Lights in the Darkness

A Jesuit accompanying refugees is accompanied in return

by Gary Smith, SJ
photos by Don Doll, SJ, and John Whitney, SJ

In 2000, Fr. Gary Smith, SJ, left Portland, Oregon, to live among Sudanese refugees in Uganda, working for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) at Rhino Refugee Camp and the district of Adjumani in northern Uganda.
Here are excerpts from They Come Back Singing, a compilation of Smith’s letters and journal entries reflecting on his life and relationships with the refugees.

Easter Vigil, Rhino Camp

Joseph Lemi plays the adungu, a harp-like instrument, at a church in Rhino Camp in Uganda, a haven for Sudanese refugees. “All the refugees here have family still in Sudan,” says author Smith.

On the night of the Easter Vigil, I walked over to Ocea, a small village about a mile from the JRS compound.

It was raining off and on, and so to create the Easter fire, three women, prominent elders in the village, stacked wood that the children had gathered at the base of a tree. How they ignited that fire in the light rain with wet wood remains a mystery to me. “African technology,” a student responded to my perplexed look. From that tenderly created fire, we lit the Easter candle and moved slowly to the front of the chapel, the flame protected from the drizzle by our hands and by the thatched roof of the chapel, patched with a raggedy canvas. A group of girls danced rhythmically, leading the procession, and all present clapped and sang with a purity of faith so characteristic of these refugees. There was one kerosene lamp hanging from a eucalyptus beam over a small wooden altar, which was covered with a brilliant red and white and orange cloth.

I celebrated the Mass in Bari with snatches of Arabic. I am not fluent in either language, but one learns the language of the Mass by constant practice with patient teachers. After the Gospel was read, I had a few of the people act out the scene at the empty tomb as told in Luke 24. The Sudanese love drama and love to see their own people act out a drama. They can perform on the spot, much as they sing and dance. The women were appropriately sad, fearful, and dumbfounded by the disbelieving apostles. There was a lot of laughter at this, since it pointed to the dynamic between men and women in the village. The angels, of course, brought lots of smiles, because it is amusing to see someone you know on such an intimate human level play something so celestial. The men, led by the one playing Peter, acted out the role of the confused and condescending apostles perfectly.

"What irony: the JRS mandate is to accompany these good people in the darkness of their tragic dislocation. And yet here they were, walking me home in the darkness."

After our Eucharistic prayer, the little band of worshipers announced to me that they would escort me back to the JRS compound. So, singing and dancing—fifty strong—we plunged into the jaws of the night, a night so black that you could not see your hand in front of you if it were not for the flicker of the Easter candle leading the way and a winking lantern bringing up the rear.

Of course, the prevailing imagery of the Easter Vigil—Christ, the light in the darkness and the light of the world—was not lost on any of us; it was a fundamental truth that poured over us like a tropical rain. The words of the first letter of John rose in me: God is light; there is no darkness in him at all (1:5).

The Oceans accompanied me to the door of my tukul. What irony: the JRS mandate is to accompany these good people in the darkness of their tragic dislocation. And yet here they were, walking me home in the darkness.

I stood there, the crowd beaming back at me as I thanked them in Arabic and Bari and English. After much singing, clapping, foot-stomping, and laughter, they wished me a good night and one final “Happy Easter” and then turned and sailed back into the night. After they left, I retrieved a bottle of cheap wine from my clothes cabinet that I had stashed away for the occasion: my Easter feast. I sipped and began to let the night soak in. I could hear them off in the distance, heading home. Singing. Clapping. Banishing the night with their love of God. They were happy that I had come, but happier that on this night they could celebrate the Resurrection with the Eucharist.

Letter from Kampala

The Jesuit Refugee Service works with the United Nations to support Vicky Kezi, teacher at the Alere Nursery School in northern Uganda. The author is one of about 40 JRS staffers ministering to more than 60,000 Sudanese refugees in the area.

I write this from Kampala, where I’m taking a break from the North. It gives me a chance to clear my head, have a few hot showers, eat better food, and do the shopping. The flight from Arua, which has the closest airstrip to the Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement, to Entebbe Airport, about thirty miles outside of Kampala, takes about an hour and a half. The approach over Lake Victoria is breathtaking. I get down about every three months and stay with the ten Jesuits at the community in Kampala. I miss all of you and read your letters over and over again.

You asked about the wars that affect us in northern Uganda. I’ll try to give you an overview. The JRS projects in the north of Uganda and in Southern Sudan labor under the dark shadow of war. Rhino is not directly involved, but of course all the refugees here have family still in Sudan. The civil war there staggers along. It has bled that poor country for almost twenty years. The Sudanese government, in white-hot anger over recent rebel successes, has taken to bombing villages along the border—in Rhino, we can hear the Russian-built Antonov bombers make their sweeping turns over Ugandan territory. Whenever the planes fly overhead, the refugees get a certain look on their faces. They have been there. They know.

In Uganda, there is also the festering rebellion of a malignantly charismatic nutcase by the name of Joseph Kony, who is the self-proclaimed leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). He says he receives visions and instructions from God. The LRA specializes in destruction and mayhem, ambushing a bus here and a truck there, burning down schools and hospitals, invading and torching displacement camps, killing indiscriminately, and, worst of all, abducting many children, who are forced to become soldiers and sex slaves. As far as I can figure, there is no coherent ideological component in their fight, but rather a combination of Christian fundamentalism and opposition to Museveni’s government. LRA rips and runs on the other side of the Nile from Rhino, so we are not affected directly, though we are touched by fleeing Ugandans who escape over to the west side of the Nile. The stories about LRA activities are horrific. Most recently, they stopped a bus, pulled the people out, put padlocks through their lips, and then torched the bus.

But there is another side of my life here, a counterpoint to the depressive and destructive activities of the LRA: it is the richness of the people and the joy that being among them brings. Recently, at a Sunday Mass, during the prayers of the people, a woman was uttering a fervent prayer for rain. A six-year-old boy stepped into the middle of the aisle, maybe ten feet away from the altar, and proceeded to take the pee of the century on the parched dirt floor looking at me with a stare somewhere between defiance and ecstasy. Of course, the whole chapel started cracking up, including the woman who was praying for rain. She was the mother of this kid. Sort of gives new meaning to the efficacy of prayer, doesn’t it?

The Women of Adjumani

Students at the JRS-supported Alere Secondary School help prepare food for fellow students, the majority of whom are refugees from Sudan.

I have known and wept with and consoled the Sudanese refugee woman, particularly as she is a mother. When you know her as a mother, you understand how she can age so quickly. The Sudanese refugee mother is poor and frequently has a baby strapped to her back or nursing at her breast. She is always working—sweeping, cooking, cleaning, carrying huge loads on her head—and is often pregnant; most likely, she has had children who have died of malaria. She is friendly and long-suffering, loves to talk and joke with her sisters, is close to her tribe and clan, most often cannot read or write, and is born into and suffers from a rigid male-dominated culture. She dies young. Often she is old before her time, but she possesses an interior beauty that endures until she dies. She would die in an eye blink for her family. I have buried her after childbirth. I have anointed her as she was dying of some tropical disease. I have given her alms when she has extended her hand, fingers lost to leprosy. I have raced my car over impossible roads to get her to a clinic where she can deliver her baby. I have been with her when she is dying of the shock of a breech birth, a little foot sticking out of her body. I have helped her younger daughters continue with their studies in the face of a cultural attitude that educating a girl child is not necessary—an attitude she has faced firsthand. I have fallen in love with the African mother, whose goodness and beauty have left me shaking.

One day, such a mother, Mary Kenyi, came to see me. Her old body was covered in a threadbare dress. She often came by, asking for a few beans or some grain and sometimes for a blanket. She has nothing, not even a son or daughter to care for her in her old age. All of her children were killed in the Sudan civil war, along with her husband. I saw her, a long walking stick in hand, coming toward me as I was conversing with a staff member outside our compound. I thought to myself, perhaps with an edge of irritation, I wonder what she will be asking for today? She carried a small plastic bag and handed it to me, giving me a smile that would capture the heart of the most heartless.

In the bag was a gift for me.

Three eggs.

Easter Vigil, Adjumani

Old methods of farming have to do to raise the corn and sweet potatoes, staples of the Ugandan diet.

This afternoon I was at Oliji, a village of Madi-speaking Catholics next to the Nile led by a well-organized young catechist named Andruga. The liturgy was under a tree again, since part of the chapel roof burned down when leaders tried to smoke out a colony of termites.

A large and enthusiastic crowd—maybe three hundred people—greeted me as I pulled in to the village an hour before Mass. I heard confessions, not understanding much but able to absolve in Madi. Midway through the confessions, which took place under the chapel tree, a powerful thunderstorm blew through, forcing us to continue under a section of the chapel roof that was still intact.

Because of security issues on the roads after dark, I needed to start the vigil at 4 pm, which took the punch out of the Service of Light. But adjustment is easy for people who adjust all the time. There were thirty-one baptisms. By the time I was anointing all the little heads and chests, three-quarters of the babies were screaming. The people loved it, though, and at the conclusion of the ceremony everyone applauded and the women ululated and the choir unleashed some wonderful music. Like a speeding locomotive, we blazed into the Easter “Gloria.”

After Mass, Andruga and I, with many of the women, walked to the edge of the village to visit a sick woman named Lucietta. Andruga wanted me to anoint her and give her Communion. The women assisted her out of her hut to a mat underneath a tree, formed a circle around her, and sang and prayed: Oliji’s cloud of witnesses. Lucietta probably weighed about eighty pounds, and in her serene and welcoming face I could detect a hint of a Parkinson’s-like tremor. She looked old but did not know her age. She remained silent throughout the ceremony, a ritual with which she was familiar, having many times before been part of the circle.

After the women finished, I knelt in front of Lucietta and anointed her hands and head, then gave her Communion. I carefully took her beautiful, tremulous face in my hands, tilting her head so that she could look into my eyes, and blessed her. In such a moment, when the near-death anointed one looks at me, everything I have ever studied about sacraments of encounter becomes clear. I rested silently before an obvious and splendid truth: this touch was an encounter with the heart of God.

She asked me in Madi, “What is your name?”

I responded in Madi, “My name is Gary, Abuna Gary.”

She peered into my face, smiled, and exclaimed, “This is a Madi name!” (gaari in Madi means “bicycle.”) Then she slowly said, “Abuna Gaari,” and laughed. I laughed. The cloud of witnesses laughed.

We left her sitting prayerfully on her mat and headed for the pickup—Andruga, those wonderful women, and me, Father Bicycle. Later, driving on the bumpy road toward Adjumani, dusk settling in, I commented to Ratib that if I was going to fight for God, all I wanted backing me up were the women of Oliji, armed with the most powerful of weapons: their prayer.

Ratib, a Madi and a Muslim, nodded reflectively and said, “A good choice, Father, a good choice.”

Easter Sunday, Adjumani

This morning, as I headed for the village of Dubaju, I encountered soldiers stationed in pickups on one of the three dirt roads that lead in and out of Adjumani. A district special election is to be held next week, and they were there in anticipation of possible violence. I was a bit unnerved by their guns and frowning faces. But my anxiety was dispelled when, about a hundred meters from the Dubaju chapel, I was greeted by twenty dancing children. Preceding my pickup in two lines, they led me to the chapel area, singing and dancing and clapping all the way.

I was tired, but I was energized during Mass by a happy, excited group of worshipers singing in several African languages. After Mass, delegated members of the congregation gave Easter speeches while I sat down and relaxed. At one point, a little girl, Kiden, maybe three years old, came up to my chair, crawled into my lap, and fell asleep. Apparently, Kiden and some buddies had recently made a raid on a mango tree, so she was covered in mango juice, which meant that half of the flies in the Nile valley were drawn to her, a fact of which she was blissfully unaware. Eventually, as the Easter talks were ending, her grandmother appeared, hoisted the sleepyhead from my lap, and then disappeared with her into the crowd.

I think of Kiden in my arms: isn’t this a metaphor for the JRS mandate to accompany the refugees of the world? Kiden’s little life is besieged constantly by deprivation and exploitation, yet in my arms—beating heart against beating heart—she could experience her dignity, that promised and sanctified human dignity that is at the shining center of Christ’s resurrection. 

Fr. Gary Smith, SJ, journaled his experiences working for the Jesuit Refugee Service in Sudanese refugee camps in Uganda in They Come Back Singing: Finding God with the Refugees (Loyola Press, 2008).



Visit the Jesuit Refugee Service’s web site: www.jrs.net

Back to Winter 2008-09 Table of Contents