Visit to Gulu, Uganda

Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He arrived in Uganda on September 15. From Uganda he traveled by car to Rwanda on September 28. Asher grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip.  

"On Thursday, October 8, Br. Henry, Kizito, and I set out for the city of Gulu in northern Uganda. This was a journey that Henry had done much planning for given that it was about as long as going to Rwanda, and we did not have much time to waste since we could only spend one full day there. 

We first paid a visit to St. John Paul II Secondary School. This is a place that Henry himself has done much for since its founding in 2019. Despite its being such a young institution, it has much to be proud of, in my opinion. We were present for a graduation Mass before the students take their exams in a few days, and the speeches given, the behavior displayed convinced me that this really was a special place with a high academic standard. The celebrant for the Mass was Msgr. John Wynand Katende, a very important man in the archdiocese and a holy one too. He has a charism of engaging in much silent prayer, and his homily was very insightful, I thought. Afterwards, I spent some time talking to him and some of the students present. They were a very nice group of young people, open, frank, and interesting. 

After our visit to the secondary school, we got in the car and started our long trek up north. It was a multiple hour ride, but finally after leaving at 2:00, we reached the hotel around 9:00 pm. It was a comfortable place, which I was glad for. We all managed to get some good rest, which we would need for the next day's visits.

The next morning, we met with Sister Milly Rose, a nun in charge of schools for the entire country.(shown in blue in the top picture) She had met with my mother about a month and a half ago in Connecticut when she was visiting our parish. She had asked us to visit Gulu and to meet with the education secretary of the archdiocese and to meet with the archbishop.(see picture below) 

She and the education secretary first took us to visit Ocer Campion Jesuit College where we were given a very nice tour of the school. It had only recently been opened in 2010 after the civil war that had ripped through northern Uganda during the 1990s and early 2000s. Atrocities and killings had terrorized the region, and it was only in the early 2010s that the situation calmed down enough for the region to begin to flourish again and open schools such as this one. 

We then visited Mary Immaculate Primary School where we visited with the sisters who run the school and have a small community there. Then we proceeded to meet with the archbishop. Archbishop Wokorach was very kind and listened attentively to what we had to say. He was very open to the movement gave us permission to move forward with rolling out the Children's Rosary in his diocese. He is a very interesting man, being a missionary of the Comboni community. 

That evening we drove out to the parish of Fr. Joel Okot. Fr. Okot has been in communication with my mother and has initiated the Children's Rosary in his parish before. We were very glad to have met him; he is a very joyful man, open and friendly. He showed us the church which even had a door with bullet holes on it, left as a memorial from a shootout that happened in that very spot with rebels during the civil war in the 1990s. 

After sleeping for the night in Gulu, we returned the next morning to Kampala. We stopped on the way at Mulajje parish in Luweero where I had visited when I first arrived. Joseph, Fr. Jude's brother, was coming from Kampala with the rosaries, and so we were on hand to officially drop them off at the parish. I was glad we were able to go. 

That night, we got back to Kampala in the early afternoon and went to go meet a certain monsignor named Msgr. Lawrence Ssemusu of the archdiocese. As it happened, Br. Henry had obtained his book at the ceremony at St. John Paul II Secondary school; this book, called From Banana Plantation to the Altar, details his life story and includes the many people who have helped him reach where he is today. 

It is very nicely written, and I was so captivated by it that I read nearly all of it on the drive to and from Gulu; this was quite extraordinary as I struggle even to read briefly in the car due to motion sickness, but this time, I was able. The book speaks of his journey from a small village in Uganda to the seminary, to studying for the priesthood in the United States, to parish life, to obtaining a doctorate in Belgium, to becoming a deputy vice chancellor at Uganda Martyrs University, to being a chaplain at Makerere University Business School in Kampala, where he works now. When we visited him, he showed us how he has completely created from scratch (there was no Catholic chaplain there before him) a church, a grotto, administrative offices, a residence, and more for the community there. He is a wonderfully nice person with a love of telling stories, and one could see why the students there must love him.

After having the privilege of meeting with this monsignor, we fought through some severe traffic jams to get back home so I could pack to leave Uganda the next day. 

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE