Slowly by slowly: what Africa taught me.

On my flight from England to Uganda I couldn't sleep. I was sick with the flu and nervous about such a long journey over the ocean, and about meeting the strangers who awaited me on the other side. When the plane landed I would be farther away from home than I had ever been.

My mother had reassured me at the airport before I left, "Same stars, Anna Cate." The thought comforted me until I saw the Big Dipper upside down.

The flight to East Africa was a red-eye, but it was daytime on my body clock, and I was fatigued from several days of traveling alone. So I prayed, drank a lot of water, did stretches in the aisle, and tried not to watch the in-flight TVs broadcasting the beheading of an U.S. civilian in Iraq.

Waiting in line to use the bathroom, a white man in his sixties from the United States struck up a conversation.

"What's your business in Africa?" he asked cordially.

"I'm going to teach English in a Holy Cross school," I replied, trying to muster the confidence I thought those words demanded. "The school's outside Jinja and I'll be working with the CSCs and the Holy Cross Associates nearby."

Then I asked him what he would be doing in Uganda, and he told me that he was a Bible translator, and that he was working with an organization that translated the New Testament into African languages. I smiled. Then he asked me, "Are you saved?"

"No," I said, still smiling. "I'm Catholic."

His blue eyes glistened as he raised his eyebrows. "But are you a Christian? Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" he asked, growing more and more animated.

I hesitated. "Yes," I said. "I believe in Jesus Christ." I was trying to be respectful.

"But who do you believe that he is?" the missionary asked.

It was a good question, and a difficult one to answer while waiting for the lavatory. Discomfort set in, and I wanted the man to leave me alone. He reminded me of the fundamentalists who would come to the park across the street from my public high school and ask those of us who looked tough if we would accept Jesus as our personal savior.

I answered his question as best I could: "I believe he's the savior of the universe," and looked down at my socks.

"Then why won't you get saved right now?!" he coaxed.

Had I given the wrong answer?

"What if this plane were to plunge into that icy water? What if this plane crashed? Are you certain that you'd go to heaven? Are you?"

I looked him straight in the face and said, "No, I'm not," as my mind drifted to the churning ocean thirty-five thousand feet below. When did I see him naked and clothe him? When did I see him hungry and give him food?

I couldn't say this at the risk of upsetting him further, and, waiting to pee, I wasn't prepared to defend a faith-and-works theology. Nor was I prepared to defend a theology that extends salvation beyond the Catholic Church--or any church, for that matter.

I couldn't say a thing. I was too frustrated and on edge to speak. My missionary friend continued preaching until the lavatory door opened and I escaped inside.

Christian fundamentalists come to Uganda all the time to tell people about God. What these missionaries sometimes forget is that God is already there.

How could I explain to this man what I believe to be true? Whether you are a Catholic or a nondenominational Christian may not be the point. We cannot bring Christ to Uganda. He is waiting for us there.

After class, my students and I used to sit and talk about the differences between Uganda and the United States. They wanted to know if people were also poor in the States, and I assured them that poverty was universal. I said, "In my country many people are homeless." My students, from rural Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, could not understand the concept of homelessness. "Do they not have families?" they asked in horror.

"Yes," I said. "Many do have families."

"Well, then, why are they homeless? Do people not have room for them in their houses?" I thought of the countless empty guest rooms, family rooms, and dens in the United States and didn't say a word.

I went to Africa to teach, but, like many before me, I ended up being the student. I went to Uganda to do service, but more often than not, I was the one served.

I wrote a paper for a class at Notre Dame, where I'm a junior, before I left for Africa. The paper was about the virtue of hospitality. In truth, I knew very little about hospitality at the time. It was only when I was a stranger in need of welcome that I began to see what it really means.

When I first arrived in Jinja, adjusting to living in the developing world was a struggle. I wrote to my family about the wonders and woes of pit latrines and chamber pots, cockroaches and spiders. Some nights as I sweated and coughed under the mosquito netting in my oven-like room I couldn't remember why I had thought that coming to Uganda was such a good idea. I'd lie awake and listen to the newborn baby of the single mother living next door to me cry, while the African couple on the other side of my house had noisy sex. Daily struggles with strange foods and dangerous roads left me feeling overwhelmed. Not to mention cultural differences. Almost all my students wrote in their autobiographies about being caned, sometimes alongside their mothers and siblings. They described being hit by teachers and fathers and neighbors. "Daddy uses the bamboo because it does not break," one of them wrote.

But despite all this, God in his mercy found me in Uganda. I think I saw him first in the form of Linda.

Linda was my four-year-old neighbor in Wanyange village. She was always jumping, singing, dancing, and running about. Her older sisters Hilda and Joanne could hardly keep up with her. Linda taught me, as they say, "slowly by slowly," how to praise.

Many words and phrases from Lusoga don't really translate into English. "Slowly by slowly" may be one of them. Africans wait. They wait for rain. They wait for peace. They wait for foreign aid. They wait for the Kingdom. Some of the Holy Cross nuns sing as they walk the red dirt roads of Wairaka village, "Katonda wabale. Wabale inho." It means, "Thank you God. Thank you very much." Africans live "slowly by slowly," and even as they are suffering, they are saying thank you, and they are waiting.

On my third night in the village, I heard giggling. I left my little cement-and-tin house and began to play with the girls next door. They made room for me on their mat, and for the first time since I'd been in Uganda, they made me feel completely at home. Within minutes, they were braiding my hair. Truly, little girls are universal, I thought. But Linda, Hilda, and Joanne were also singular. They walked me home every day. They watched out for me, and loved me--stranger though I was. They taught me Lusoga songs, and Musoga dance moves, and helped me fit in. "No!" Joanne would say as I scrubbed my floors with a dirty rag and the same blue soap I used to wash my dishes, clothes, and hair, "let me."

They became my friends. Every day I went to school as an English teacher, as an official volunteer, but when I came home I was just one of the girls, although richer and whiter. I had coloring books and crayons. My young neighbors had never seen crayons before, so we started a coloring club on my front porch, and I was instantly popular.

We sang songs from Vacation Bible School, ate g-nuts and jackfruit, taught each other words, and waited in line to get water or to use the latrine. We were neighbors and friends.

As I lived in the village I realized why I had come to Uganda. I had come to meet my brothers and sisters, Muslims and Catholics and Protestants. I had come to meet my neighbors. I had come to know a few Africans and to learn how to talk with them.

The waters separating us are wide. Half of all African children don't attend school, and two-thirds of the world's 33 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa. Ugandans die every day from preventable, treatable, and potentially curable diseases such as polio, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and AIDS.

While I was there, I reread the Sermon on the Mount and Michael J. Himes's commentary on it. He writes, "The only criterion for the final judgment, according to Matthew 25, is how you treated your brothers and sisters," not why you did it, or when you did it, but that you did it at all.

Some of my brightest students at Lakeview Secondary School were saved, or "save-dee" as the village kids said it. They often pestered me, "Madam why don't you get saved?" I still wonder. Why don't I get saved? Why don't I welcome the stranger, or visit the imprisoned, or console the doubtful, or forgive offenses willingly?

There are so many needs in Uganda. I taught English. All told, I did very little for my community while I was there, but what I saw left an indelible mark on me. I saw people who had nothing sharing what little they did have. And now I know, as Simone Weil writes, that "The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: 'What are you going through?' It is a recognition that the sufferer exists not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled unfortunate, but as a man, exactly like us who was one day stamped with the special mark of affliction." Perhaps through that recognition, our neighbors (however distant) and ourselves really can be saved.

Anna Nussbaum is a junior at the University of Notre Dame.