Leaving...

We are in the middle of the roller-coaster of transition. We left Uganda on 1^st July, and we have travelled to visit friends in Botswana and then America, bouncing from Dallas to Madison to Lake Geneva to Minneapolis. Now I arrive in England, where I have not lived on a permanent basis since 1992, nineteen years ago. Back then, young free and single, just 25 yrs old, I signed up with Africa Evangelical Fellowship (AEF) and flew without a backward glance to a corner of rural Zambia to teach in a mission school for Zambian girls. Cutting a long story short, after two fascinating and happy years there, I went to missions college (All Nations Christian College) in England, married an American fellow-missionary, worked with him in Zimbabwe for five years, had two children there, watched and experienced Zimbabwe hurling itself into chaos, left in a hurry, spent a year teaching at Redliffe College in England, and then moved to Uganda in 2003.

In Uganda Dan and I were working at Uganda Christian University, which had been the Church of Uganda (Anglican) theological training college since about 1913, and in 1997 became a university. The goal of the university is to train Christian professionals in every walk of life for Uganda and the surrounding East African countries. Their vision statement is: a complete education for a complete person. It is a great place. We loved working there, but for the past two to three years I had begun to feel that I wanted to move back to England, to be nearer my family, and so that our two children, Abigail and Alex, would have time as teenagers to put down roots in their own culture. I began to feel tired of the heat and dust of Uganda, the traffic and related hazards on our hour-long commute to the children’s school, and to long for a life less ordinary, back home in England.

LEAVING…

However, when the time to leave Uganda finally came, I found it quite a wrench. More than I expected. As I put it to various friends, it is only when you pull a plant up that you realise how deep the roots go. I found saying goodbye to all the various groups of people we had been involved with, and our friends both Ugandan and ex-pat, very poignant. Living away from your own family, ex-pats tend to make close friendships very quickly, and to depend on them for all the support, morale-boosting, venting, and recreation that they might, back home, derive from siblings, or regular phone calls with parents. Leaving those friends in Uganda was hard. I shall miss them. I also realised how many people I had made connections with, as I walked around the university campus in the last few weeks before leaving: various students, colleagues, university staff and our Ugandan neighbours from the part of campus where we lived, would stop for a chat, shaking me by the hand and not letting go of that hand until the conversation was over. We had been at UCU longer than some of them and so we were often told, “We thought you would be here for ever. We are really going to miss you.”

So, leaving was sad. But, we were sure it was the right time to leave. I knew how much I would miss the beauty and green-ness of Uganda, the splashy flowers, the daily sunshine, the birds (which Dan and I loved watching and identifying) and even the red-tailed monkeys visiting our garden, entertaining us by doing a balancing act along the single electricity wire that crossed in front of our house - as well as the friends, the nights of playing Settlers and Carcassonne, and Scrabble, with various neighbours. But, when Dan suggested on one of our last evenings that maybe in five years time he would try for another job at UCU, my immediate reaction was, “No, no, no….!!” That brought it home to me: sad to leave, but, wanting to leave…