eating

Eating in Uganda....well, I could give you the list and description of the foods I eat here. I’ve already done that elsewhere, so I’ll spare you at the moment. But I instead pause to share with you a couple of vignettes that have stuck in my memory centered around eating and the Eucharist. Maybe this is the beginnings of a sermon....read as you’d like – these are long.


Beans and kwon

Each evening before dinner with the sisters, I wander over to the compound where the child mothers live. Sunset is my favorite time of day here. The heat subsides but the light still glows. The day’s work is finished, and all that is left to do is eat and rest. So, I go and sit beside them. I don’t know quite how to describe their embodied-ness without giving the impression of filth. They are very clean, but have simply accepted the messes that come with small children. The kids often don’t wear diapers and pee wherever. There is always at least one mother breastfeeding. There are plenty of runny noses and plenty of African dirt. But don’t have in your mind images of some septic, biohazardous place. It is far from that. They are constantly washing hands, clothes, the bodies of their children.

“You will eat with us,” Evelyn told me one of the first nights. Her daughter Mirriam is terrified of me (we’re making small steps toward friendship), but Evelyn has become a fast friend. My first reaction was a polite decline. I explained that the sisters would be waiting to eat dinner with us. I watched as they set down a bucket of kwon (cornmeal stuff) and a bucket of beans. They laid the plastic bowls down on the concrete porch and prepared to serve the food. People washed, the kids found their mothers.

Jesus ate with the unclean. That’s all I could think about. I knew that breaking bread with these women was the most important thing I’d do that day. Despite my enduring questions of how many hands had touched the bowls since they’d been washed, whether some kid had peed on the concrete where we sat an hour prior, and whether the nuns would mind if I had already eaten, I ate. Evelyn brought me a spoon (which no one else was using), and we ate. And it humbled me.

They have since extended similar gestures and invitations. It doesn’t necessarily get any easier to share their food – I still wonder about germs, and I think rightly so. But each time they thus invite me into their lives, I cannot help but think of the humanity of Jesus. He humiliated himself to share in our messy flesh. Thanks be to God.

I am certainly no saint for eating with them. There is nothing particularly special or holy about my willingness to break bread...if anything, my being compelled to share this story indicates how far I have to come in getting over myself and being truly for others. But, I’m taking small steps at least...

The eucharist

And a word about the Eucharist. I had a long conversation with a friend named Charles. He shared many stories of war, death, rape, pain, healing as he narrated the history of Northern Uganda over the past 20ish years. At one point, he was describing the rehabilitation programs that foreign and domestic NGOs have started in the area for former child soldiers and child brides...he said that the Eucharist is often seen as spiritual healing. The troubled and broken come and do Eucharistic adoration. (That is a Catholic practice in which part of the bread and wine – understood to be the true body and blood of Christ – are set apart and put in a special ornate container. People then sit and adore the Eucharist, understanding themselves to be worshipping the physically-present Christ). Though I am decisively Protestant and likely won’t be incorporating Eucharistic adoration into my life in the near future, there is something quite beautiful to the idea that sitting in the presence of Christ heals and restores those who are most battered in this world.

Well, that’s it for now. So much more to say and process, but hopefully we can do some of that in poolside conversations on late summer nights...