The Painful Pace

Rugarama Hill -- Our hill from a distance. You can see the red roofs of BBUC.

 "You're eating up the hill!"

One of the Ugandan lecturers at BBUC made this comment as our paths intersected on campus. I was trudging up the trail to our house at my normal rate, but his remark (which meant, from his perspective, that I was moving uphill in a hurry) reminded me of how different the pace of life is here.  Everyone and everything moves much more slowly.  Rarely do I see a Ugandan run.  Adults and children alike wait with seemingly unending patience for everything from a meal to important meetings. A simple 5 minute walk to drop off a document easily becomes an hour long stroll through two or three conversations...and the document still doesn't reach its destination. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, it never takes less than an hour for the first course to arrive.

The change of pace applies to establishing a home as well. It goes without saying, of course, that there are no Ikeas, Wal-Marts, or Targets for easy shopping. Furniture has to be ordered from one or two local carpenters.  Two weeks completion times is impressive speed -- for two pieces of furniture. Any do-it-yourself projects have a similar completion rate.  I have to go to one store for nails, another to find something similar to string, and yet another to find anything like a stool.  Each of those purchases, by the way, end up happening on separate days.  So it took me 4 days to hang a small, cheap mirror in the bathroom.

It's no surprise, of course, that church services also are a bit longer.  Reference is often made to keeping time, but while the drums calling us to worship start beating a little before 9am, the service itself doesn't normally begin until about 30 minutes after the official start time.  And I love what the bishop said to me when he and I met to talk about my upcoming responsibilities in the diocese.  "I know in America you give these homilies that are 10 to 15 minutes.  Not here.  Here, we preach.  Say what must be said.  Don't think about the time."

This is the base of the toilet brush holder in our bathroom.

A different pace of life.  We do like it, but it is indeed challenging. Immediate gratification is not an option. Actually, lots of kinds of self-gratification are not options!  Wine and beer are out because of the Christian culture here and the harsh reality of rampant alcoholism.  I can't get any kind of dairy product that makes my coffee taste the way I like it.  We can't find items that make our house feel like home.  Nothing tastes great to us, regardless of anyone's culinary creativity.  It can take three or four days before I can print a needed document.  We're frequently without power, and even more frequently without running water.  There definitely have been moments when we've cried out, in different ways and at different volumes, this is no kind of life!

That leads us to ask, of course, where it is we're finding life.  We've been surprised to discover how much value we've placed on certain things and certain ways of living, how much in the past we have "found life" in things and circumstances that gratify us.  Yes, yes...we're Christians, and we know that true life is only found in Jesus.  We've always known that.  But when the all the other things that have been life-giving are stripped way, it's rather shocking, and even painful.  Like ripping the band-aid off to expose a wound still in the process of healing.

That is where we find ourselves -- band-aids ripped off, unprecedented vulnerability to the elements, life-giving gratifications sucked away.  And so we turn to Jesus.  "I am the way, the truth, the life...."  Hidden with Christ in God, is how Paul describes it in Colossians.  The band-aids gone, we feel even small jabs of pain more acutely, yet now we have the opportunity to turn from self-gratification to self-emptying, with the hope that we will be filled with real Life.  We're just on the shoreline of experiencing that life.

I know I'm mixing metaphors and bumbling around in a late-night, culture-shocked way of trying to say something simple and un-surprising: The pace of life in Uganda and the absence of self-gratifying resources is freeing us to experience a new kind of life in Jesus.  That freedom is both painful and healing.

A Crested Crane -- The Ugandan national bird roosting on a tree in our yard