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.