by Loren Linquist, as told to L.R. Ames
Today I work with home-schooling families in our beautiful Conejo Valley, teaching Spanish and doing what I can to help. But I used to live and work in San Jose, California, for 13 years, teaching bilingual education and training teachers for the San Jose Unified School District.
All that changed in 2004, when my husband Craig and I uprooted ourselves from San Jose and went to Africa with the desire to serve the people of Uganda. There, we met a very different world of deeply spiritual people, smiling faces willing to help neighbors who had less than they did. But it was also a world very different than mine in California—a world of heartbreaking need, a country ravaged by war, and a population struggling with the AIDS epidemic and the threat of the LRA, a brutal armed group terrorizing the Ugandan people.
An Israeli friend from Africa told me my first year in Uganda, ”Loren, if you come to Uganda, you’re going to have some great stories to tell.”
How Our Adventure Began
Craig and I were both educated at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Craig studied agriculture, and I studied English and Spanish Literature. Then I did a postgraduate program to get my bilingual/bicultural teaching degree, as well as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching credential, after which I taught in an inner-city school.
Upon graduation, Craig proposed to me, and we got married. We applied to the Peace Corps, but because I was pregnant, the Peace Corps refused us as volunteers.
For a while, we gave up our dream of living overseas. But something wasn’t quite right. Although we were living productive lives and were financially comfortable, both of us had an itching for something more. Craig had grown up in the Central African Republic and left part of his heart there. More recently, he had been doing some work in Mexico, Hungary, and various parts of Africa. Whenever he came home, I noticed he always had such a wonderful glow of happiness. So in 2004, we felt it might be time to leave.
At the time, I was homeschooling our boys who were 5, 8, and 11. (We later also fostered two African boys for over ten years.) Craig’s mom had just mailed me a postcard sent by some friends working in Entebbe, Uganda, who were pleading for a teacher to come over and help a small group of families to begin a cooperative school. I had recently done just that same work at our own church.
Hearing a Call
As I sat at my kitchen table, staring at that postcard, it was as if I heard a voice say, “Would you be willing to go there?”
At this point, an old song came into my head which says in part,
Please don’t send me to Africa
I don’t think I’ve got what it takes …
Don’t like lions, gorillas or snakes
I’ll serve you here in suburbia
In my comfortable middle class life.
That about summed up the turmoil of my thoughts.
Since I had never experienced Africa, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But ignorance is bliss. In the end, I thought, “I don’t want to miss out on those ‘good stories’ my Israeli-born friend told me about if that’s where God wants me to go.” Imagine what I was facing—I had three young boys to care for, and I didn’t even like camping!
Convinced, however, that this was where we were needed, we sold our beautiful Victorian home, packed a small container of our most valuable and useful possessions, and, after having said goodbye to family and friends, we bought a one-way ticket to Entebbe.
Once there, I spent many hours crying and laughing—but mostly crying—early on during that first year.
Crowding and Chaos
When we arrived at Entebbe Airport, the man–a bush pilot–who had sent us that fateful postcard bringing us to Africa came to help us with our luggage as we navigated through the small, crowded, chaotic airport. The air was heavy with humidity, the sky a deep blue with voluminous clouds, and we boarded a van with our 15 pieces of luggage that would take us to the capital, Kampala, where we would work on getting visas and getting to know the land.
We traveled on the only “highway” in Uganda, which at the time was only a one-lane road. IHowever, it was jammed with three lanes of traffic—cars, bicyclists, matatus (14-passenger vans), boda-bodas (motorcycles which transport people), and animals all vying for space.
The sides of the “highway” were lined with people, huts, and animals roaming free. But the animals were not the kind I had hoped to see—no giraffes, lions, or elephants. Instead, the animals were chickens, goats, cows, guinea fowl, and monkeys. Matatu drivers wove in and out of the one lane, stopping for passengers along the road. The boda-bodas also wove, trying to dodge the other transports.
The roundabout leading into the capital had a huge plastic Coca-Cola bottle in the middle and someone’s herd of cattle sleeping around it. To the left of that roundabout were the slums, and to the right, open-air shops were strewn along the road set up with furniture for sale, animal feed stores, hairdressers, gas stations, fruit stands, and meat butchers. Crowds of adults walked along this road, and hundreds of children were everywhere.
Here, I began to understand my husband in a whole new way. Because of his African childhood, in Uganda he was at home! He knew how to barter, talk to the police, get documents from immigration, and understand the English of Ugandans.
Trapdoors and Escape Tunnels
We had to find a place to live. Few rental houses were options for us, so for a cheap price, we rented an enormous house that no one wanted. It was called the Alligator House because it had a moat around the entrance to its front door. It was a whitewashed fortress, and all the windows, as is the custom there, had iron bars over them.
Though once a beautiful home, it was a mess. The locks on the doors were broken, and animals had nested in various corners. Bats and birds were regular visitors, and frogs were swimming in the toilets. One time, two big hornbills (birds about three feet long) squeezed their way into our bedroom and were banging on the glass door to get out.
An emergency escape tunnel ran the length of one side of the house with the trapdoor in our bathroom, leading out to an escape door in the garden. All the houses we lived in had this provision, adopted during the time of Idi Amin, former president of Uganda called the “butcher of Uganda,” when family homes of wealthy people would be raided and people hauled off down the road and killed. In fact, when we finally built our own home six years later, we also made such a hiding place.
Craig took a job helping out a small school in the capital city. Every day he had to board the overcrowded matatus (minibuses) to commute. During this time, he came down with tuberculosis. He has had meningitis and malaria also.
I woke up each morning at 4:30, cried until 5:30, and then began my day. I was told if you can make it through the first year, you will be okay. A year went by and I cried harder. But at one year and ten days, the crying stopped. I had made friends, and my husband and children were happy. I was finally at peace.
Buying a Trash Dump
After much counsel, we decided to start a ministry in Entebbe—a church or a school, we weren’t sure. Craig began looking for buildings, and agents kept bringing him to the shore of Lake Victoria to a two-acre piece of land that was a trash dump. There was no real road that led to it. He didn’t really want “that kind” of ministry and work. But one night, he was praying and said, “Lord, that’s not what I had planned on. And it’s an expensive trash dump. If You want us to start a work there, then You will have to provide the $85,000 to buy it.”
The very next day, the people to whom we had lent money after the sale of our house unexpectedly called to say they were paying back our loan to them. So Craig now had the money to buy the land. It was indeed a trash dump, and so we cleared, cleaned, and set up three tents. We now had two cement holes in the ground for bathrooms and a couple of “classrooms.”
Hundreds of kids showed up for our Saturday kids’ program, and we began a literacy school under the tents. We started with 50 of the poorest kids in the area, teaching literacy, math, and Bible. That school now has 500 students. However, we found it strange that so few adults showed up.
The Mystery of the Missing Adults
Eventually, we found out why they weren’t coming. In Uganda, many times when a building is being erected, the witch doctor is called to appease any evil spirits on the land and to bless the business of the building. Often, sacrifice is required—animal, financial, and sometimes even human sacrifice. For example, when they built the State House in 2006, many children disappeared, and it was common knowledge they had been taken away and offered as sacrifice to serve as an appeasement for the evil spirits that were thought to haunt the new building. In bringing Christianity to those who were open to it, we worked to counteract ritualized human sacrifice and appeasement of evil spirits.
A newspaper did a poll in 2004 and asked educated Ugandans how many of them practiced witchcraft. The answer: 84%. Ugandans live on both sides of the fence: many see our concept of God as just
another god—a big witch doctor. Yet they know the names of the evil spirits and what they demand, which drives them to continually offer sacrifices. They don’t want the evil spirits to be mad at them, and human sacrifice is the ultimate appeasement they can give. So much fear! We ourselves had many strange experiences with what the Ugandans said were spells cast by evil spirits.
The community knew we had done none of those things, so many people watched wide-eyed to see what the evil spirits of the land might do to us without the use of a witch doctor.
When we had a dedication party for the new buildings, one of the dignitaries got up to speak. “Pastor,” he said, “it is true what you say, that God has redeemed this garbage dump. But you do not know the full history of this piece of land. This is a dumping ground because it once was a killing field of Idi Amin. His soldiers would come and kill, maim and destroy his enemies, and the bodies would be dumped here. Most adults in this area fear the evil spirits that reside in this land [hence why we had few adults coming]. But let us pray your God can redeem it.”
And that is exactly what happened in the ensuing years. Though we saw plenty of trouble, we also saw blessing upon blessing. We had a crazy 14 years, but so much joy. That community is so sweet. We saw a real revival—people set free from fears, lives saved, and marriages fixed. And there was revival financially as well, because as the church members became honest, good citizens, the rest of the community wanted them as employees. I miss them all so much.
With its 500 children, the school now has real buildings and classrooms, a library, and a computer lab. Our 12-acre farm is growing food for the community. We started a medical clinic as an offshoot from the island medical work we had done for ten years. And the community has hope!
But Uganda has had some extremely difficult trials recently. With severe flooding and devouring locusts, on top of coronavirus, it is in dire straits. The church we founded is standing strong, but because of the shutdown for the virus, many people are unemployed and starving. Tourism, the main employer for many people, is decimated. Nonetheless, Craig and I hope to visit as soon as the country reopens.
