At the Uganda Catholic Worker, Healing and Hope
In the second part of our series, “The Catholic Worker in Africa,” founder Michael Sekitoleko carries on the work of the Uganda Catholic Worker in the wake of his two co-founders departing. One of the ways he copes is by forming his guests into an ad-hoc community with set routines and responsibilities. But when COVID-19 hits, the community is overwhelmed by people desperate for help.
After his two cofounders left in 2015, Michael Sekitoleko operated the Uganda Catholic Worker largely on his own, renting houses in rural villages and providing hospitality to a dozen or so guests at a time: victims of domestic abuse, newly released prisoners, refugees, the mentally ill, abandoned children, and HIV-positive individuals. On top of all that, he visited hundreds of schools to promote peace and nonviolence.
Read the first article in this series here: The Catholic Worker in Africa: ‘We Need It Now More Than Ever’.
How did he manage it all? While he would name prayer as a key factor, he also formed the guests who stayed at the house into an ad hoc community.
Typically, when Catholic Workers refer to their “community,” they mean the group of individuals who have made an intentional commitment to living out the ideals of the Worker together in a particular place. Yes, guests might be in the “penumbra” of the community, but they generally don’t take part in retreats or planning meetings.
When Sekitoleko referred to his community during our interviews, though, he more often than not meant everyone in the house, including guests. In the Uganda Catholic Worker, everyone who lived in the house participated in a daily meeting and household chores; most of them also prayed together twice a day. They went out to work to support themselves and the household during the day, and they participated in the works of mercy, too, such as distributing clothing to the poor.
Sekitoleko also encouraged them to discern whether to join the community permanently as “committed Catholic Workers.” No one ever did. Instead, they moved on when they were ready to support themselves.
“The Catholic Worker way of living should come by choice,” Sekitoleko said. “For now, it is not a choice that many people are willing to take on permanently.”
Days Marked by Prayer, Work, and Restoration
Following a set routine with assigned responsibilities was part of what made it possible for Sekitoleko to keep doing hospitality for so many years. While that routine has varied over the years, in the early 2020s a typical day would begin around 7:30 a.m. with most of the community participating in morning prayer while two women prepared a meal.
As the community ate breakfast, Sekitoleko would lead a discussion about any problems or conflicts between individuals.
“Morning is the best time to resolve any conflict, no matter how small or big,” he said.
After breakfast, members of the community left for the day, with Sekitoleko usually traveling to a school or church with a small team to conduct peace and nonviolence training. Some of the women stayed back at the house to watch the children and do chores. Among those chores was tending the garden where the community grew sweet potatoes and matoke, a starchy type of banana that is a staple in much of the country.
The other men and women went into the village to do basic agricultural labor—weeding, hoeing, digging—for which they usually would be paid in food and clothing. Almost 70 percent of Ugandans earn their living from agriculture, mostly at the household level.
Payment was typically made in the form of a few bunches of matoke or clothing. In rare instances, the workers might have also been paid money, which they kept for their personal use.
People would begin returning to the house late in the afternoon. Any clothing the workers had been given would be distributed to those in need, and any food they received would be shared with the community.
While everyone else rested, two women cooked the evening meal. After the meal, the whole community gathered for evening prayer.
While people might pray for a variety of intentions, Sekitoleko said three were fixtures: “Every day we must pray for peace in the world; we must pray for the hungry people that have failed to get food or meals to eat; and we must pray for the departed souls, especially those in purgatory.”
As with any other Catholic Worker community doing hospitality, sometimes the day came with its own agenda. Village leaders might ask Sekitoleko to intervene in disputes, for instance. (They trust him, he said, “because of my college degree.”) Other times, the police would bring him an abandoned or neglected child.
Without a formal child welfare infrastructure in place, the police attempt to place abandoned children wherever they can. Especially in rural areas, where the police themselves might be fed one meal a day, they simply don’t have the resources to care for children, Sekitoleko said.
Frustratingly, though, the same officials might stop by a few days later—not to pick up the child, as promised, but to harangue Sekitoleko with a long list of rules and requirements he is supposed to meet while caring for the child.
“They tell you, ‘We have no facility to take care of them, keep them for three days as we work out a plan.’ And guess what? When you accept, they disappear, and you’re stuck with somebody with no proper legal papers for two months,” he said.
Throughout our conversation, Sekitoleko kept circling back around to two words: healing and hope. For him, the work of hospitality is about restoring both to people who come to the Catholic Worker profoundly wounded.
“When somebody is struggling and they have reached the height of their struggles, they have internal wounds,” he said at one point. “So, they need internal healing.”
And that means welcoming them “with no strings attached” and doing the practical things that need to be done to help restore their dignity—and their hope.
Teaching Peace and Nonviolence
Sekitoleko professes that the resistance, civil disobedience, and protest he sees other Catholic Workers doing are “too advanced” for him. It might be, though, that he feels little need to go there, given how easy it has been for the police to jail him for weeks on trumped-up charges.
Even so, promoting peace and nonviolence has been one of his major passions from the beginning. Since its inception, the Uganda Catholic Worker has conducted peace and nonviolence educational programs at an estimated 600 primary and secondary schools across Uganda. Sekitoleko’s goal is to reach every school in the country.
The program is desperately needed, he said. “We have so many people who are violent because of social hardships…. People have a lot of hate and anger. And they end up being violent—even the kids, you find young kids beating up another kid like this person is an adult.”
Sekitoleko or another community member typically wrote to a school, explaining the program and requesting permission to visit. Schools that agreed to their request would have Sekitoleko or other community members make their presentation in classrooms or at a school assembly.
The message was pretty basic: don’t antagonize your neighbor, don’t provoke violence, embrace peace. Bible verses backed up the message, and the whole program ended with students signing a pledge committing themselves to the way of peace and nonviolence.
For a while, the presentation was followed up with the establishment of a peace and nonviolence student club.
These mostly died out in a few weeks or months, Sekitoleko admits, because of a lack of resources and follow up: “We used to provide a little bit of stationery, tell them what they need to do, to find a patron teacher for the club, and then we leave. But because we’ve been doing it the nomadic way—we do a school, leave, go to another one, you know, we left them in a state of not being able to sustain themselves.”
On the other hand, the program has clearly had an impact, because a number of students have kept in touch with Sekitoleko, calling him to ask for help. And several dozen have asked him to visit their families to help resolve family disputes.
Some of those requests for intervention have come from girls who have been forced into marriage. “It’s criminal, marrying an underage girl, but in the villages, the law doesn’t seem to apply,” Sekitoleko said.
For a while, the police and district leaders asked him to facilitate peace and non-violence meetings for an adult audience. That cooperation came to a halt after they arrested Sekitoleko in 2017, falsely charging him with holding an illegal meeting. (He had actually brought two lawyers to meet with rural villagers to advise them on fighting an illegal land grab.) In the wake of that incident, he refused to work with the police until they addressed the widespread corruption.
Overall, he believes the program has been a big success.
“However, we are challenged with the fact that we also have to be living examples of peace and nonviolence,” he said. “Sometimes we are not very peaceful ourselves.”
And he punctuated that statement with another big laugh.
The COVID-19 Years: Death and Devastation
The daily routine of work, prayer, and non-violence education was abruptly interrupted with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ugandan government ordered a complete lockdown on March 18, shuttering businesses, schools, workplaces, and other institutions.
By the time of the pandemic, the Uganda Catholic Worker community was living in its sixth rented house in a rural village, Kiboga. To emphasize just how off the beaten path it is, Sekitoleko pointed to the fact that people there still get chiggers (a small parasitic mite that lives just under the skin). That village is about two hours away from Kampala, where the first house of hospitality had been established.
The lockdown had a “terrible” impact on families, Sekitoleko said. Poorer Ugandans relying on day labor or small entrepreneurial activities lost all their income. Suddenly out of work, men were confined at home with their families.
“It was very difficult,” he said. “People didn’t have a means of providing for their families. And the resultant effect was domestic violence, very, very bad cases of domestic violence.”
Some three dozen women asked to join the community in order to escape domestic violence at home—and those were the ones brave enough to leave, Sekitoleko said. Others wanted to leave but were too afraid.
Dozens of other people reached out due to mental illness. And HIV-positive people, especially women, sought help from the Uganda Catholic Worker because they couldn’t access their medication or palliative care.
“People are dying in their small houses in the villages,” Sekitoleko said, “and they thought that they could get help or aid from our house.”
Given the limited resources in his rented house, Sekitoleko was only able to take on a dozen guests as community members. They did a lot of praying during the lockdown.
“God helped us to persevere,” he said. “Before COVID, we were prayerful, but not so prayerful. When COVID came, everybody wanted to pray to God to survive the pandemic. Even the non-religious became very, very religious.”
Only three community members, including Sekitoleko, came down with COVID. He survived, but one of the other people died. Fortunately, the Ministry of Health took responsibility for burying the bodies of people who died of COVID.
“If it wasn’t for COVID, we were really stuck with a dead body,” Sekitoleko said. “Do you know what it means for a homeless person to die in your care? The government is not going to assist you, but they are going to be on your case, persecuting you as if you made a mistake to welcome this homeless person. And if you’re in a rented house, okay, where are you going to bury the homeless person who died on you? You’re going to make a grave in the house?”
File that under “Not Your Average CW Concern.”
Asking St. Joseph for a Helping Hand
As happened worldwide, the pandemic was followed by a period of high inflation in Uganda. Prior to COVID, Sekitoleko had been paying about 500,000 Ugandan shillings every month to rent the house where the Uganda Catholic Worker was staying. Within a three-month period, rent increased to 750,000 shillings (approximately $200).
The Uganda Catholic Worker had shifted locations six times before during its history, moving to increasingly rural (and more affordable) rented houses. But not this time.
This time, the Peter Maurin Farm—the source of most of the community’s support since its founding in 2011—wasn’t able to help; founders Jim and Anne Dowling were facing their own eviction threat at the time. (The farm eventually managed to purchase the property it had rented for decades, thanks to a loan from Jim Dowling’s niece.)
The landlord asked Sekitoleko to vacate the house in December of 2022, but Sekitoleko, concerned about relocating his community members, asked for more time. After appealing to the local authorities, he was given two months to resettle his people.
He went back to Dowling, who sent enough money to provide each of the twelve members of the community with 500,000 Ugandan shillings (about $133). Next, he found each person a job, drawing on his extensive network of contacts in the schools. Many of the individuals were hired as school matrons, cooks, or security guards. The remaining handful of men who weren’t hired by the schools had to use their seed money to start brick-making enterprises.
“In Uganda, when you (don’t) have a job and everything is tight on you, the best you can do is bricklaying, because you basically play around with the soil, you know, and then bake bricks and then sell them,” Sekitoleko said.
At the end of February 2023, he distributed the contents of the house—bedding, furniture, and so on—to the other community members, each of whom had found a place to live, much to his relief.
“Actually, I’m so grateful,” he said, “because I did not think I would be able to integrate members of my community who are homeless into the wider…Ugandan population. I thought Jim must be praying for us to St. Joseph!”
Like Dorothy Day before him, Sekitoleko has recently found himself doing a lot of praying to St. Joseph. Despite the latest eviction, Sekitoleko remains committed to the Catholic Worker life, which he describes as a lifelong calling.
He hopes to reopen the community in a new house, but this time, he wants it to be a house the community owns. As this article went out, he was looking at two houses and was trying to raise the remaining money to purchase one of them.
Beyond re-establishing a more sustainable Uganda Catholic Worker, though, he has ambitions to become a “model Catholic Worker” for others to imitate—the seed of a larger, uniquely African Catholic Worker Movement.
You can contact Michael Sekitoleko directly at catholicworkeruganda@gmail.com or donate to the GoFundMe to help purchase a new home for the Uganda Catholic Worker here.
“The Catholic Worker in Africa” series will continue next week with part 3: Inspired by Big Dreams, the Uganda Catholic Worker Faces Big Challenges, Too. To contact Michael or donate money for a new house, see the Uganda Catholic Worker listing in the Community Directory.
Cover photo: Students involved in Uganda Catholic Worker’s peace and nonviolence program. All photos are provided courtesy of Michael Sekitoleko.
