Guest at Your Table

This is the time of year when the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) asks UU congregations to support UUSC’s human rights work in the US and around the world by participating in the Guest at Your Table program.

The Social Action Committee is asking the congregation to participate in this program along with our Sunday School families who participate in Guest at your Table every year.  The program has started and will continue until mid-January when the boxes and envelopes will be collected. UUFF’s support of UUSC has declined in recent years and SAC would like to see us reverse that trend.

To advance human rights UUSC engages in partnerships in four main focus areas.  One of these areas is “rights in humanitarian crises”.  To understand exactly what this means and how UUSC works, read the story of Opoka Kenneth, a Ugandan who was displaced by war and lived many years in a camp far from his home village, Acuru.

Story of Opoka Kenneth

People say that home is where the heart is. Imagine if you couldn’t go home for years. In northern Uganda, thousands of people called the Acholi have been kept away from their homes for a long time by a war. Working with Caritas Pader, a local group, UUSC is helping people return home from the camps where they’ve been forced to live for 20 years because of the war.

Opoka Kenneth is 19 years old. He’s married with two young children. In the camp where he lived, he was separated from other family members, like so many people were.

Finally, Opoka was able to return to his village, Acuru, and see his family again. There, he has his own land to farm. His children also have room to play and are getting to know their relatives. But how do you go home and rebuild a life after so many years away?

Working with Jackie Okanga, our team leader in Uganda, UUSC asked the Acholi people what they needed to leave the camps and live at home. She asked them, “What is important to you about going home?”

With UUSC’s help, villagers talked and decided for themselves what they needed. They did special ceremonies to remember people who died in the war. People torn apart by the war were reunited. Many people returning home are children, single mothers, and elderly. They have a hard time building houses, clearing land, and planting crops. So Opoka and other youth helped rebuild houses for these people. This helped bring people together - an important part of returning home. “Change begins in people’s hearts,” the saying goes, “and when people’s hearts change, their feet follow.”

For building homes, the youth were given dance costumes and musical instruments. The elderly taught them traditional songs. The youth formed music and dance groups, which strengthen Acholi values with songs that talk about why returning home is better than living in the camps. They are even played on local radio, which helps spread the word.

As the Acholi people thought about how to work their fields, they came up with a way to share oxen and plows among several families. The youth take care of the oxen and plow the fields. They help widows and the elderly get ready for planting. Once their work is done, the youth can plow other people’s fields to earn money for school fees, food, and other things.

With help from UUSC, Opoka uses the community oxen and plow to farm sesame and save seeds for next year. His group hopes that if it rains enough, they will also farm cassava and grow sunflowers to sell. After years of depending on aid given in the camps, Opoka and his fellow villagers have begun to realize that they can solve their own problems.

Since UUSC’s work began, 8,500 people have returned home to 14 villages, and a lot of healing has taken place. They have said to Jackie, “We are so glad you listened to us. That is the one thing that makes you different from other aid groups; you listened to what we thought.”

There are still hundreds of thousands of displaced people in northern Uganda. Your support enables UUSC to help people like Opoka and his family create a place to call home again. As you gather together in your home to think about this special guest at your table, please consider the role your gift will play in the homes, communities, and culture of Uganda.