Nineteen

I can’t help but recognize the metaphor in the rising sun peeking over the seven hills of Kampala this Sunday morning.  I have no memory of ever taking the time on any of my prior visits to Uganda to sit still and appreciate the beauty and simplicity and constancy of the equatorial sunrise – 6:45 a.m. every single day.  I need to do better.  I need to daily draw a connection between the faithfulness of this sun rise and the infinitely more sustaining son rise that gives all of this meaning.

I find myself feeling less anxious about the soon-to-unfold events of this trip than perhaps any other of the prior eighteen.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I suspect it is because this one is starting out less frenetic than the others.  And that’s not an accident.  I am often a slow learner, but I eventually tend to figure things out.  My modus operandi has heretofore been flying in the night before the launch of a series of fast-paced programs.  This has too often led difficult sleep adjustments (ten-hour time difference), not to mention awkward wardrobe malfunctions due to the dilly-dallying of my suitcases on one or more of the layovers.

As the details of this three-week trip began to crystalize, my hyper-organized Global Justice Program colleague, Jenna DeWalt, gently suggested that we build into the schedule some leeway to allow those traveling with us (most for the first time) to get their feet under them before we ask them to run.  Good advice well taken.

So we set off on Thursday afternoon – Jenna, Judge Mitchel Goldberg, and I from Los Angeles, and Selina Shultz from Pittsburgh.  We hooked up with Selina in Amsterdam, ultimately landing in Entebbe a little before midnight, and settled in at our Kampala Hotel at around 1:00 a.m.  Fortunately, there was nothing eventful about the flights, other than the fact that all of our suitcases made the journey with us – I am now 13 wins and 6 losses in this department, but who’s keeping score.  (I guess I am).

This three-week trip is conveniently divided into three substantially equal parts.  The first week is mediation training, the second is the prison project, and the third is conferences.  Those who know me even moderately well know than I am incapable of training anyone in mediation.  I know my limitations, but I also have friends, who themselves have friends.  Which leads me back to the all-star mediation trainers, Mitch and Selina.  Which, in turn leads me back to John Napier.

In 2009, Pepperdine launched its Nootbaar Fellows program, pursuant to which a Pepperdine Law alum serves the Uganda Judiciary for entire year.  John was our first, and became the first-ever court-annexed mediator in the country.  Since then, the fellowship program has helped launch a movement to expand mediation to the entire country in an effort to reduce court congestion and case backlog.  Since Pepperdine’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution is the world-leader in dispute resolution training, it only made sense to invite Straus to partner with our Global Justice Program.  This partnership led to the first-ever national mediation training workshop in 2014, and its follow-on workshop that begins tomorrow.

Mitch was one of the trainers in 2014 and has been itching to return for round two.  Having received an advanced legal degree in dispute resolution from Pepperdine, Selina has become one of the mediation trainers for Straus and jumped at the opportunity to join this trip.  So Monday morning will kick off a week-long training workshop for fifty Ugandan judges who will soon become the core of Uganda’s mediation corps.

But all work and no play makes Jimmy a dull boy, so we spent Saturday in one of my favorite places in Uganda – Jinja.  Before heading out of Kampala for the two-hour drive, we stopped to say hello to our Pepperdine summer interns who are serving eight-week internships with Ugandan judges.  One of them, Emily, jumped in the car with us (along with Nicole, our current Nootbaar Fellow, who is serving as a year-long mediator in the Family Court); four of them had gone ahead to Jinja for a day of white water rafting and bungee jumping.

Our first stop was the Source Café, which was started by a team of missionaries nearly twenty years ago.

First Stop in Jinja

From there, we dropped Mitch, Selina, Emily, and Nicole off in a fishing village on the banks of the Nile River for a two-hour tour of the Nile and Lake Victoria, which is the source of the Nile.  While they were touring, Jenna and I went to visit an American friend and her husband of about two years.  It was a joy to catch up with her, a few of her many adopted Ugandan girls, and to meet their adorable new son.

Before returning to Kampala, our group met up with four of our student interns and watched them climb a rickety platform, strap their feet to a rubber band, and then hurl themselves a couple hundred feet toward the Nile.  There is nothing like bungee jumping in the developing world if one wants to tempt fate.

What could possibly go wrong?

Having done this twice in 2012 (once each with my two youngest kids), I passed on the opportunity to become a recidivist.

Strapped to Joshua on my first plunge in 2012

Today is final preparation day for the mediation training.  While Selina and Mitch are training their hearts out the rest of the week, Jenna and I will be preparing for the arrival of a team of American lawyers on Friday who will work alongside our student interns, Ugandan lawyers, and Ugandan law students on our annual prison project.  This year, we will work in three prisons (Fort Portal, Mbarara, and Bushenyi), the first of which was the site of our first-ever pilot plea bargaining program in adult prisons in 2013.

Day One of 2013 Prison Project in Fort Portal’s Katojo Prison

Stay tuned for regular updates over the next three weeks.

For those wondering about the title of this post, it derives from 1980s novelty song that raced to #1 on music charts around the world.  I will let you decide whether this was or was not a clever way of indicating that this my nineteenth trip to Uganda.