Love ‘By Blood’ in a Uganda Prison

Housed on a hilltop above Lake Victoria, Murchison Bay Prison is wrapped in a panorama of green isles and cool waters—one of the prettiest vistas around Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Inside the prison gates is also beauty, but it is dressed in rags and camouflaged by squalor.

A first glance reveals the harshness of the grounds: barracks of political detainees, their cinder-block buildings surrounded by high, barbed-wire fencing and small clearings beat to a muddy ooze by hundreds of bare feet. Metal huts of the prison staff, many as poor as the prisoners, sit nearby. At this medium-security prison, 2,000 prisoners wander the grounds or lounge on thin, straw pallets laid on concrete floors.

Prisoners also lie on newly donated beds in the prison hospital, but the surgical theater is bare, a testimony to the thoroughness of looters during Uganda’s 12-year civil war, officially ended in 1986. On the wall of one ward a poster wrapped in yellowing plastic warns of the lastest national scourge: “Love Carefully—AIDS Is Guaranteed Death.” One-quarter of the residents in the capital of this nation of 18 million are estimated to be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. “We have a few diagnosed cases here,” says prison nurse Jennifer Mugoya, “but most patients are suspect.”

Fortunately, some Ugandans, like lay preacher William Ssentumbwe, have found their calling in looking beyond such misery to where hope is found. “When you preach to prisoners,” says Ssentumbwe, “they respond. They are pushed into a corner; they know the only freedom is freedom in God.”

And Ssentumbwe, 40, knows how to preach unashamedly. No artful introductions, no subtle sensing of another’s religious background. “Are you saved?” he asks a member of a government minister’s family, to whom he has just been introduced. “Are you saved?” he asks a prisoner in a torn shirt. He asks it of virtually everyone who crosses his path. If your answer is “no” (and in Uganda, a strongly Christian nation, people seem surprisingly aware of his evangelical meaning), William will tell you how to find salvation, how to live an abundant life. Tall, soft-spoken Ssentumbwe, a husband and father of three, cannot think of anything in the world more important to do.

A Muffled Call

Ssentumbwe is now Uganda coordinator for Christian Light Foundation, a small, international prison ministry with an office in Jacksonville, Florida. Sitting in an old chair under a papaya tree outside his small, cement house in Kampala, he explains how he has made service to Uganda’s 12,000 prisoners in 15 penitentiaries his business for the past 20 years. Grace, his four-year-old and eldest, wraps herself around his knee as he speaks, and Florence, his wife, who has recently delivered him a third daughter, brings out popcorn. Behind the papaya tree, other relatives, all women, wash clothes by hand in large tubs. One has a question for Ssentumbwe and drops to her knees in petition, as Ugandan girls do for their elders. Ssentumbwe, the mild-mannered king of his tiny domain, talks on.

He says his call to the ministry was a muffled one: he joined the Uganda Commission of Prisons as a guard in 1971, right out of high school, primarily so he could play goalkeeper on the prison soccer team. But through a series of trials he began to search for a deeper purpose in his work, a process that a few years later led him to Christ, then to seminary in Kenya.

In 1982, fresh out of seminary with a certificate in theology, Ssentumbwe became an assistant chaplain with the Commission of Prisons and had a front-row seat for the bloodiest period of Uganda’s civil war. The prisons became targets during the war because each side needed manpower. “Both sides wanted to recruit prisoners for their fighting forces,” says Ssentumbwe. The prisoners who remained also suffered.

“They were eating one meal a day, and most of the roofs were blown off the wards. There was no medicine, and people were dying.” Ssentumbwe found that although he was saving prisoners’ souls, he was having a hard time trusting their sincerity. In the midst of the terror and strife, a miracle changed Ssentumbwe’s attitude and the prisoners’ fortunes. While serving at Kigo prison in 1985, Ssentumbwe and the prisoners were attacked and surrounded by soldiers. “I had a vision that none of the prisoners was going to die,” says Ssentumbwe. “Then a prisoner came running up to me and told me that he had had a vision that no one would die.” It proved prophetic and had a profound effect on Ssentumbwe. “It taught me that God responds to prisoners,” says the Ugandan. “When the prisoners testify now, I believe their testimonies. You know, in our language [Luganda] you say that you love someone ‘by blood.’ You look at them and feel in your blood that you love them. And that’s how I feel about prisoners.”

The feeling appears to be mutual. At an outdoor worship service at Murchison Bay, more than 400 prisoners turned out under the hot equatorial sun to hear Ssentumbwe preach. A prison choir with a percussion section of rattles and animal-skin drums led the crowd in worship songs sung in Luganda and Swahili.

Most of the prisoners wore rags that were remnants of prison uniforms, but signs of their interests in the outside world were apparent. One man sported a T-shirt with reggae musician Bob Marley’s name on it. Another clutched a copy of a James Joyce novel. Many wore their wedding bands, which glinted in the sun as they clapped their hands, first to the music, and then for speeches by visitors. Finally, Ssentumbwe rose to give a sermon in Luganda. “How many of you are saved?” he asked in closing. Three-quarters of the men, whose numbers had swollen to 600 during the sermon, raised their hands.

Spiritual Rehabilitation

Since joining Christian Light in 1986, Ssentumbwe has been able to reinforce his spiritual message by linking up with other Christian agencies, which in three years have provided more than $3 million in clothing, Bibles, hoes and seeds for the prison farms, and medicine and equipment for the hospital.

John Wabereire, corporal in charge of horticulture at Murchison Bay, says the prison’s shrunken farm, which once not only fed prisoners but also generated enough income to sustain the institution, has expanded again. At another prison farm, Kitalya, prisoners return from the fields balancing buckets of freshly harvested yams on their heads, a produce absent from prison diet for many years. Even the reintroduction of one vegetable—carrots—has tangibly improved prison health. After the first harvest, night blindness, a result of vitamin A deficiency, disappeared among prisoners within weeks. And all the while, more prisoners have been responding to Ssentumbwe’s message.

“There has been a tremendous change,” he says, still seated under his papaya tree. “First, there is open worship. Second, the prisoners now have three meals a day—porridge, maize meal, and beans mixed with vegetables. There is medicine in the dispensary, there are beds in the hospitals.”

And, Ssentumbwe says, in the past two years, more than 2,000 Ugandan prisoners have made Christian commitments and joined prison Bible studies and prayer groups. The Ugandan Commission of Prisons is taking note, and Ssentumbwe hopes other prison systems will, too. “The authorities have realized that promoting spiritual welfare is one of the best ways to rehabilitate these men,” says Ssentumbwe.

The Ugandan prison authorities also seem to have learned the wisdom of Christ’s loving approach to outcasts. Outside the office of Uganda’s Minister of the Interior, who oversees the prison commission, hangs another poster wrapped in yellowing plastic. It reads: “Remember, Prisoners Are People, Too.” It is a statement Ssentumbwe intends never to forget.

By Katie Smith, Africa Desk Officer for Food for the Hungry, an international Christian relief and development agency based in Phoenix.

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