Building a School for My Village; with Susan Urbanek Linville

In February this year, I made my first ever trip to Africa, landing in Entebbe, Uganda, and spending some time in the capitol before moving across the border into Kenya. It was a short, two-week trip that was filled with many to-dos and very little time to explore the region or get to know many of the people outside our contacts, yet before my trip, I knew I had to do at least some reading to learn what I could about the place.

Now, my local library isn’t huge, but it’s big enough for a city this size, and I tell you, I was shocked at how few books there were on the shelves about either Uganda or Kenya! Literally, I found The Lonely Planet and a book about child soldiers. I had to visit a used book store to see if I could find anything else that might clue me into the culture, and thankfully I found this book lying on the shelf—the only one on Uganda in the store.

The Price of Stones wasn’t precisely what I was looking for, mind you, as I prepared for this trip. I wanted more of an ethnography, perhaps, or a travelogue that could offer through snippets big-picture stories about the people, their history, and their lives. Still, this book by a native-born Ugandan who returns regularly to his home village from the States provided a feel for Ugandan villages that prepared me for some of the things I eventually saw there. I’m no stranger to the so-called “Third World,” yet there were some portions of both Uganda and Kenya that floored me with their depths of poverty, and this book gave me at least an inkling of what to expect.

Twesegye Jackson Kaguri grew up in a the small village of Nyaka in Southwestern Uganda which, like most rural areas of Uganda, is a place of bad water, disease, and physical poverty despite the peoples’ personal industry. Through the Lord’s blessing of both educational prowess and the opportunities to develop it, Twesegye made his way to the national university and eventually to the United States where he became a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Following his marriage to American girl and years spent in the States, he eventually returned home to Uganda only to be struck by the devastation that the AIDS virus had wreaked on the people of his region. He was especially struck by the plight of the orphans left alone or with grandparents or other extended families following the slow, painful deaths of their parents. These children were left hopeless and shamed, and both Twesegye and his wife knew they must do something.

Eventually, the author began raising funds in America and through his contacts in churches and elsewhere to begin the process of building a school and hiring teachers to teach and feed these forgotten children. He charged the families a tiny tuition, not so that they could pay the teachers or cover their food costs, but so that families could maintain their dignity while sending the kids to what was essentially a free private school. In time, the reputation of Twesegye and his school began to grow in the region, and he was able to see even the orphans’ shame within the community be slowly erased.

While in Uganda, I visited a similar Christian school for orphans and low-income families, and I saw what meagre facilities were offered by the benevolent workers as a refuge for these children. I can’t imagine what their home lives must be when this school was to them the image of progress! Mud walls, holey roofs, hand-pumped well water they couldn’t trust, and no electricity—yet the smiles on the faces of those 300 children and their tiny handful of teachers was a joy to see.

The poverty wasn’t limited to the orphanages, though. While walking the streets of both Uganda and Kenya, I eventually got used to hearing people ask me flat out, “Muzungu! Can you give me money?” Even in response to my simple, polite query of “How are you?” several people said, “I am not good. I need money!” Had I given to everyone that asked (or had need) I’d have been broke before I left the airport and would never have made it home! Certainly these experiences pull at your heart strings, but what can a visitor do but bear witness to the situation and tell others of the needs?

The debate that rages in situations like these covers topics like charity and need. Books like The Hole in Our Gospel suggest that we’re not being Christian if we only tell these people about Jesus and don’t also give to help their physical needs, while books like When Helping Hurts emphasize the destructive power of unchecked charity, especially in formerly-colonized areas. As we face homeless crises in cities across America, we can get easily confused about what’s right and wrong about giving money or goods to help the suffering (or the “suffering”) and fail to consider what else giving can entail. Some organizations focus on micro-loans and business training as methods for giving to a people without stripping them of their dignity or ability to work and earn their own living. Other organizations emphasize giving time instead of money through volunteer work in orphanages such as these.

The question is: What’s the right way for Christians to give to people in need? I don’t know the answer to that question, though I do know it’s definitely multi-faceted and needs-based. In fact, there probably isn’t a right answer to this question! We would all do well to investigate it further through books like those mentioned above and memoirs like this, The Price of Stones, a decent introduction for me to the plight of Ugandan villages and a healthy re-introduction to this topic of charity and service.

©2023 E.T.