. I would call it ‘mutual exchange’ volunteering. I had to make that term up be cause no other phrase accurately describes it. I didn’t volunteer in hospitals, although I was there repeatedly when one of my housemates was close to death with Typhoid. I didn’t work in schools, although I visited them a bunch of times to talk with the students. What I did do, however, was move into Father Bash’s orphanage.
For three months I lived in a four-bedroom house with concrete walls and concrete floors, rats running on the floor, and no running water. In the living room, there was a wooden bed frame that we used as a couch. When I first arrived there were ten kids living there, but after a few weeks the number ballooned up to twenty-five when school let out for the summer. Without any parents, the house was ruled hierarchically by age, but it wasn’t chaos. Meals were made and chores assigned. And this was my life for three months. We shared everything.
They were interested in me, and I was interested in them. They’d ask me questions like: “what do you do for work?” and “where do you live?” They wanted to know about Massachusetts and the weather. They were fascinated by snow, of all things. And I had many questions too, like, “How can bananas possibly be your staple food?” But it was. Yet, like everything else, I learned to adapt.
By the end of my time there, Ivan, my roommate, told me that I was family. And I really felt like it! When all of the orphans got invited to the wedding of one of their adopted siblings, I was invited too, because I was their ‘brother’ and a member of the family.
I am not saying that my experience was better than other volunteers. I am saying, however, that it was different. The structure wasn’t there for me to volunteer in a traditional way. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to return home with the usual stories of a summer spent in Africa. And after a few weeks I discovered that the key was to be present and available to my housemates. Once I did that I began to cherish my stories; as unusual as they might have been, they were real.
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