Calm Before The Storm

I have lived the past three days in the calm before our team’s storm of activity here in Uganda.  But I haven’t been idle.  I arrived late Tuesday night after a relatively uneventful 24-hour journey, LAX to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Entebbe.  I have now made this journey seventeen times since 2010, but it doesn’t get any less tiresome on my aging body.

The first wave of the team will arrive this evening.  I went ahead of the rest so I could prepare a place and ensure that as many logistical details were nailed down as possible.  It was great to catch up on Wednesday with our nine students who are spending the summer here interning for various judicial officials – two in the Court of Appeals, two in the Family Division of the High Court, two in the Commercial Division, one in the Criminal Division, one in the Anti-Corruption Division, and one in the Department of Public Prosecutions.  In addition to the judges for whom they work, the students are loosely supervised by our two Nootbaar Fellows, both of whom are serving as court-annexed mediators – Jory Canfield in the Commercial Division and Megan Callaway in the Family Division.  They are 2014 Pepperdine Law graduates serving one-year terms.

After a full day of running errands and nailing things down, I had dinner with the Pepperdine interns and fellows on Wednesday evening, along with Court of Appeals Justice Kiryabwire (who is the Ugandan liaison under Pepperdine’s Memorandum of Understanding with the Ugandan Judiciary).  We were also joined by Judge Clifford Wallace of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  Judge Wallace, who is 86 years old and going strong, is here in Uganda for a week assisting the Ugandan Court of Appeals in evaluating whether appellate mediation should be implemented here, an idea hatched during an earlier visit to Pepperdine by various Ugandan Justices.

Dinner with the Pepperdine Interns

Thursday was another day of preparations, but was highlighted by an opportunity to see my youngest two kids, Joshua and Jennifer, who are here for two weeks with a group from their school – Oaks Christian High School.  The group is led by American doctors and nurses, who are partnering with Ugandan doctors and nurses on a mobile medical tour of schools and villages.  The kids are getting to help with registration and filling prescriptions, as well as providing spiritual care for those receiving treatment.  Joshua has been in the pharmacy the entire trip, while Jennifer has been registering patients and praying with them.

Joline and I have done plenty of things wrong in raising our kids, but we have succeeded in providing them opportunities to flourish in unfamiliar surroundings and to have confidence in God’s presence in their lives.  All three have risen to the occasion.

We briefly Skyped with Joline so she could see them, but Joshua and Jennifer felt guilty about getting to see their parents, while the others haven’t had the chance, so we snuck away from the others for the Skype call.

Before I went to bed on Thursday evening, some dark clouds began forming on our logistical planning.  The flight carrying two members of our team – Jenna Anderson, who works with me at Pepperdine in the Global Justice Program, and Eleanor deGolian, Atlanta-based lawyer – was delayed for one hour and forty minutes out of Atlanta, putting their two-hour connection in Amsterdam in serious jeopardy.  When I awoke this morning, the situation hadn’t changed.  They were in transit and weren’t sure if they would make the connection to join five other members of the team whom they were supposed to meet in Amsterdam for the final leg into Uganda.  These team members are Alan Jackson, former high-profile prosecutor in Los Angeles, Melissa Mertens, LA public defender, Emily Smith, Nashville prosecutor, Alan Brown, Midland lawyer, and Allison Brown, Alan’s daughter who attends my alma mater Abilene Christian University.

Via e-mail from the landing runway, Jenna notified me that she and Eleanor landed in Amsterdam about thirty minutes before the connecting flight, but their plane was unable to pull in because another was at their arrival gate.  Fiddlesticks! (as one of my former bosses used to say in situations where others would say something stronger).

I sent Jenna the flight information for the only other flight out of Amsterdam that would get her to Uganda in the next 24 hours (leaving forty minutes later) and prayed for their success in making the connection.  The plane finally pulled into the gate about ten minutes before takeoff of the original connecting flight.  As of the time I am writing this (two hours later), I haven’t heard anything more, which I am hoping is a good sign.

More tomorrow after our first meeting with a high-powered task force, which is creating guidelines for the introduction of video appearances in Ugandan court and video conferencing between lawyers and clients.  Adopting these new procedures promises to save lots of money and time, reduce security risks associated with bringing busloads (and sometimes cattle-truckloads) of prisoners to court, not to mention drastically increasing the communications between prisoners and their lawyers (who often don’t drive out to prison to meet with their clients in advance of trial).