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Ugandans Showered With Sisterly Love

Julie Busch/The Tampa Tribune

Eunice Sunday of Uganda tells a story as she shows a class at St. John’s Episcopal Parish Day School how people balance baskets on their heads to transport food. Below, Fiona Masika, 12, third from left, plays with friends during recess at St. John’s.

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By MICHELLE BEARDEN | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 9, 2007

Special Report     |     Video: Keeping The Faith     |     Bring Uganda To Your Kitchen     |     About Uganda

Some may wonder why the Rev. Marcia Davenport has such a keen interest in a little village in western Uganda.

"Because Morris matters," says the chaplain at St. John's Episcopal Parish Day School.

Morris is a 14-year-old boy who is dying of AIDS. He writes to the kids at the south Tampa school and they write back. That's because St. John's and the Kamaiba Primary School in Kasese, separated by nearly 8,000 miles, have a sister school relationship.

It puts a face on AIDS. It gives a heart to strangers whose culture, race and life experience are a world apart.

"He's become important to us, and we've become important to them," Marcia says. "Because he has a hope that someone knows his story and who he is. That is important to him."

It began four years ago, after Marcia met a visiting Ugandan bishop who came here to talk about his foundation for AIDS orphans. His country is teeming with them. It's an epidemic of huge proportions in Uganda.

Marcia is an Episcopal priest, a woman who believes in divine providence. She was impressed with Bishop Masereka's vision and work. So she asked if he knew of a school that St. John's could partner with in his district.

He most certainly did: Kamaiba Primary School, where the average student-teacher ratio is 100 to 1. More than half the kids are orphans. Hundreds have AIDS or HIV.

Marcia is also a woman who loves a challenge. A mother of three grown children and grandmother of three, she says she had never really entertained the idea of a mission trip to Uganda.

Now the timing was right. It seemed like something that was supposed to happen.

With the support of the school and St. John's Episcopal Church, Marcia and a few others made two mission trips to Uganda: a 10-day visit in the summer of 2005 and a two-week venture the following year. They brought supplies and helped with building projects. They cultivated friendships. Dwayne Varas, a teacher at the school, joined the group on both trips.

"Crossing borders is always a profound experience," he says. "Your eyes open, your awareness expands, and you come back home with a new appreciation for things you've always taken for granted."

But not everyone can take the time — or spend the money — to travel overseas on a volunteer project. So St. John's sponsored a "reverse" mission trip, bringing the school's headmistress and a student to Tampa for five weeks. They live with a different family every week.

Fiona Masika, 12, an orphan who lost both parents to AIDS, and Eunice Sunday, a 44-year-old educator who walks seven miles to school, arrived here in mid-October for their American immersion experience.

Eunice is shadowing teachers at St. John's and auditing a class at the University of Tampa on teaching reading and writing. As for Fiona, who is taking fifth- and sixth-grade classes, every day is a whirlwind of activity.

"She's like a rock star," Dwayne observes, laughing. "One day she was supposed to go to the movies with some girls and be at a Scout meeting at the same time. Marcia worked her magic, and she was able to do both. Everybody wants a piece of both of them."

It's a magical place, this America. Fiona carries a piece of paper with the names of all her newfound friends and still marvels over her first Halloween. Soft-spoken with a quick smile, she is soaking up the newness of a world so foreign to her life in the village, where she lives with her grandfather and sleeps on the floor of a hut made of grass.

On her first day of chapel here, she stood before the congregation and told the students and their parents: "Before you sponsored me, I had one meal a day. Now that I have a sponsor from St. John's, I have two meals a day."

Marcia says there wasn't a dry eye in the place.

"They hadn't realized before how much of a difference they can make in just one person's life," she says. "It's powerful stuff. This really brings it all home."

Eunice is feeling the same kind of impact. She comes from a school where there's just one soccer ball for nearly 1,000 students. Banners that hang in trees surrounding the property remind students of the crisis killing off the older generation. The signs urge: "No sex until marriage." "Stay a virgin." "No bad touches."

She, too, will bring home some lessons.

"You people have such love here. We don't show it so much at home. We discipline with a cane; maybe we discipline too much," she muses. "I will tell my people we need to be more patient with our kids, to show more love."

There's lots of love to go around. The St. John's parish and school community shows it with fundraisers to provide support and scholarships to students such as Fiona. They help nearly 100 kids with hot lunches, tuition, shoes and medical care. There's an effort under way to find a motorbike for Eunice to make her trek to school a little easier.

On Wednesday, you can take part in this humanitarian effort.

St. John's will sponsor an African Potluck Dinner with drumming, dancing and singing at 6:30 p.m. in the parish hall, 906 S. Orleans Ave.

Bishop Masereka and his wife will be there to share their story of the Christian foundation. Bring a donation and you've helped the cause. For information, call (813) 259-1570.

Put a face on a crisis of disease and poverty. People such as Eunice, Fiona and Morris should matter. And we matter to them.

"Once you become a community, you can never go back," Marcia says. "God knocked on our door and on the door of the children of Uganda. Now we can never say that we don't care or it doesn't affect us."
µ Keyword: Uganda, to see a narrated slide show of Fiona Masika and Eunice Sunday at school; a video report on cooking Ugandan style and a preview of the benefit dinner; and Michelle Bearden's "Keeping the Faith" report on the reverse mission trip.

Bearden can be reached at mbearden@tampatrib.com or (813) 258-7613.

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