I realized that I haven't said a lot thus far about the Catechist Training Center where I am living. And I also wanted to include a few photos of where I am staying!The Catechist Training Center is located about five kilometres outside Gulu Town in an area cleverly named ForGod. On our street (if you can even call the muddy river next to our compound a street) we have the Archbishop's residence, the Gulu Cathedral, various convents of nuns and offices for Caritas and Catholic Relief Services. It doesn't take too much intelligence to figure out why they named this area "ForGod."
The Catechist Training Center is actually made up of two separate buildings on one compound. The building you see in the picture above is actually the Catechists Training Center where the church trains volunteer catechists from all over Acholiland in northern Uganda to teach the faith to their various communities. This particular building has a few offices for the priests and sisters inside, classrooms for the catechists who are undergoing trainning, and a chapel where we attend mass on Sundays (see picture below).
The second building is the guesthouse where I live. At any given time the guesthouse can have between two and 12 people living there. The only permanent residents are Fr Joe Okumu, the director of the BOSCO project, and another priest from the Archdiocese. Right now we have six people staying here, making it much quieter than it was during the peak times of the summer when we would usually have 12 or so around the dinner table each night.
The photo below shows the second level veranda rooms--mine is the third from the right.
The photo below is a good view of our beautiful compound from the second floor veranda of the guesthouse. On our compound Fr Joe grows and raises almost all of the food we eat on a daily basis: potatoes, greens, tomatoes, cabbage, maize, cassava, etc. He also has a place for the animals: the pigs, ducks, turkeys, and chickens. And to top it off, he has a small vineyard to grow grapes from which he makes his own wine. Depending on the bottle you get, it can either taste like grape juice or vinegar--he is still perfecting this craft.
Below is a picture of the room I stay in followed by a view of the sunset from the second floor veranda just outside my room.
The Catechist Training Center is a great place to have as my temporary home in Gulu. It is a peaceful enclave from an otherwise hectic and seemingly chaotic world surrounding the environs of Gulu. However, it was not always this way.
Until 2006, Fr Joe used to welcome between 400 and 500 night commuters every night to sleep in relative safety on his compound. The night commuters were mostly children and young adults who lived in the surrounding IDP camps. It was not safe for them to sleep in the IDP camps at night because it was a common event for the rebels to attack the camps at random during the evening hours. During attacks, they would especially target youth to abduct into their infantry ranks. Consequently, every night, tens of thousands of youth would walk into Gulu Town and to places like the Catechist Training Center to seek relative safety from rebel abduction and/or attack.
Yet, even places like the Catechist Training Center were not free from intrusion by the rebels. During peak times of violence about three to five government army soldiers would patrol the compound where I stay, charged with protecting the 400-500 night commuters sleeping on the compound each night. However, this was not enough on an occasion in 2006. The rebels came into the Catechist Training Center compound while the government soldiers retreated or went into hiding. They abducted Fr Joe's cook and then looted supplies and food. Then they escaped into the night.
Hearing these stories from Fr Joe--someone who has endured this instability for twenty years--is almost surreal as I enjoy peaceful evenings and beautiful sunsets over Acholiland while imagining how only two years ago those sunsets were colored by the fear on the faces of young children looking for a safe place to sleep every night right below my bedroom.
In the final picture below I managed to find a Notre Dame fan in Uganda. He had no idea what Notre Dame is but he said he enjoyed his jacket anyway!
