Faith Supports Ugandan Aid Worker

The meeting with his long-lost mother remains etched in the memory of Joseph Mutebi, program consultant for Uganda for the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee.

When Mutebi is speaking to churches in North America about the wide-spread development work of CRWRC in East Africa, the Ugandan native rarely, if ever, has the time to share the story of the experience that truly propelled him into a walk with Jesus Christ and ultimately into the job with CRWRC.

In his current position, he works through the Anglican Church in Uganda under the auspices of CRWRC to help train trainers who are involved  in helping  community groups-- returning after many years of war and uncertainty -- to develop methods of farming that help sustain them. Many of them have lived in camps where they were fed and overseen by others.

In an interview, Mutebi talks about his current employment, but first discusses that meeting in the early 1980s with his mother, who left their home nearly 20 years before, abandoning Joseph at nine months of age to be cared for by others.

“This is an experience I’ll never forget in my life. She had accepted Jesus as her Lord and savior and had returned to reconcile over issues she had left behind. She was on a spiritual journey,” says Mutebi, who is in the United States to talk to Christian Reformed Church congregations that help to fund his work in Africa.

His wife, Robinah, was supposed to accompany him, but she could not get a visa to leave Canada and has made the best of the situation by talking about their work with Canadian groups.

At some point, his mother shared her Christian testimony with him, explaining the need for reconciliation among all people, as taught by Christ.

Although Mutebi had been baptized and attended church, he had wandered away and was not living a full Christian life when he encountered his mother. But that meeting changed the course of his life.

“After I met my mother, she took me with her to small, Christian group discussions. I saw the love, openness, happiness and acceptance of these people and it struck me that this was what it meant to follow Christ.”

Once his mother had worked through reconciliation with him and others she came to see, she left, leaving him with the idea that he, too, needed to reconcile aspects of his life and relationships. He found, for instance, he needed to reconcile with his stepmother.

Not long after his mother left for her own home, Mutebi was attending a revival at a church when he was touched by the Holy Spirit who opened his heart and life to God. “I realized that I needed to draw much nearer to God,” he said.

A trained teacher, Mutebi eventually married a Christian woman, Robinah, whom he had met before. They have three sons.

Leaving teaching, he managed a tea factory. But he eventually found himself drawn to community development work, wanting to find ways to make life richer and better for the parents of the children he taught in school.

He had seen problems in the classrooms and knew that those difficulties often stemmed from the situation at home.

“I wanted to get at the level of the parents and family, where the real problems and difficulties are coming from,” he said.

He worked for Bread for the World, as well as a German development agency, doing a range of development work. He went back to school and then landed the job with CRWRC.

CRWRC works in partnership with other churches. In his position, he teaches leadership, micro-finance, team building and resource management, usually to others who then work with people in the communities.

“You build a system that can deliver and then you work alongside people,” he says. “We work in an area that has about 30,000 people. It is an area that has had war, in which refugees have come back and we teach them ways to generate their own food,” he says.

Mutebi and those he has taught help the people gather together their energy and plow one another’s land. When necessary, Mutebi says, they help the people obtain high-yield seeds for planting. Additionally, they teach and encourage people to plant small kitchen gardens to produce their own fruits and vegetables.

There also is a goat project in which people purchase a goat that is good for fertilizing crops, for food and for other things. Once the goat has a kid, the family gives that kid to a family that doesn’t have a goat.

“This helps to build cohesiveness and enhances relationships and soon people start to care for one another, which minimizes conflicts and builds community,” he says.

Teaching people about how to address malaria, a major cause of sickness and death, is another of their programs. This involves education and encouraging people to obtain mosquito nets for their homes.

Mutebi has also taught workers how to help people in communities to pool their resources so that they can set up borrowing and lending programs for friends and neighbors who may have a need.

“CRWRC is a crucial part of this process of building capacity, of teaching people how to do things and then letting them fly,” says Mutebi.

Much more needs to be done in the area in which they are working and elsewhere, and political instability is always a threat, but Mutebi’s faith in Christ and in the people of faith with whom he works helps to carry him through.

“I remind myself that we are doing outreach and that we remedy challenges that are out there, and we are also restoring hope in households,” he says.