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'Family' Plan
By Phil Nero |
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For more than a decade, Jesuits from the Upper Midwest and Great Plains have supported the ministries of the Eastern Africa Province with manpower, training, and other assistance. Known as a twinning agreement, this involvement helps men like Fr. Stephen Msele, SJ pursue their vision of a better Africa and a stronger African Church.
The hilly, densely populated community of cramped brick, block, and tin homes, shacks really, bakes in the afternoon sun. Young children, still oblivious to the struggles of life in Kampala, Uganda, play in dusty streets where childhood imaginations create games from sticks, cans, and the occasional rubber ball.
"Hello! How are you?" Fr. Stephen Msele, SJ cries out with contagious joy to the children. He carefully navigates a tired jeep over and around ruts in one of the narrow dirt streets that crisscross the many communities in the Nsambya area of this crowded city.
"We are fine. How are you," reply the children, almost in unison as they run alongside the vehicle.
A slender man of average height, Fr. Msele parks outside one of the homes to which the word shanty might apply if not for the spirit and hope radiating inside. Within the tiny interior, nine women work in dim light sewing Undugu Sports and Culture Association soccer and netball (a kind of basketball-soccer hybrid) team bibs.
Fr. Msele encourages and laughs with the group, an eclectic assembly of Moslems, Catholics, and Protestants. He updates them on a meeting held earlier in the day to strategize the launching of a small bakery to raise money for Undugu activities throughout Nsambya Hill. The parish there has nine subparishes, each with between four and nine small neighborhoods. One of the women leaves briefly, returning with sample baked goods that were packaged that day. They will sell for a few shillings in a country where 1500 shillings equal one U.S. dollar, and a dollar goes a long, long way.
The diversity of the gathering is no accident. Bringing together children and families of different ethnic, tribal, and religious origins for cultural and athletic events aimed at healing the scars of historical divisiveness is Undugo's philosophical and spiritual cornerstone.
In a dirt-bare area behind a group of homes in the same neighborhood, chickens scramble as young Undugo men pound drums and schoolgirls rehearse a group dance. Children and adults from the community are drawn to the rhythms and activity. With a charismatic smile, Fr. Msele works the small crowd spreading his message of brotherhood, sisterhood, harmony, and peace.
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Fr. Msele's inner fires to create Undugu were sparked by two life-changing events, the first coming in Ireland where he lived from 1982-85 during part of his Jesuit formation. In a country with a long history of Christianity, he was struck by what he perceived as a lack of a connection between the people.
"Not just between Protestants and Catholics, but even the Catholics themselves. I felt the brotherhood, the warmth and so forth that Christ would have built among people was not there. There was so much individualism. Everybody minded their own business," he says. So trong was the impact that he almost decided to leave the Jesuits. "I did not want to be a priest if that was the kind of Christianity I would be spreading.
"It made me realize that we need to emphasize our communal brotherhood, our communal sisterhood and a God who is really our common parent. This, I feel, has been overlooked in our evangelization." His feelings were punctuated by tragedy in the early 1990s during his pastoral studies in the Philippines.
I used to go to the TV in the evenings just to see what was on about Africa. And at this time, for a whole week, all I saw was what was going on in Rwanda." The pain in his voice is vivid as his recollection of those images dulls the usually hopeful luster in his eyes. Shaking his head in disbelief he repeats, "For a whole week. Bodies floating on the river. Christians slaughtering one another in church. Christians slaughtering their own bishop. This was happening in a country that was the most evangelized, the most Christian, the most Catholic country in Africa.
"The question jumped out at me. What is this? There is no other country in Africa with a 93 percent Christian population, and yet we still see this happening. What is going wrong?" Struggling with the contradiction again tested his will to be a priest. |  |  | It eventually brought me to the idea that we have overlooked the real reason that brought Jesus to the world and the real reason he died on the cross. We have overlooked our identity that we are all sons and daughters of God, which makes us all brothers and sisters for better or for worse. And our lives should be focused on that identity - that we are brothers and sisters with the same parents - the same father, the same mother and nothing should come between us in our brotherhood. Not money, not honor, not power, not the material. If we allow these things to come between us, we end up with what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia.
Power, glory, and honor belong to God, but Fr. Msele believes humankind, in an attempt to claim earthly versions of these heavenly elements, distorts the image in which we are created.
"We should reflect a caring and sharing God. A God who shares with us everything She has," he says, changing gender references freely as he talks about the Creator. "He shares with us, and we share with Him. And we should learn also to share everything we have with each other, including our time, our joy, our sorrow, our pain.
"The more we try to live along these lines, the closer we become as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and the more joy we experience in our neighborhoods and our world."
Upon his return to Africa in the mid-1990s, Fr. Msele immediately confronted a challenge that would test his hope for nurturing common bonds. He was assigned to a parish in Mwanza, Tanzania, a place that was roughly 40 percent Moslem and 40 percent Christian, the balance falling in a variety of other classifications. Tensions were running high between the Moslem and Christian communities. The issue was pigs. Hostilities were threatening to take the eye-for-an-eye standard to a new level.
"Moslems want nothing to do with pigs and about 10 pigs belonging to Christians wandered into their fields. When the Moslems killed the pigs, the Christians wanted to retaliate by killing one Moslem for every pig. I asked them to understand that there is nothing more valuable to have than our brotherhood, not just among Catholics, not just among Moslems, but inclusive regardless of religious or other differences. I asked them to understand that once we lost that, anything and everything else we have won't matter."
Fr. Msele started working among the children. Searching for ways to bring them together, he determined song, dance, and athletic activities were the best cross-cultural common denominators. He involved any parent or other volunteer willing to help organize and support a program rooted in celebrating together the kinds of things each culture enjoyed individually. Shunned by many at first, over the course of two years, Fr. Msele found he had built enough bridges to be welcome in the homes of both Christians and Moslems.
"We found that while we could not start a pig farm together or pray the rosary as Catholics might, there were a lot of things that bind us together but we tend to overlook them. We all liked to sing, sew, dance, and play sports. By focusing on these things we could grow a culture of peace," Fr. Msele says, adding, "Anything is possible if we don't overlook the power of God to bring us together."
After three years in Mwanza, Fr. Msele went to Australia for final studies and started a branch of Undugu there. "Human differences take different forms in different nations," he says, and people of all nations tend to focus too much on their differences. When he returned to Africa, he was assigned to the Jesuit community at Xavier House in Kampala, and immediately began forming another new branch of Undugu.
In May 2000, Undugu groups in Australia and Africa celebrated the organization's fifth anniversary. With the calendar now locked on 2001, Fr. Msele continues a visionary odyssey to one day establish thriving Undugu organizations throughout the world. Will he succeed?
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Only time holds that answer. Until then, it's great to have him in the family.
For information on how you can help support the work of Fr. Msele and our Jesuit foreign missionaries, contact:
The Jesuit Partnership, 3400 West Wisconsin Avenue,
Milwaukee, WI 53208
Tel.: 800 537-3736 / e-mail: Partnership@jesuitswisprov.org |
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