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 From: Dave Zamierowski Journal Essay #3 (trip date May, 2009); Essay date June 22, 2010 The MZEE I was able to make three trips out to Ocer, the "New Campion," during our week in Gulu. I should tell you first of all that my ear for languages is not really good. But it sounded to me like Acholi words spelled with an English letter "c" sound like "ch" to my ear when pronounced. Hence, Burcoro sounds like boor-CHORE-row and the private Italian (religious run and subsidized I believe) Lacor St. Mary's Hospital is pronounced La-CHO (the terminal "r's" seems to be dropped also - almost like in French) and the name of our school is Ocer, pronounced O-CHEY. The word in Acholi means He is Risen. If you remember the story of Burcoro, you realize why that name was chosen for these people. So the full name is Ocer Campion Jesuit College (strictly college-prep secondary schools are referred to as "colleges" in the British-based educational nomenclature here). We may add advanced courses later but the intent now is a boarding college prep for boys and girls. Anyway, best advice probably is to forget how words are spelled and listen to how locals pronounce them. Our first visit was on that first Sunday when we were making the rounds of his northeast district with Hon. Reagan Okumu. There was no activity at the Ocer Campion school, but he got the gates open for us and we were able to just wander the yards and get a first impression. It felt good that I could explain to everyone, as above, why OCJC was carved in the doors. I had been paying attention to my e-mails from Fr. Tony. All of us were struck with the statement of pride and significance and outward welcome that the huge flower bed presented "outside" the gates along the road. No other compound we visited had flowers "outside." The metal piers and girders for the large maintenance shed were up, supporting the large metal roof and the deep ditches around it to catch the monsoon-like rains that come off the roof were already slate lined. The solar powered well-water pump and elevated reservoir tank were impressive. And the resident chickens came out to say hi to us. Fresh eggs for breakfast everyday on this trip came to be much appreciated. I returned on Wednesday of that week to tour the site with Fr. Tony and we brought along Dr. Tom Spiegle, an ER physician from Creighton University Hospital in Omaha who was our representative for Medical Missions Foundation (MMF, Inc.) which is headquartered here in Kansas City. We returned to Ocer Campion to find the place bustling with activity. Many workers were on the brick-making machine. I found that really impressive. Using local ground materials (murram, sand, water, etc.) this "Hydraform Brick" machine pressed out one block at a time in just seconds with vacuum and compression and turned this dirt into formed blocks that dried into a system of interlocking bricks superior to flat clay bricks or concrete blocks. So all the buildings will be constructed of these Hydraform blocks, a tremendous savings. The workers carried them out of the press to drying stacks under the protective roof of the huge shed. A little kitchen/pantry and two small classrooms had already been constructed and were in use . a class was actually in session. At the other corner of this initial compound, next to the gate, a second set of workers were just starting the foundation for a pair of new, larger classrooms with a covered veranda where students would be able to eat and study. Fr. Tony and I excitedly went over to view this. Now to understand what happened next you need a little background. The main Jesuits spearheading this school campaign are our classmate Fr. Tony Wach and the Jesuit who was a few years ahead of us at Campion (whose brother Dave was a classmate of ours), Fr. Jim Strzok. There are just a handful of Jebs in the entire East African Province and they're headquartered in Nairobi and Kampala. So Frs. Tony and Jim at that time were not constantly present in Gulu . they just made site visits. Fr. Jim is mostly in charge of the engineering and physical aspects and the building projects and Fr. Tony of the administrative and teacher hiring and schooling aspects, but their responsibilities cross and they try to alternate their visits to increase direct supervision. This was the situation at any rate, when I visited a year ago, before Fr. Tony resigned as rector of the Province and took his current full time post as President of Ocer Campion. He is now in full-time residence at Ocer Campion. But a year ago Fr. Jim had just left the site a week or so prior to our visit, and with him went the previous Jesuit scholastic who had been on site full time in charge of overseeing construction for a few months. A new Jesuit scholastic had just arrived and this was Fr. Tony's first site visit with him in place. I am reminded of a mix of the Tower of Babel and the Hubble telescope mirror construction, designed with metric measurements and built with English measurements (or was it vice-versa?). Anyway, the foundation had been dug and the laying of blocks started and the blocks were already several high so you could get a good sense of the proportions now. I remember the scholastic, John, looking frantically at the plans and Fr. Tony, standing in the middle of the classroom space saying, "John, we're trying to build something really special here, to bring an outstanding educational facility to this region. How can you teach in this closet?" John, who was a very soft-spoken Ugandan, exchanged several comments with Fr. Tony which I could not hear. And finally, everyone heard Fr. Tony say, "I don't care what the plans say, this is a closet!" Everyone knew that this was decision/revision time and drifted over to the site. You need some more background to understand what happened next from my perspective. When we first arrived that morning, I had been introduced with some fanfare to Francis, the son of the Mzee of the clan as the benchmate/classmate of Fr. Tony at Campion High School and that me and my classmates were going to raise the money to help build this school and that was why "Campion" was part of the name of the school. Now, at the direction of the Mzee, Abononi Okumu, and his sons Francis and Roger, had already made this "new Campion" famous in northern Uganda. No one else had ever done what he did before - give up their own land - for anything. And the Ugandans emphasized that to me over and over - no one - ever - anywhere in Uganda. The "land" is the family's prime possession and essentially their principle measure of wealth and status. "Mzee," as I understand the Acholi term, means the family, or clan elder and, as such, owns the family lands. This man, now old, ill and frail, had decided with his family that his land offered little real opportunity to his grandchildren and his village in this changing world and that the most important thing they needed was education. He donated 100 prime acres to be the campus of this new school. To understand this further, consider our visit the previous day to Gulu University and the Gulu Medical School started by the Kampala government 5 years ago. Because this is a national school, entrance is by competitive exam, and from an international pool of potential students. There are very few students from Gulu in the University and none in the medical school. The med school has students from Kampala in the south and from Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda etc. - all of whom will return to their own countries or metropolitan areas and none will stay in this local town of 100,000 to help the local healthcare system - even though it is on these people that they trained. The rules of admission are being changed now to favor the local students a little more. But even so, the Mesai understood that to access higher education, he would need to change the local educational infrastructure from the ground up to not only rebuild it, but to have his people become nationally competitive. The Jesuits were invited, and Fr. Tony, as rector of the Province responded. And now here he stood "in a closet." The Ugandans say volumes with body language and the formalities of positioning, arrangement of attendees, etc. Your participation in discussions, I quickly found out, depends on your mastery of these almost ritualistic. social formalities. You must at least understand these and basically accomplish these before anything substantive can be politely broached. So here we were, looking at this "closet," the foundation already dug and poured. All the workers had stopped laying bricks and were just standing there. Fr. Tony paced out a comfortable size for a classroom and he and John were buried in the plans and I wondered about whether, with increasing the size of this building, there would be enough room in the road between it and the adjacent large maintenance house for truck and tractor traffic between them. I'm not sure how this happened, but after roaming around the site trying to tell if there was enough room, I found myself standing at the southeast corner of the proposed building shoulder to shoulder with Francis, the older son of the Mzee and the family representative on the job-site. It didn't seem that he said much, but there we were, symbolically together, just the two of us, holding one end of a measuring tape as one of his men ran it out to the new proposed dimension. He just nodded his head and suddenly someone was pounding in a rebar-type stake with survey tape on it. And then the other direction. And then right angles were put in and the 4th corner marked. Now we could see it. Yes there would be enough room for truck traffic. And then it hit me. We are making a statement, the two of us standing there together, nodding our heads. He was taking a terrible gamble, investing his entire family fortune on this venture. And he couldn't do it without us. And here we were - we couldn't do this without him, without local support and total commitment. But our two groups together, with everyone's prayers and with the grace of God, were going to do this. "Well, see what you can do," Tony said to John and to Francis, as Tom and I got in his truck to speed off to appointments we were already late for. We were able to meet up with Fr. Steve Msele later that afternoon. He's the Jesuit who started the "Undugu" Movement in East Africa (you've figured out by now that these little "toss-ups" and "shout-outs" are a prelude to a future Essay topic). We rejoined our group for "supper under the stars" again that evening. The next morning it was pack and start the trip back to Kampala. I left our group of eight to travel alone with Fr. Tony back to Kampala later in the day and that gave us a chance to go back to Ocer Campion. Wow! They must have worked through the night. The new foundation had been dug and footed and that morning they had already laid several rows of bricks - up to the level it was the previous day - so we could clearly see the new dimensions and layout. It looked great. I found out later how committed the Mzee and his sons were to this project. Several months earlier, Francis had fired one of his own nephews because "he wasn't taking this project seriously enough." A message like that moves quickly through the community. He's essentially the project manager for this venture. After meeting him and seeing him in action, I'm sure that this venture is going to happen. They are committed to education. And we need to be committed to them - shoulder to shoulder.
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