UGANDA, Jean de Dieu Ntisumbwa / Maria Fischer •
It was a real Christmas surprise in the parish of Nakivale, the parish of the Nakivale refugee camp in Uganda. The young and enthusiastic Schoenstatt Family, founded by a refugee from Burundi, received a visit from Burundi. Father Alain Amani, a Congolese priest, arrived after the second Christmas Mass and met with about 60 Schoenstatters, some of them from the Pilgrim Mother Campaign. —
Jean de Dieu Ntisumbwa was in the parish of Buhungiro for Christmas preparations, and when he returned to Nakivale, “he could not find much more than 60 people” to meet with the guest from Burundi.
Schoenstatt in Nakivale
A surprise for Fr Alain Amani
The visit of a Schoenstatt priest to the Schoenstatt Family in Nakivale was not the only Christmas surprise. Father Alain came not knowing if there was Schoenstatt in the area or in Uganda in general, but with the intention of doing some apostolic and vocational research. And what he found was a thriving Schoenstatt community with a growing number of members and a growing need for more Pilgrim MTAs, books, medals, pictures …
Jean de Dieu recently translated a book from Burundi into the local language spoken in Nakivale. But he does not have a computer or a printer to distribute the book…
Schoenstatt in an open refugee settlement
Nakivale is the eighth largest refugee camp in the world, created in 1958; it is a camp where 171,387 people live in 51,132 households (May 2023, UN Habitat). They are refugees from many countries – the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, the Horn of Africa, or have been internally displaced. According to UN-Habitat, Nakivale, Uganda is the oldest refugee settlement in Africa and benefits from what is often hailed as the most progressive refugee policy in the world: One of the key tenets of Uganda’s refugee policy is the Self-Reliance Strategy (SRS), a policy that expects refugees to become economically self-sufficient by using a given plot of land to develop a livelihood based on subsistence agriculture. However, as more and more refugees arrive, the settlement is rapidly running out of arable land to support both refugees and the host community, environmental degradation is causing shortages of water and firewood, and poor infrastructure is limiting connectivity and wider access to markets.
This is where Schoenstatt is growing in Uganda, in self-reliance, in the Covenant of Love, in the few symbols and in the great experience shared, holding high the flag of Schoenstatt, like Jean de Dieu’s little one, Igiraneza Jose Kentenich, when the priest from Burundi came to visit.
