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Bridget's Bunia Blog 50

Bridget's Bunia Blog 50

"We are ready for CHOGM." "Are you ready for CHOGM?" "I'm ready for CHOGM."

What a great publicity campaign along the road out of the airport at Entebbe! Important people endorsing this coming event or person. What is everyone getting ready for? Who is this CHOGM? I need answers to my questions.

If the road repairs and the building refurbishments are anything to go by, this is an important 'something' that is going to happen. There's a great sense of energy, preparedness, activity. The city roads are being repaired, widened and re-routed to deal with the magnitude of the traffic. New paving stones appear and smooth pavements are being created.

Teams of citizens equipped with hoes and picks and shovels are busy preparing the verges, banks and central strips all along the road from Entebbe to the capital, Kampala. They are busy digging, removing the debris and then - stalk by stalk -planting grass to cover the vast areas of hardred soil. It looks back-breaking work. Holes are dug at intervals and frondy palms are planted all along the route.Inch by inch, the city is turning green. But what is it all for? What or who is CHOGM? Who deserves such cleanliness? So many repairs? Such verdure?

CHOGM stands for The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings scheduled to be held in Uganda in November. 53 heads of government and 5,000 delegates will converge on the capital and - The Queen is coming! It's a great honour for Uganda to host these meetings. It's a great incentive to beautify the cities. One day another monarch will appear. Similar preparations will herald his coming.

"…Prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken." Isaiah 40:3-5

Are we ready?

Blessings,

Bridget

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About Bridget Howard

Bridget Howard’s first recollection of Africa is being shown slides of termite hills in the Belgian Congo during a Sunday school class. “From a young age I had a sense of purpose from God that I would one day teach in Africa”.

Bridget is not one to freely give out her age but it occasionally does slip out that she first went to Congo to work 26 years ago when the country was still called Zaïre. Her first assignment was as a teacher at Rethy Academy, the Mission’s school for children of its members. Her next assignment was as a school inspector in Zandeland where, as she puts it, she: “cycled around inspecting teachers and outside toilets of the church schools!”

Following evacuation from Congo as a result of the fighting that errupted around the Great Lakes in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, Bridget worked at Aim’s International Office in Bristol. She returned to Congo in 2005 to teach English at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique in Bunia. The ISP exists to prepare students to teach at secondary schools run by the CECA-20, Aim’s partner church in Congo.

Since her return Bridget has been sending her ‘blog’. She admits that ‘composition’ was not a favourite lesson when at secondary school but writing has become less of a chore as she told friends back in the UK of her daily experiences of life in Africa. “Maybe it’s an exalted sense of my own importance as being ‘From Our Own Correspondent-like’ I can pretend to be Aim’s very own Kate Adie!”