MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Summer 2025

Marj Humphrey, Uganda

Kenyan Sister Zipporah Waitathu, who lives in the Palabek Refugee Resettlement Camp, accompanied Marj Humphrey as they met with refugee women sharing their stories.

The shade of huge, leafy, mango trees, laden with ripening fruit, became our primary gathering places for the last two months in our Trauma Healing, Nonviolence, and Restorative Justice course in the Archdiocese of Gulu, Uganda.

During these final two months of our program, fellow lay missioner Joanne Blaney and I followed up with each course participant from each of the 32 parishes represented, meeting each of them on their own home turf.

We listened to their stories of how they have begun applying the principles they have learned, in concrete ways, to their own daily lives and realities. We were humbled by the inspiring, impressive reports and challenging discussions from our course participants, now at home in their individual parishes.

Each day we travelled with our Ugandan colleagues and listened to the participants explain how they had been able to use part of their newly acquired knowledge and skills to work with their own communities.  Most parishes were in outlying villages, some very remote, stretching as far as the South Sudan border. Some days we drove for several hours on rutted, rough dirt roads. Some days the heat was sweltering.

But at the end of each road, we were warmly welcomed by our course participants (catechists, Sisters, teachers, community leaders) and seated, often on rickety wooden or plastic chairs, beneath the welcoming branches of giant mango trees! Day after day in each new place we found ourselves embraced in the cooling shade of these magnificent old trees, occasionally jumping or dodging as we heard the cracking warning from above—signs of an impending large mango falling!

In one of the farthest outposts of the diocese, under the tree outside the parish house, the local parish priest joined us. As our lively conversation went on, he said, “you see, much goes on out here in our Mango Tree Cathedrals!!”  His smile, and his pride in the parish and the “cathedral” were near bursting!

The participants were inspiring and already deeply engaged in the challenges of their parish and village lives and expressed gratitude for the skills they had acquired in the courses, now integral parts of their parish work. Almost all had begun applying the principles of healing, nonviolence, and restorative justice as they worked to be, at times, “judge and jury” in interpersonal, personal, parish-wide, and community conflicts.

We heard stories of how these principles had brought healing effects in their own personal and family lives, as well as in larger community conflicts. They described how learning to manage anger, listen to each person and respect each side of a story, discuss concrete and creative ways of forgiveness, and come to mutually agreeable settlements to disputes and conflicts, had made positive inroads into the various aspects of their family and community lives.

Many of them said, as they began, that they had not realized before how much anger they harbored deep inside themselves, the results of decades of war and violence, oppression and deprivation. They came to realize, once they returned home from the course, how much this deep-seated, long-held anger was affecting both their personal family lives and their approach to dealing with conflict within the parishes and communities.

Their work is nothing short of heroic! They proved to be hard-working, committed peacemakers, most of them walking for miles to visit their parishioners or respond to a site that beckoned them.

Perhaps the most dramatic situation was of one catechist, Stephen, who found himself called to face two angrily feuding families, after one family member had been killed. The family of the dead youth was out to avenge the killing by killing a member of the other family. He ultimately was able to get the two families to sit down together, listen to one another, and find a peaceful way to “repair the harm done” without further bloodshed.

It was the parish priest who told us this story, as he had also been called to this mob situation. He said, “I was so scared, I didn’t know what I was going to do. But when I got there, I found Stephen had already restored order and was working through a peaceful but just solution with them.” He said, “I was astonished. I think we need to learn much more of this method and hope we can train many, many more parishioners.”

During our time here, Joanne and I were approached by several different groups who had heard of the program (beginning with the completion of the first course), asking if we could consider doing some training for them separately: two Religious Congregations, school and youth groups, priests, and women abductees of the Lord’s Resistance Army. We were also requested by a Religious Sister in an adjacent Diocese to provide the course, particularly the trauma aspect, for her students who are predominantly South Sudanese.

Palabek Refugee Resettlement Camp

“There is no trauma worse than not being able to feed your own child.” – Refugee mother in the resettlement camp

Our final phase of this Uganda project was time spent in the Palabek Refugee Resettlement Camp, graciously hosted and accompanied by Salesian Father Ubaldo Andrake (Fr. Uba as he is affectionately known throughout the camp!)

We spent these final weeks working on ways to help relieve some of the painful and difficult trauma symptoms they had been experiencing for years as they survived and then escaped the civil war in South Sudan.

During our time in Northern Uganda, time and again, we had seen immediate evidence of results of the sudden, unexpected cuts to foreign aid, but nowhere as stark and heart-breaking as in this refugee camp. For during our time there, the World Food Programme officials had been visiting the various zones of the camp and informing people that the food was now nearly finished, with only a little bit for people who were just arriving. The future unknown.

We were accompanied by Kenyan Sister Zipporah Waitathu, who lives in the camps, accompanying the largely South Sudanese population who had fled there escaping threats to life and limb, and starvation. We met with women’s groups and spent the days there working on trauma symptoms, listening to their unbelievable stories of horror and peril in South Sudan, culminating in their grief, and now, after reaching “safety,” finding that they had no way to feed their children.

The women told stories of horrific trauma, from rape, to being shot, to seeing multiple family members killed in front of them. Overall, they all expressed that their trauma is now greatly increased by the current situation of very little food in the camp. One told of going out into the forests to find a few leaves to boil for their children’s dinner. There was an overwhelming sense that there is no trauma worse than not being able to feed your own child.

Each day was filled with women “telling their stories” and expressing some relief simply from being able to talk about it, have others listen to them, and learn that there were many women there who had similar experiences … they were not alone.

We worked together on trauma-healing exercises, which gave immediate relief to some but also offered tools that they could use at home and in their communities to help one another with trauma symptom relief. Many expressed that they were happy to meet other women with whom they could now share experiences and felt encouraged to be able to go back home and invited others into the same healing exercises. They delighted in learning from one another, not realizing that they all had valuable ways they had learned to manage their own symptoms and that they could continue to learn from one another.

It has been an honor and a privilege to have been entrusted with the sacred stories from so many who stand on the holy ground that is Northern Uganda.

They are people of such great faith and hope. Indeed, much goes on in those Mango Tree Cathedrals, those places of profound living homilies bearing witness to their great faith, perseverance, and hope. It is my deep hope to respond to so many sincere invitations to return there and continue to walk this road with them in the future.

“When you tell your story, you no longer have to carry your burden alone.”  – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving