Final Relections on East Africa

This is my last Sunday in Uganda, here in the safe confines of the Bujagali Falls community. Safety is a funny thing – I have been reflecting on what safety means and how you know you are safe over the past couple of days. While safety means different things at different times, here it means an understanding. I have an understanding of how things work here – when and where to go for food, water, shelter, who to speak with and what to say, how to get out of situations that feel uncomfortable. Understanding runs both ways – I feel understood and cared for here. People in the village know me by name and those at Eden Rock spend long amounts of time chatting with me – I am known here.

But the meaning of safety is context specific. I wonder what defines safety for people in Rwanda – today and ten years ago, for people in Arua, for those in Lebanon and Israel now, for people in New York – especially after 9/11, or for you all in your homes. Safety is fluid – but most of all I think we feel safe when we feel like we have something in common with those in our families, communities, individuals with whom we live – it is in that common human thread that we show concern for others and feel safe ourselves.

For my final reflections from Eastern Africa, this quote seemed to fit. It speaks to the unbearable suffering I have witnessed, the generosity of spirit I have experienced, and the hope for the future we all hold.

This is a call to the living, to those who refuse to make peace with evil, with the suffering and the waste of the world.

This is a call to the human, not to the perfect, to those who know their own prejudices, who have no intention of becoming prisoners of their own limitations.

This is a call to those who remember the dreams of their youth, who know what it means to share food and shelter, the care of children and those who are troubled, to reach beyond barriers of the past bringing people to communion.

This is a call to the never ending spirit of the common man, his essential decency and integrity, his unending capacity to suffer and endure, to face death and destruction and to rise again and build from the ruins of life.

This is the greatest call of all – the call to a faith in people.

~ Algernon D. Black