The archbishops and me...

If you can't name-drop in your own blog... where can you???

Today Dan and I went to the Trustees meeting for the UCU UK Partners, which was held this time at Cuddesdon Theological College, just outside Oxford. We had a really good productive meeting, which was good. Also, it was lovely to visit Cuddesdon, which is in a beautiful rural location, amongst rolling fields and sheep. I don't know how the students concentrate, with such lovely wide views outside the windows...

It happens that Cuddesdon is near the village where my parents lived when I was born, and they went to the church there. And it happened that Robert Runcie was the vicar and principal of Cuddesdon at that time - he later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since it was my parents' church, I was baptised there, by Robert Runcie - my Dad remembers how he lifted me up afterwards, right up in the air, facing the congregation, and said, "We welcome you" and I looked out at everyone. I don't remember a thing, of course... But today we called into the church to see it, as I had never been back since we moved away when I was six months old. It is a beautiful, wonky, unspoiled old church, parts dating back to 1124 AD! The side bits  were added in the 1200s, and not much has been done to it since. Amazing.

But I must add here that Robert Runcie is not the only A of C I have had dealings with. Donald Coggin, who was archbishop in the 1970s, came to preach at my university college in 1987, and I sat beside him at chapel breakfast - he tried talking to me in Hebrew but it didn't work and we ate our fried eggs together. George Carey invited me to tea at Lambeth Palace, as an Anglican mission partner - there were a few others there, I might add... We did meet him again later in Harare at the WCC, and in Mukono as a visitor to UCU - he didn't remember me on any occasion... And then Rowan Williams, was my Early Church tutor in Cambridge, and I had tutorials in his college rooms. He made me tea with sour milk that had sat on his outside window-sill (as all the tutors did). I liked him a lot.

So you can understand I am a bit miffed that the new Archbishop, Justin Welby, I have never met, and I do not know him from Adam. Well. Perhaps something should be done about this.

Some faces from the past. And, did they really use to travel like that?!!

We are putting together a book of old pictures of Bishop Tucker, hopefully in time for the centenary event this year. Rev John Hunter sent us this one, and I thought a lot of you might enjoy seeing it. John Hunter was a principal of the college from 1962-65, and he visited again in 1993 which is when this photo was taken. So I can name a few of the staff from 1993 but not all of them. The ones I know, l - r, are,
-----, ----- , Eliphaz Maari, ----, Elisha Mbonigaba, ----, -----, Lusania Kasamba,  John Magumba. John Hunter was here with his son Christopher. Any filling in of names appreciated...

This shows John Hunter's mother, who had lived in Uganda long before her son, travelling from Kampala to Toro circa 1909, in what they called "landies". Incredible. The road on the other hand, doesn't look much different...

Meeting Mrs Burkitt

This week has been a helterskelter of meeting up with old friends and new.

This week we have seen our former student friends Andrew and Carien, on a visit from the Netherlands, who taught us Carcassonne and Settlers!!! Yay! Also our friend Andy Sexton stayed with us, whose family we are very close to from Uganda days. Yay! I also spent 24 hours in Devon with my parents. We also had a Trustees meeting for UCU UK Partners and met with Tudor Griffiths, a former misionary in Mukono, from the 1970s. We also had our second ever meeting of our brand-new home group, with our new friends, former Wycliffe Ethiopia missionaries Simon and Lynn Caudwell, and another lady from our church.

On Tuesday, we drove to a small Cotswold village to meet a lady who had lived in Uganda for twenty years from 1943 to 63, Mrs Burkitt, wife of the surgeon Denis Burkitt, who worked first in Lira and then at Mulago for those twenty years.

It was a real privilege and so interesting to meet her, and to hear her stories of Uganda back in those days, taking out her young children via a six week boat voyage. Amazingly, she had masses of black and white photos, really clear and quite large, albums full - so we saw her and Denis on the shores of Lake Victoria, at the Nile Dam when it was first opened, shots of Makerere when it was a single grand building surrounded by trees and bush, a thatched bush hospital in Hoima, the Paraa ferry, and so on and so on. They were very good friends with the Taylors, which is how we got in touch with this lady.

It was like a trip into the past for us, to a green, beautiful, orderly, groomed Kampala, Mulago and Jinja, before the chaos, by the look of these photos at least, before the traffic, tarmac, potholes and pollution, before the rubbish piles at the roadsides, before the Maribou Storks. It looked so clean, tropical, and well-kept.

You might know that Denis Burkitt became very well-known for the medical discoveries he made during his work and then research in Uganda. He discovered what became called Burkitt's Lymphoma. He also discovered the importance of a high fibre diet, linking it to the prevention of colon cancer: so a book about his life was entitled "The Fibre Man." I remember my mother hearing about it on the radio and getting all excited about us eating brown rice, wholemeal flour and brown sugar, when I was very young. Although I didn't like the heavy food that resulted!

So, it was a wonderful morning, and an honour to meet Olive.  I hope we will get to visit her again and see more of the pictures and hear more stories. What struck me most, as it did when I read John Taylor's prayer letters, was that, although life was simpler maybe and Uganda less developed - no electricity, no internet, no supermarkets, no phones - still many issues of living far from home, living with househelp, learning culture, cross-cultural relationships and expectations, eating local foods, finding out how to spend days off, spending a lot of time reading, and eating with friends, were just the same as we are familiar with. Of course things have changed, and our global village may be shrinking but, missionaries are still strangers in a strange land, "bazungu," and I don't think that will ever go away.

Uganda Partners

A few days ago the Uganda Partners UK, for whom Dan has been working one day a week this past year, met again at Graham and Fiona Carrs' home near Oxford, and I was voted in as a trustee! So exciting! But one of the first proposals was that every trustee should aim to raise two thousand pounds and my heart sank... - you mean I have to do fund-raising?? But fortunately that idea got nixed pretty quickly - phew! Well of course the idea is to do some fund-raising... and I really will... but a hard and fast goal like that was just a bit scary (pathetic I know.)

The first newsletter to be emailed out to our database of supporters has been written by Dan (blood sweat and tears...), and after it has been circulated around the trustees, I will post a copy on here.
There is also a website for the Uganda Partners UK, and this is the link to it:

http://www.ugandapartners-uk.org

It looks great, but it is not quite finished yet I believe. But you can check it out if you are interested.

This is the current group of trustees, minus Tudor Griffiths who could not make it to this meeting.
The other new member is Julius Mucunguzi, a Ugandan who now lives in the UK and is the Communications Officer for the Commonwealth Secretariat, and a great guy. We are so happy to have him and his expertise on board.

l to r, Julius Mucunguzi, Roger Marsden, Chris Dobson, Graham Carr, Me, Dan

One plan already being worked on is to have a parallel centenary celebration event in Oxford on June 1st next year.

Whilst I feel more and more settled here in Gloucester, it also feels good to have a real connection with UCU and to feel we are still involved even in a small way. Recently I have reconnected with a couple of university friends, and got to know someone who was in Zambia at the neighbouring mission station to ours at the same time as me, and with my same mission (AEF), so we knew all kinds of friends in common - so I feel as though the threads from my former lives keep multiplying. I suppose the key is not to feel pulled in different directions by those threads, but to enjoy the sense of being in a tapestry which is still being sewn, growing and becoming fuller and richer, as it all interweaves over and over.