What’s Next for the Uganda CW: How about a House…and a Farm?
In the third part of our series, “The Catholic Worker in Africa,” Uganda Catholic Worker founder Michael Sekitoleko dreams of creating a sustainable, revitalized community—in spite of a skeptical priest and a stalled fundraising campaign.
After moving the Uganda Catholic Worker six times and being evicted from the last rented house in February 2023, founder Michael Sekitoleko dreams of revitalizing the community: buying a house, registering with the Catholic Church, registering with the government, bringing in more experienced Catholic Workers from overseas to mentor him, establishing a wider network of support, developing a cottage industry to make the community self-sustaining.
Read the previous articles in this series:
Part 1: The Catholic Worker in Africa: ‘We Need It Now More Than Ever’
Part 2: At the Uganda Catholic Worker, Healing and Hope
In short, as he heads into his forty-fourth year of life and thirteenth year as a Catholic Worker, he is focused on building a community that will outlast him. Having had more than one brush with death during various illnesses over the years, building a sustainable community has become increasingly urgent.
“I want to have a community that can go on to help people and impact our society even when I’m gone,” he told me toward the end of our three days of interviews.
In the meantime, he is sharing a room in the rural village of Kiboga, where the last house of hospitality had been located. With the school year resuming, he is re-starting his school-based peace and nonviolence education program.
And in his down time, he spends a lot of time researching and planning—and lately, house hunting.
A CW Farm in Africa?
In early 2023, Jim Dowling organized a GoFundMe to help raise the $60,000 Sekitoleko estimates he will need to purchase a house in Kampala. (All dollar amounts are U.S., unless otherwise noted.) That effort eventually raised about $9,000—not quite enough to put a downpayment on the houses he had been considering.
He still hopes to find a house to provide some measure of stability for rebuilding the community, though. A permanent, stable address is a prerequisite for being recognized as an official entity by local authorities in the Catholic Church and for registering as a nongovernmental organization with the Ugandan government.
He’s researching cottage industries that might support the house: growing mushrooms, maybe, or making fruit juice, or extracting juice from sugar cane plants to make wine.
But a house isn’t the full extent of his dreams. Eventually, he would like to expand the community into a 100-acre farm. The idea is well-suited to Uganda, where the majority of the employed population works in agriculture.
He has the whole thing planned out. Ten acres are allocated to a small fruit orchard. Another twelve acres will be a cemetery for the poor. A house will provide shelter for the homeless. Twenty acres will go toward agricultural production for the community, providing it with an estimated 40 percent of the food and income it needs to maintain itself.
Another thirty acres will be set aside for men newly released from prison.
“When somebody is Incarcerated for close to eight to ten years, by the time they leave prison, they come back to a world that is overturned upside down,” Sekitoleko explained. “Their wife is gone, married to somebody else. Kids are scattered. No house, no garden, no nothing. This person is integrated back into the community with nothing. There’s no plan whatsoever.”
Sekitoleko wants to give thirty newly released prisoners an acre on which to grow maize (corn) for a year. He estimates that each acre would produce four tons of corn over two growing seasons in the course of the year, providing the men with enough seed money to re-establish themselves in society.
The farm, which he figures would cost about $350,000, would make the Uganda Catholic Worker self-sustaining. More importantly, he believes it could be a model for other Catholic Worker communities across Africa.
“I want to build a model Catholic Worker community in Uganda, a Catholic Worker community that can be an example, a source of inspiration to other Catholic Workers in Africa, where they can come and learn and go back and copy what we do,” he said.
‘Africa Needs the Catholic Worker to Heal’
Given the difficulties that the Uganda Catholic Worker has faced, it seems fair to wonder whether the Catholic Worker model is a good fit for Africa. At the moment, the only other Catholic Worker community on the continent is Catholic Friends of Mentally Ill in Kenya, a unique iteration of Catholic Worker ideals focused on supporting people who suffer from mental illness.
And while Sekitoleko has been approached by three individuals from other African countries about starting a Catholic Worker, none of them survived longer than a year.
Still, he believes that the Catholic Worker can be a significant catalyst for social change on the continent. That isn’t to say that the Catholic Worker in Africa will look like it does in the United States or Europe.
“Because of the differences between our continent and your countries—the system, the lifestyles, the cultures and everything—the Catholic Worker in Africa should be nurtured to suit the situation, conditions, and circumstances in Africa,” he said. “But the model of the Catholic Worker—the elements, the ideals of the Catholic Worker—is what the African continent needs to heal.”
The continent faces challenges on multiple fronts, he said: income inequality, corruption, climate change impacts, a broken justice system, war, and more.
At the top of his list is the practice of land grabbing, in which land that has been settled by ordinary Ugandans is leased or sold to international investors and the people displaced, sometimes at gunpoint, to make way for commodity crops or forests used as carbon offsets. It was Sekitoleko’s intervention in a land-grab that landed him in jail for several weeks in 2017.
“Almost every day on the news, there’s a rich man trying to take land that is a whole village, sometimes three villages!” he said. “One person is claiming the land of three villages—close to 100,000 people have to become homeless because of one person who is rich.”
His lived experience is backed up by reports from international NGOs such as GRAIN and the Slow Food Foundation and studies by Cambridge University and Friends of the Earth International. Land grabbing not only displaces subsistence farmers and indigenous people, but worsens the effects of climate change, according to the Pulitzer Center.
Despite a 2013 presidential statement officially condemning the practice, the problem persists, and as Sekitoleko experienced first-hand, the country’s broken and often corrupt justice system makes it difficult to fight it.
“You have to pay for your freedom or justice, and expensively,” he said. “If you have nobody above you who is backing you up and you do not have loads of money, you won’t be successful no matter how true or right you are.”
Meanwhile, extreme poverty drives desperation and violence. Some 41 percent of Uganda’s 44 million people live on less than $1.90 a day, according to Opportunity International. Almost half the population is under the age of 15, with only about half of all Ugandans completing primary school.
Sekitoleko likes to say that the average free Ugandan is worse off than Ugandans serving time in prison.
“The prisoners are much better than them. You know why? Because in prison, you’re given free food. The government has to treat you okay in prison,” he said.
That situation has driven more than 750,000 young Ugandans to emigrate to other African nations, Europe, and the Middle East, according to a report by the Vatican’s Section for Migrants and Refugees, a division of the Dicastery Promoting Integral Human Development.
At the same time, Uganda hosts more than 1.4 million refugees, the third-largest refugee population in the world and the largest in Africa. Sekitoleko takes pride in his country’s welcoming spirit, but he has also seen how the refugees are treated.
“Welcoming refugees in an institutional political setup is not enough,” he said. He has seen refugees being treated like school children, told where to line up, where to go, where not to go. Some refugees become victims of sexual violence. “Refugees are people who did not ask for war to come in their country.”
And then there’s the impact of climate change. At the time of our August interviews, Sekitoleko said that although the country was well into the rainy season, it had seen only two inches of rain.
Then, in the fall, eastern Africa was hit with torrential downpours that led to flooding, livestock drowning, and malaria outbreaks. Sekitoleko spent more than a week hospitalized with the parasitic disease.
Rounding out his list is the militarism that drains resources that could be spent on human development. He sees a role for a reborn Uganda Catholic Worker to tell the government “you need to stop wasting money and spending money on defense and arms; instead, let the country be peaceful and have peaceful neighbors.”
A Skeptical Pastor: CW ‘Looks Very Radical’
Before any of his wider ambitions can be realized, though, Sekitoleko needs to shore up the Uganda Catholic Worker’s financial and legal foundations.
For a start, that means registering with the government, a move he has avoided but feels is inevitable.
“You can’t just start an institutional entity and operate without being legal,” he said. He did it for ten years but kept enough of a low profile and was well-regarded by local authorities, who by and large left him alone. But if the community does manage to expand in size and reach, it will become more vulnerable to corrupt elements of the government.
A key step is to receive the formal blessing of the local Catholic Church authorities. Dorothy Day famously rejected the idea that Christians needed the canonical approval to perform the works of mercy. But in the context of Uganda, where nongovernment organizations are tightly regulated, receiving the Church’s blessing is important.
Getting that ecclesial stamp of approval hasn’t been easy, though. When he has approached Church officials about registering, they have told him he needs a permanent address, evidence of support from the wider Catholic Worker community, and stable finances.
At one point, people from another NGO with a similar name, the Catholic Workers of Uganda, raised concerns with the bishop that Sekitoleko might try to fraudulently fundraise off their name. (The other organization offers microloans to small entrepreneurs.)
The bishop asked Sekitoleko’s parish priest to investigate.
After explaining that the Uganda Catholic Worker was part of the larger Catholic Worker Movement, the priest asked why it wasn’t registered as an NGO with the government.
“And I said to the priest that the Catholic Workers don’t align with the government,” Sekitoleko said. “And the priest was like, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yes, you have a laptop, you have Internet. What I tell you is verifiable.’”
The priest got online; after reading for a while, he looked up and commented that Catholic Workers look “to be very radical people,” citing the Movement’s resistance to war and nuclear weapons. Sekitoleko explained that Catholic Workers perform both the spiritual and corporeal works of mercy.
“Then he asked me, ‘Why aren’t you registered with the Catholic Church?’ I also asked him, ‘Do I seem to be ready to be registered with the Church? Because the Church does not support me. I’m doing what I believe is God’s work and I’m not yet at the point where I can register with the Church. So, what I’m asking for is your support as my parish priest and the Catholic community, so that I can get to the point where I can qualify to be registered with the Church.’”
A Need for Nurturing
While his pastor’s report satisfied the bishop, Sekitoleko still receives little practical support from the Church—or any other institution, for that matter. Few Ugandans have the disposable income to help, and among those who do, there isn’t the sort of culture of charitable giving that is found in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
So, will Sekitoleko’s dreams of a revitalized Uganda Catholic Worker—one that thrives, rather than just barely surviving—ever come true?
It’s an open question. The Peter Maurin Farm Catholic Worker in Brisbane, Australia, single-handedly provided thousands of dollars of support over ten years but is unable to continue that level of support. (Jim and Anne Dowling continue to help Sekitoleko keep body and soul together, psying for the rent on his shared room.) The fundraiser Jim Dowling launched in the spring of 2023 raised $9,000, mainly from Dowling’s immediate network, but it hasn’t gotten wider traction.
At this point, Sekitoleko hopes he can network with the wider Catholic Worker community in order to gain a wider base of support.
“If the rich Catholic Worker community doesn’t help out, then the possibility of the Ugandan Catholic Worker being successful is going to be very limited,” he said.
The three things that Catholic Worker communities in wealthier countries can supply, he said, are nurturing, material support, and prayers.
Nurturing might take on many forms, Sekitoleko said. He is deeply appreciative of the Catholic Workers that send him newsletters and newspapers, but he would like to develop even closer ties to other communities. Ideally, he would like more experienced Catholic Workers to join him in Uganda for six months to a year to guide the development of the community there.
As we wrapped up our August interviews, Sekitoleko circled back to his dream of a robust movement native to the African situation.
“If the Catholic Worker can be distributed all over Africa,” he said, “do you know the number of people that won’t cross over the Mediterranean to go to Europe? And apart from that, do you know how much of an internal healing you’re going to have caused to those people? Do you know the hope you’re going to have restored to those people?”
A few days before posting this third installment of his story, I reached out to Sekitoleko to see whether he had any updates.
He sent pictures of himself as evidence that he was doing well, especially compared to his malaria-ravaged condition earlier in the fall. Five schools have signed up for his peace and nonviolence training.
And as usual, he is doing a lot of thinking and planning.
In fact, he sent me another ten minutes of audio on Whatsapp explaining his views on sustainable farming, environmental stewardship, and climate change mitigation. Listening to his enthusiasm, I couldn’t help thinking that if he ever manages to get to a Catholic Worker gathering, he’d have no trouble holding his own with his “Catholic Worker brothers and sisters” (as he likes to say). If it ever comes to pass, it would be a fascinating conversation.
Who knows? Maybe, someday, it will.
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 4: Kenya CW Devellops a Mutual Aid Model for the Mentally Ill.
Cover photo: Students involved in Uganda Catholic Worker’s peace and nonviolence program. All photos are provided courtesy of Michael Sekitoleko.
