Temporary World, Eternal God

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Pepperdine became engaged with Uganda’s Judiciary as a direct result of a speech by Restore International founder Bob Goff to Pepperdine students in February of 2007 during “International Justice Mission Week” at the law school.  During that talk, Bob whimsically invited the Pepperdine students in the audience to accompany him to a judicial conference he was putting on the following month in Kampala, Uganda.  Two of them, Matt Kraus and Lizz Alvarez, caught the vision and convinced me and Dean Starr to fund their two-week Ugandan adventure a few weeks later.  They came back full of ideas about how Pepperdine could serve the judiciary in its work.  Two months later, Lizz and a few other Pepperdine law students spent the summer launching the partnership that is now flourishing.

Fittingly, Restore International and International Justice Mission both crossed my path here in Uganda over the past 24 hours.  I spent Monday afternoon and evening with the Kampala Field Office Director of IJM, Jesse Rudy, and had breakfast on Tuesday morning with a Restore International team, most of whom had flown in the night before.  (Bob arrives on Friday night, minutes before I lift off for home).  At breakfast, I met a young lady who now works for Restore who lived with Lizz and the other Pepperdine students during that first summer in 2007.

Small world, big God.

Because Henry’s mom had traveled from Hoima with Henry’s one year-old brother on Monday evening to join Henry and his older brother Kegan, there was no room on the floor between the hospital beds for all of them to sleep on Monday night.  (I, of course, had offered to pay for a hotel for them on previous nights, but they insisted they needed to be there during the night to attend Henry’s ailing father, David).  Accordingly, Henry stayed with me at the conference hotel on Monday night, and set off on an 8:00 a.m. three-hour bus ride to his hometown of Hoima on Tuesday morning where he planned to stay for 24 hours before returning to Kampala to be with his father.

When I walked into the mediation conference room at 9:40 a.m. after the breakfast with Restore, Pepperdine’s Nootbaar Fellow in Uganda, Susan Vincent, was sitting at the back of the room looking at her phone.  As I sat down next to her, she whispered, “have you seen this yet?” and set her phone down on the table in front of me.  It was a text from Henry addressed to both Susan and me.  Three simple words that took my breath away.

“Dad is dead.”

Henry had received this devastating news from his mother while he was bouncing around on a crowded bus.  I stepped out into the hallway to call him, but I received no answer.  My mind resumed its racing through the “what if” questions that had been ricocheting around my mind for several weeks.  Once again, I received no answer.  I suspect this sort of second guessing is hard-wired into many situations of medical uncertainty preceding the passing of a loved one.  But it doesn’t make it any easier to fight off feelings of guilt and confusion.  I am not sure those emotions will ever fully subside, however, as we are all forced to confront the inescapable truth that we are not meant to have all the answers.  Not yet, anyway.

Temporary world, eternal God.

Over the course of the day, Henry and I texted much, but spoke little.  Understandably, he is taking it hard.  I suspect he is wrestling with same “what if” thoughts.  I did my best to assist with the arrangements of claiming and transporting David’s body back to his ancestral burial place a mile from Henry’s home.

                                                                                                     

In the early afternoon, I met with the Director of Public Prosecutions to discuss a variety of planned and potential points of collaboration in the near and distant future.  We also had a chance to discuss at length some rather controversial legislation Uganda has recently passed.  During our visit, he made a call and secured a meeting for me with a veterinarian doctor on Thursday.  I am quite excited and hopeful about where that meeting might lead.  More on that front on Thursday.

Following my meeting with the DPP, I had lunch with someone who is fast becoming an old friend – a Welshman living in Uganda who is pouring his heart and soul into securing families for Uganda’s orphans.

After lunch, I had a chance to watch a fair bit of the mediation training the Pepperdine team is delivering to the judges and lawyers.  It is nothing short of fascinating, and the trainers are nothing short of spectacular.  The participants are attentive and engaged as they strategize and envision how they can use the tools they are acquiring to serve the people of Uganda.

On Tuesday evening, I had the privilege of meeting a very special young man for the first time.  Shortly after lunch, I had received a text from Justice Kiryabwire – a man who has become like a brother, which said:

“Your God child made a perfect landing on this planet.  Thanks for your prayers.”

Brilliant, as they often say here.  Last month, Justice K had asked me to be the Godfather to his third child, who was providentially scheduled to arrive during the week I was here.  After dinner, I had a chance to hold baby Mark and congratulate the family.

It feels too trite to write all about the circle of life, joyful beginnings and tearful endings, comings and goings, etc.  But those are the thoughts swirling inside my head right now.

Baby Mark Kiryabwire and his Proud Godfather

 

Newly arrived Mark Kiryabwire

Mediations

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Just Before Opening Ceremony with Chief Justice Kavuma and Justices Kiggundu and Wangatusi

 

Like other African countries, Uganda has a lengthy history of resolving its disputes informally.  Before the arrival of the Brits in the 1860s and its subsequent colonization, Uganda didn’t have a formal justice system in the way that term is commonly understood.  Rather, the tribal leaders served as judge, jury, and (sometimes) executioner.  Conduct we would consider criminal either resulted in physical punishment, compensation, or even banishment from the tribe.

As a formal rule of law was established, cultural dispute resolution norms were replaced by “modern” means of delivering justice in both the civil and criminal context, at least in the urban areas.  Even after Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962, it retained the British common law system in its justice sector.  With the dawn of the 21st century, however, Uganda began its rediscovery of alternative dispute resolution, beginning with a mediation pilot program in its Commercial Court.  Pepperdine Law School’s Straus Institute was instrumental in the expansion of this effort, providing training to more than a dozen Ugandan judges over a period of eight years.  Indeed, the first court-annexed mediator in the country, John Napier, was a recent graduate of the law school and dispute resolution program when he became a mediator here in 2009.

Justice Geoffrey Kirybwire (Justice K), Uganda’s designated liaison between the Ugandan Judiciary and Pepperdine, presided over the successful implementation of mediation in the Commercial Court while serving as the Head of that division.

Sunday morning, I attended All Saints Church with Justice K and his two children.  Once again, I stood out like the photographic negative of a fly in a bowl of milk.  And no, this was not because of my skin color, but rather because I have no rhythm.  Church in Uganda is a bit more, well, energetic than in the United States.  I am confident I provided more than a little comic relief for those sitting behind me.  On the good side of the ledger, the music and singing were so loud that I could fully utilize my lung capacity without shredding the ear drums of those around me.  I couldn’t even hear myself.

After church, I met up with Henry at a local mall for lunch and an update on his father, David, who is in dire need of a different form of mediation as his condition deteriorates in Mulago Hospital.  I have forwarded portions of David’s medical charts to doctors in the United States and they have impressed upon me the critical nature of his current condition.  I visited David in the late afternoon and even I could tell he was worse off than the day before.  As of Sunday evening, the private doctor who was attending to David at this public hospital remained unwilling to operate unless and until his condition stabilized – surgery is impossible until he is stabilized, but it seems as if the only thing that can stabilize him is surgery.

Late Sunday night, the Pepperdine mediation team returned from their African Safari and Nile River cruise exhausted, but glad they had taken the trip.  We finalized plans for Monday’s conference over dinner.

On Monday morning, Uganda formally launched an expansion of mediation into the other three civil divisions at the trial court level.  Fittingly, Pepperdine was in the middle of it.  While incongruous in one level (I am not trained in mediation techniques), I was honored to be the Pepperdine representative for this occasion.

As per usual, the gathering started about an hour late.  In attendance were fifty Ugandan judges and fifty Ugandan lawyers.  Among the judiciary were one Justice from the Supreme Court, seven Justices from the Court of Appeals, and twenty-one Justices from the High Court (trial level).  About twenty Magistrates and Registrars were also in attendance.

After two welcoming speeches from the high court judges who convened this gathering from the Ugandan side, I was invited to the podium to say a few words and to introduce the four mediation trainers who would be presiding over the five-day program.  I took the opportunity to congratulate and encourage them as they embraced civil mediation for the entire country in an effort to greatly reduce the case backlog in their courts.  The Chief Justice of Uganda spoke next and lavished thanksgiving on Pepperdine for its long-standing and transformative service to Uganda’s judiciary and its people.  It was a proud moment for our school.

As the media-rich opening of the program came to a close, we divided the Ugandans into two separate rooms – judges in one, lawyers in the other.  During this transition, we broke for tea and took some pictures.  Several of our team were photographed while engaged in a side conversation with the Chief Justice, which ran in Tuesday morning’s paper.

http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/All-civil-disputes-set-for-mediation–judiciary-says/-/688334/2238594/-/rurny1/-/index.html

Good thing I have such a huge forehead, or I would have missed my opportunity for this photo op.  Also pictured with the Chief Justice are Professors Stephanie Bell and Denise Madigan, along with Judge Paul Beeman.  Just off camera was Judge Mitch Goldberg.

As the day unfolded, I drifted in and out of the two training rooms (the participants were fully engaged), even while David drifted in and out of consciousness.  In the late afternoon, the private doctor told Henry that David’s chances of survival were 50/50, and that prayers were his best hope.  More mediation on David’s behalf would be greatly appreciated.

In the early evening, however, a team of doctors and medical students from Makerere University arrived at David’s side and have apparently decided to use his case as a training exercise for the students.  This, in and of itself, felt like an answered prayer.

Henry and I discussed in depth the options – I was leaning toward trying to move David to a private hospital, perhaps in Nairobi, Kenya, but Henry is convinced that his best chance for survival is to remain with this medical team that has now replaced the private doctor.  Practical wisdom is playing hide and seek with me now.

In the late evening, Henry’s mother arrived at the hospital to help take care of David.  Now that he is no longer ambulatory, an additional layer of responsibility exists, including those related to bodily fluids that Henry’s mother has insisted on handling.

Henry joined me at my hotel late Monday night and will venture back to Hoima on Tuesday morning to ensure his brother Joseph is settled into the school he began attending on Monday.  Henry will return to Kampala on Wednesday.

 

Judge Beeman and Professor Bell Training the Judges

Settling In and Booting Up

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Because none of the four others who have joined me on this trip – Professor Stephanie Bell, Mediator Denise Madigan, and Judges Mitch Goldberg and Paul Beeman – had been to Africa, they were eager to see the local wildlife.  Given the intense training schedule this coming week, the only time for them to go on safari was this weekend.  Accordingly, they were in bed for about four hours before climbing into a safari vehicle Saturday morning for the five hour drive to Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda’s premier game park.  Having been there three times myself, I opted to stay behind and connect with others in town.

I began the day with a quick trip to the local mall to get my wireless internet stick charged, and then had tea with Justice Kiryabwire (Justice K), who is the liaison for the Pepperdine program and serves as a Justice on the Ugandan Court of Appeals.  Halfway through our meeting, he picked up his law professor wife (Winnie) from the doctor, where she had her final pre-natal checkup in advance of Tuesday’s C-Section delivery of their third child.  As I always, I very much enjoyed getting their insider perspective on recent legislation and developments in Uganda.

During my last trip to Uganda in January, I met up with someone whose family was on an unexpected adventure in Uganda.  She, her husband, and three children had traveled to Uganda in the fall with a plan to stay four to six weeks.  Six months later, they are still here, still in the process of navigating some challenges they encountered during their stay here.  It was a blessing and an encouragement to see them flourishing and trusting fully in God’s timing as they wait for things to unfold on Uganda time.  Their kids are adapting so well, and they are such a positive influence on those around them, especially other American families who come through Uganda.

On the way back from lunch, I stopped at Mulago Hospital to meet up with Henry and his father, David.  During my last trip to Uganda, I did my best to assist them in getting David admitted to the hospital and evaluated for symptoms that included a swollen and painful stomach and worryingly yellow eyes and skin.  I will never again complain about the length of time it takes to get a referral or test in our American medical system.  They waited in the hospital two weeks for an MRI and CT scan, and then ten days for the results.

And the conditions in which they wait would make an uninitiated westerner weep.  The hospital beds are placed wall to wall in open rooms that lack any semblance of sanitation.  The beds are bare mattresses – sheets and blankets are strictly on a BYO basis.  Same with food, water, and any hygiene products.  Same with medicine.  The beds are approximately two feet apart, providing barely enough room for the relatives who care for the patients to sleep on the floor between the beds.  The doctors and nurses come by infrequently, and usually only when specifically bidden by the relatives.  The sights and sounds and smells of literally dozens and dozens of injured, ill, and incurable cannot be adequately captured in words.  This is a waiting game of the worst kind.

Feelings of helplessness barely fended off waves of hopelessness as I scanned the room.  When I enter a prison, whether juvenile or adult, I can envision each person’s case.  I can understand where it is in the process and how it can possibly be moved forward to resolution.  I can see the starfish stranded on the shore and I can operate within a system that holds the prospect of bringing them hope.  But in a hospital, I don’t know what to do.  I don’t speak the language of medicine, and I don’t know where to begin.  I see starfish baking in the sun, and am thankful to those who are making an effort to help those in this realm of need.

As Henry and I snake through the labyrinth of patients, I finally see Henry’s father.  He is hooked to an IV drip that Henry has himself prepared and inserted, after he purchased the contents of the bag.  One of the silver linings in this dark cloud of David’s life-threatening illness is that Henry has had the opportunity to dive deep into Uganda’s medical system.  Having just completed his Secondary education in November, Henry is hoping to enroll in Medical School in August at Makerere University – Uganda’s top school, which is located at the Mulago Hospital where David is a patient.  Henry has now been by David’s side for about six weeks (mostly here in Kampala at Mulago), which is four hours from their home town of Hoima.

Henry has been proactively interviewing and interrogating doctors as they try to figure out the source of David’s ailment and the best treatment.  The tests and scans show that he has a tumor in or near his gall bladder that is blocking his bile duct.  Henry had been visiting with numerous doctors around the city and finally got one to agree to operate on his father in the next couple of days.  But by the time I arrived on Friday with the money for the surgery, David’s blood tests revealed an alarming lack of certain chemicals/minerals and a worrying excess of others.  The doctor declared him to be unlikely to survive the surgery unless he was stabilized.  Accordingly, this next week will be critical as he aims to be ready for surgery by next weekend.

David painstakingly mouthed words of gratitude as we talked.  His face gaunt, his belly distended, and the color of his eyes reflected the battle raging inside his organs.  Conflict raged inside of me, as my mind raced through the options.  Should I move him to a private hospital?  That was the plan just before I took off from the United States.  The private surgeon had recommended as much because of the lack of success they were having getting the attention of any doctors at Mulago.  But when I arrived on Friday night, Henry had secured the assistance of a doctor at Mulago who was now overseeing the treatment in advance of surgery.

Should I fly him to India for surgery?  That was the suggestion of the doctor who initially reviewed the CT scan and MRI.  But David had no passport, no support structure in India, and didn’t want to go there for surgery.  And what if I persuaded him to go and he died on the operating table there?

Ultimately, I accepted Henry’s conclusion that the best plan was to the stay the course, even if that course meant remaining in the substandard conditions where he currently resided.

On the good news front, Henry’s younger brother Joseph was just admitted to Mandela Secondary School in Hoima for his A-level, which is the last two years of high school.  On Saturday afternoon, I converted dollars to shillings and Henry sent the $600 necessary to pay for Joseph’s first-term (of three per year) school fees and the books and supplies he needed for this boarding school.  Joseph is excited to continue his studies closer to home and will be focusing on physics, economics, mathematics,  and information technology.

Just before we left the hospital, Henry’s older brother Kegan arrived from Hoima with some food and essentials for David and Henry, and plans to stay in Kampala for a few days to keep Henry company as he cares for David.

I brought Henry and Kegan back to my hotel room and gave the surprise I had been waiting to deliver for more than a month now.  During my last visit to Uganda, I had learned during a tour of the Makerere Medical School that Henry would need a laptop for the fall (assuming his admitted).  Fortunately, the Zacharia family (Michael and Debi are the proud parents of Tyler and Dana, whose separate weddings to Katie Black and Jason Hinojosa I had officiated over the past few years) had graciously donated some money to the work I am doing here in Uganda.  Providentially, their donation almost exactly equalled the cost of a new Dell laptop I was able to deliver to Henry on Saturday.

Ecstatic doesn’t even begin to describe his reaction.  And since Joseph will be studying computers in his secondary school, Joline and I decided he needed a laptop also.  Because their older brother Kegan runs a small business burning CDs and DVDs, he is sufficiently conversant with computers that he has promised to teach Henry and Joseph how to use them.  For a few hours on Saturday afternoon, Kegan booted up and formatted the computers for Henry’s and Joseph’s immediate use.

More tomorrow.

 

l

Henry with his new computer
 

Triskadecaphoria

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That might not even be a word, but it well describes my mood as I am borderline euphoric about my thirteenth trip to Uganda.  A little while ago, I landed at the Entebbe Airport with a group of American judges and lawyers to carry out a plan hatched this past August.

Each year, Uganda sends two of its judges for a week-long training program in mediation at Pepperdine Law School’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution.  The Straus Institute is world renowned and has been ranked first in the country for nine years in a row.  Judges and lawyers from across the county and around the world regularly descend upon Malibu for this intensive and valuable workshop.  During the training session in August, I spent some time with the two Ugandan judges who had made the journey.  That conversation led to a plan, which turned into a proposal, and is now embodied in a program.

Rather than bringing two Ugandan judges to be trained in Malibu, we have brought four trainers from Malibu to provide training in Uganda.  And rather than two Ugandans receiving training, that number has been multiplied . . . by fifty.

Mediation was first rolled out in Uganda in 2009 in the Commercial Division of the High Court under the able leadership of Justice Geoffrey Kiryabwire (fondly known as Justice K by his Pepperdine friends).  In fact, the first-ever court-annexed mediator for the country was Pepperdine Law graduate John Napier, who served as Pepperdine’s first Nootbaar Fellow – a one-year fellowship program.  Mediation in the Commercial Court has been so successful, it is being rolled out this month to the rest of the civil divisions (Land, Family, Civil) in the country.

And the centerpiece of that rollout is this week’s training session, which is a joint project of the Pepperdine’s Global Justice Program in the Nootbaar Institute and Pepperdine’s Straus Institute.  As the Global Justice Program’s Director, my role is primarily logistical and diplomatic – the actual training will be provided by Pepperdine Professor Stephanie Bell, Pepperdine Adjunct Professor Denise Madigan, and Judges Mitch Goldberg and Paul Beeman.  Pepperdine’s current Nootbaar Fellow, Susan Vincent, has been diligently working directly with the Ugandan Judiciary to ensure everything was arranged on the Ugandan side.

As we planned this project, we envisioned training forty judges and forty lawyers.  But when the program was announced, the interest was so strong, we agreed to expand it to fifty judges and fifty lawyers.  We are told that the lawyer slots were filled within a few hours of the announcement.

The Straus Institute agreed to put on this program for an amount of money that may or may not fully cover the actual expenses incurred by the team.  None of the presenters for this week-long training session are being paid for their time.  The standard price for this program is $5,000 per attendee.  I am proud to be a part of an institution that values the rule of law and its relationship with Uganda enough to invest in the country’s future in this important way.

While I won’t actually be actively involved in training the Ugandans, I intend to be quite busy during this eight-day trip.  I have lined up numerous meetings relating to ongoing projects I am involved in, and will be actively exploring additional projects, a few of which appear very promising.

I will also be connecting with Henry and Joseph as they prepare to begin their next educational chapters.  Henry and Joseph are Ugandan young men I met four years ago while they were imprisoned juveniles, trapped in a broken system.  More on that here.  Joseph recently received his Senior Four national exam scores, and will hopefully be starting Senior Five in just over a week.  He scored quite well, though not as well as he hoped or expected.  We are in the process of nailing down where he will complete his high school education.

Henry should be receiving his Senior Six national exam scores at some point in the next month or so, after which he is very much hoping to enroll in medical school in August.  Over the past six weeks (since I was last here in Uganda), Henry has received an up-close-and-personal view of the Ugandan medical system as he has tried to navigate through the frustrating and time-consuming process of getting his father treated for acute abdominal pain and yellowing eyes.  Initially, they waited in the hospital for eight days, just to get an MRI and CT scan.  A few weeks later, they received the results.  A few weeks later still, they had a chance to meet with a surgeon and have learned that a tumor in his bile duct requires immediate surgery.

 

Henry and Joseph’s Dad, David

Joline and I were able to borrow against the equity in our home to pay for the medical costs and I am hopeful the surgery will happen while I am here this next week.  Prayers are greatly appreciated as medical care in Uganda lacks the predictability and success rates we enjoy in the West.

On a brighter note, Justice K and his wonderful wife Winnie are expecting their third child to be born via C-Section on Tuesday of this week.

I remain hopeful that we will receive the ruling in Henry’s appeal in the near future – there is an outside chance it could happen this week.

My plan is to provide daily updates while I am in town.  Thanks for following along.

Constitutional Crisis at Judicial Conference

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Lake Victoria just after sunrise

In January of each year, the entire Ugandan Judiciary assembles at a Lake Victoria resort hotel for an full week of meetings and reports.  This includes about ten justices each from the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, about fifty High Court judges (trial level), and about thirty Registrars.  Also present are a few representatives of other law-based governmental and non-governmental organizations, including the Uganda Law Society.  This Annual Conference began on Monday with the President of Uganda showing up nearly four hours late in order to deliver the “opening” address.  The media reported Museveni as confrontational and somewhat dismissive.  At one point, he drew laughs of derision when he referred to former Chief Justice Benjamin Odoki as his “nominee” for the post of Chief Justice, which has been vacant since June of 2013 when Odoki reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy under Uganda’s Constitution.  Ironically, Odoki, himself was the primary drafter of Uganda’s Constitution.

Nonetheless, President Museveni reappointed Odoki to a two-year term as an “Acting” Justice on the Supreme Court, which is permitted by the Constitution, but then proceeded to further nominate him to fill the position of Chief Justice – a position for which he is ineligible due to his age – and over the firm objection of the Judicial Services Commission, the body tasked with forwarding judicial nomination recommendations to the President.  After President Museveni sent his nomination to Parliament for its approval, but prior to an up or down vote in Parliament, one of its members challenged the nomination’s constitutionality in the Constitutional Court, which is Uganda’s Court of Appeals.  The case was scheduled for argument before a panel of five appellate judges two weeks ago.  The advocate representing the objecting Member of Parliament is himself an aged-out Supreme Court Justice.  He first sought to disqualify two of the five judges, one on the grounds that she had previously ruled against Parliament on another controversial case (frivolous), and the other on account of his current multi-faceted role in the judiciary.

A brief bit of background is in order here.  In March of 2012, the Deputy Chief Justice, who heads the Court of Appeals, reached her mandatory retirement age.  Rather than appointing her successor then, President Museveni decided to wait, apparently because he knew the Chief Justice post would be vacant in June of 2013 with the retirement of Odoki, so the two top positions could be named together.  Consequently, the senior-most member of the Court of Appeals became the Acting Deputy Chief Justice.  In March of 2013, however, she died.  This elevated Justice Kavuma to the role of Acting Deputy Chief Justice, as he was the senior judge on the Court of Appeals.  Fast-forwarding to June of 2013, Chief Justice Odoki named Justice Kavuma Acting Chief Justice as his last act as retiring Chief Justice, or so it appeared.  This, of course, made Justice Kavuma the senior judge on the Court of Appeals, the Acting Deputy Chief Justice, and the Acting Chief Justice.

At the hearing two weeks ago, the lawyer representing the Member of Parliament challenged Justice Kavuma’s place on the appellate panel deciding the constitutionality of the re-appointment of retired Chief Justice Odoki on two somewhat inconsistent grounds.  The first was conflict of interest, alleging that he could not be impartial in deciding whether Odoki should take over the position Kavuma now occupies.  While a facially plausible argument, Kavuma has never been under consideration for the permanent Chief Justice position, so there really are no grounds for kicking him off the panel on this basis.

But the second challenge sent shock waves through the courtroom and spilled much ink onto the front pages of the local papers the next day.  The advocate forthrightly declared Acting Chief Justice Kavuma to be illegally holding that post.  He produced a copy of the letter from Chief Justice Odoki purportedly naming Justice Kavuma as Acting Chief Justice until such a time as the next Chief Justice would be appointed and confirmed.  So far, not a problem – everyone has that public document.  But no one had previously calculated the dates.

When reaching the retirement age, a judge has a three-month extension in which to complete written judgments and further wind up the judge’s work.  So three months after Chief Justice Odoki turned seventy, he automatically became a civilian.  Unfortunately, the letter from Odoki to Kavuma designating him Acting Chief Justice was dated three months and one day after he turned seventy.  No one had realized this until it became ground two for the motion to remove Justice Kavuma from the panel.

While this is a weak argument for removing Kavuma – it actually undercuts the conflict of interest argument if he is not actually the Acting CJ – its potential for destabilizing the entire judiciary cannot be overstated.  After briefly conferring, the five-judge panel denied the motion to dismiss the two judges, but granted the lawyer the rare right to immediately appeal this interim order directly to the Supreme Court before the Court of Appeals proceeding on the merits of the constitutional challenge of Odoki’s reappointment.  Odoki, of course, currently sits as an Acting Justice on the Supreme Court, so the constitutionality of his own reappointment is now coming before the court on which he sits.  In addition to potential chaos, this immediate appeal promises to inject many more months (perhaps years) of delay, meaning that the Ugandan Judiciary will be without a permanent leader for the foreseeable future.  It also means that the legitimate power of the Acting Chief Justice hangs under a cloud of uncertainty and skepticism.  Just how wide and deep that skepticism ran was anyone’s guess as the annual conference opened on Monday.

Late last week, one newspaper published rumors of a coming widespread boycott of the conference by the judges, and everyone wondered who would take the podium as the Chief Justice.  A collective sigh of relief was breathed when the conference opened without such a boycott and the Acting Chief Justice continued to assume and assert his leadership role, much to the consternation of the President, who pointedly warned the judiciary in his opening speech not to “provoke” him.  For now, this constitutional crisis seems to be bubbling just below the surface, though the cauldron continues to periodically spit.  On Thursday, the Principal Judge (third-ranking post) characterized the judiciary as “sheep without a shepherd” and the President of the Uganda Law Society referred to the situation as “the big elephant in the conference room.”

Shortly after the plea bargaining conference I was honored to keynote last Thursday, the lead prosecutor informed me that he had been asked to address the judiciary on day two (Tuesday) of the judicial conference on the subject of plea bargaining.  He had been allocated fifteen minutes to provide an overview and path forward for the plenary gathering.  Thursday’s conference had been sufficiently well received that he asked me to do an encore performance for the judiciary.  The problem is that my opening presentation went an hour on Thursday, so cutting it to fifteen minutes for Tuesday presented a challenge.

My portion was to be part of a three-presenter panel, the other two of which related to anti-corruption and sentencing guidelines.  Director Chibita’s introduction of me included telling the crowd about his trip to Malibu late last year to learn more about plea bargaining, and about me meeting Henry in prison, representing him in court, and sponsoring his education.  The latter point brought a vigorous show of appreciation from the judges.  But now I only had thirteen minutes.  In order to get through it all in the allotted time, I decided that not only would I need to whiz through several of the PowerPoint slides Susan and I had prepared, but that I needed to also skip most of the vowels in my speech.  At least that is how it felt.  It was a real high-speed chase, but I got out everything I wanted to say.

Following the third presenter on the panel – the Inspector General of Government – the Q and A/Comment session began in earnest.  Roughly half of the questions/comments related to plea bargaining, while the other half concerned the other topics.  After the allotted thirty minutes expired, the master of ceremonies for the day made an executive decision and cancelled the next one-hour session in favor of continued discussion, which occupied the next eighty minutes.  All of the feedback was positive toward the concept of reducing the substantial backlog in the criminal justice system through plea bargaining, though (as always) the devil will be in the details.  I am cautiously optimistic that things will begin picking up speed, though the transition period will take place over the span of years, rather than months.  Following the session, one of the three judges on the panel I appeared before in Henry’s case last March introduced himself to me.  We exchanged polite words, but I was unable to read anything into his demeanor regarding how he intended to rule and when.

In other news, our hopes of a reasonably quick diagnosis and treatment of Henry’s father at the Mulago hospital proved to be overly optimistic.  While he was admitted to the hospital late Tuesday morning, he wasn’t actually seen by a doctor at all on Tuesday, nor did he receive an ultra-sound or CT scan.  Given the uncertainty of the timing, Joseph took a bus home, but Henry stayed by his father’s side the entire day.

On Wednesday morning, I took a forty-minute flight to neighboring Rwanda to meet with the Chief Justice of the Rwandan Supreme Court.  For the last five years, two of our students have been spending their summer working for Justice Rugege, so it made sense for me to pop in for a visit while I was in town.  I enjoyed a lively discussion over lunch with this brilliant and wise jurist who studied law not only at Makerere in Uganda, but also earned Masters’ degrees in law at both Yale and Oxford.  He was teaching Constitutional Law in South Africa when the 1994 Rwandan genocide took place, and was summoned shortly thereafter to provide a stabilizing influence to the country as Deputy Chief Justice of Rwanda.

While we were eating at a hotel restaurant, he introduced me to the chief prosecutor for Rwanda, and we had a brief discussion about the potential adoption of plea bargaining in Rwanda.  Indeed, Chief Justice Rugege and I discussed numerous points of future collaboration/training that will be explored in the coming weeks.

After our lunch, I took a quick tour of the beautiful and clean capital city of Kigali and secured accommodations and a driver for our two students who will be spending eight weeks there this next summer.  The contrast between Kigali, Rwanda and Kampala, Uganda was sobering.  Following the 1994 genocide, the city and its infrastructure was rebuilt and order was restored.  The streets are clean and paved sans potholes, the motorcycle taxi drivers all wear helmets and numbered vests, and new construction abounds.  At the hostel where I secured housing for our students, I spent a few minutes talking to two young British women who have traveled the world with their jobs and they said unequivocally that Kigali was the safest city they had been in.

Throughout the day, I periodically checked in with Henry and learned that his father had finally been seen by a doctor.  The ultrasound revealed normal functioning of his pancreas, liver, and kidneys, though his gall bladder was inflamed.  While a follow-up CT scan had been performed, the results were not yet ready.

On Wednesday evening, I flew back to Kampala, then boarded a plane bound for Amsterdam, Detroit, and then LAX.  From takeoff in Kigali to landing in Los Angeles, the trip will take just over thirty-one hours.  As they say in the South, I am plum tuckered out and will be glad to be home with my family.

Thanks for reading along.

The rolling hills of Kigali, Rwanda

Makerere

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During the final 18 months of Henry’s nearly two-year detention in a juvenile prison in Uganda, he served as the “Katikiro” in the internal prison government.  Part of his responsibilities in this Prime Minister post included taking the juveniles who got sick to the local hospital.  It was there, watching the doctors treat the patients (often after excruciatingly long delays), that Henry decided he wanted to someday become a doctor.  After he was finally released, he enrolled in Bob Goff’s Restore Leadership Academy, where he excelled in the sciences.  For his final two years of secondary school, Henry transferred to the top science secondary school in the country.  He graduated in November of 2013 and is now awaiting his national exam results, hoping to score well enough to be admitted to medical school, which is a five-year university program following graduation from secondary school.  The top medical school in the country is at Makerere University in Kampala.

On Monday morning, Henry and I reported to Makerere Medical School for an appointment and tour that one of my judicial friends arranged.  We met with a lovely and kind administrator who connected us with a current medical student for an excellent and informative tour.  She answered every question Henry and I had, and even several we didn’t know we had.  Later that afternoon, we met with the Acting Dean of the Medical School to discuss Henry’s candidacy.  While the meeting was good and informative, it was clear when we left that so much is riding on his national exam scores.  As Henry is want to say, “we shall pray hard” for good results when they are released toward the end of February.

Between our two meetings at Makerere, we traveled to two secondary schools where Henry’s younger brother Joseph (two years behind in school) would like to complete his “A” levels – the final two years of secondary school.  His first choice is the school where Henry completed his “A” levels, so we ventured out to meet up with a physics teacher with whom I have become friendly and with the Head Teacher – the one making the final decisions.  Like Henry, Joseph’s educational opportunities will be largely determined by the results of the national exam he took after completing his “O” level education at Restore International.  Those results should be released in about two weeks.  We also visited another school that is his second choice, but it is a step below the school Henry attended.

We also had the chance to connect for lunch with a friend of mine from the court.  You gotta love the directness of Ugandans.  “Ahh, Jim!  You are fat!  What happened to you?”  Anyone reading this who can figure out an appropriate response to this should feel encouraged to send me an e-mail.

In Sarah’s defense, however, calling someone fat here is not as bad as in the States.  In some ways, it is akin to saying, “you have been eating well,” or “you have not been starving.”  The bright side is that I lost about ten pound in the month preceding my trip here, so she probably would have called me a hippo had I come a few weeks earlier.

Throughout the day, we received updates from Henry’s father as he made his way toward Kampala from Hoima.  As mentioned in yesterday’s post, he had been experiencing severe stomach pain and his eyes were quite yellow.  The doctor in Hoima was unable to diagnose the problem, so he suggested that Henry’s father journey to Mulago Hospital (depicted in Last King of Scotland) for a CT scan.

The kind administrator with whom we were meeting at Makerere on Monday morning was able to direct our paths so we knew where to take him.  As providence would have it, Henry’s father’s doctor was going to be at Mulago on Tuesday and promised to meet him there to brief the Mulogo doctor on the tests he had already performed.

So by late Monday evening, Henry’s father had arrived via bus and was staying with some relatives just outside of Kampala.  On Tuesday morning, I needed to head to Entebbe to speak on plea bargaining to the entire Ugandan Judiciary, so Henry would assume responsibility for getting his father admitted to Mulago and examined.

Before we went to bed on Monday night, we had a one-hour Skype with an eighth-grade class in Quincy, CA.  I got to know the teacher, Anna Shea, through some mutual friends.  She had been following this blog and knew all about Henry and his family.  After one thing led to another, she and her class are now reading the manuscript Henry and I are putting together about how meeting each other dramatically changed our respective lives.  Since I was going to be with Henry, we arranged to have a live Skype call with her students so they could put faces with names and stories.  Both sides of the call enjoyed the opportunity to share each other’s lives, even if only for an hour.

The next post will discuss the opportunity I had on Tuesday to participate in Uganda’s annual Judicial Conference and will provide an update on Henry’s father.

Back to Hoima

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On Sunday morning, I was up early and excited about my first time back to Hoima since we surprised Henry’s family with the delivery of nine cows, replacing those they lost while Henry, his brother, and their dad were in prison awaiting trial for a crime it was later proven they had nothing to do with.  One of the primary reasons I was excited to reunite with Henry’s family was finally getting to meet his little brother, who surprised everyone with his arrival just over one year ago.  After his birth, there was a minor crisis regarding his name – the family refused to name him, insisting that Joline and I do the honors.  Not wanting the boy to be left with only a symbol for a name (a la Prince), Joline and I ultimately chose to name him after a King.  He goes by Josiah, but his full name is James Josiah.

What I wasn’t looking forward to was the nearly four-hour drive on an undivided thin strip of asphalt that masquerades as a two-lane highway.  With scores of pedestrians, swarms of bicycles, herds of goats, and barreling semi-trucks, the ride is never, well, dull.  When I lived here in 2012, I guess I grew accustomed to the greatly diminished distance between and among cars and other moving objects.  On the bright side of things, I got an aerobic workout on the way because my (massive, rippling) muscles flexed every minute or two as my NASCAR-ain’t-got-nothing-on-me driver deftly maneuvered in and out of harm’s way like it was his job.  I guess it was.

We arrived just after noon and had a hug-filled reunion.  At least most of us did.  Josiah, who had just started walking, though fairly unsteadily, broke into a dead sprint in the other direction when he saw me.  While my baby-frightening cold sore (finally starting to abate) could have, in and of itself, done the trick, all agreed it was the entire package that made him shriek and wail like he had seen a ghost.  Indeed, he had.  I am the first mzungu (white person) Josiah has ever seen.  And it scared the living dung out of him for all but a few moments of the 90 minutes I was there.

My wonderful wife planned ahead and bought Josiah a Children’s Bible and inscribed a blessing inside.  Before I left home, she had wrapped it in birthday paper, another object Josiah had never seen.  During the brief moments while he tore it open and examined the contents, he forgot he hated me.

Josiah temporarily distracted by his Bible

A short while later, he vividly remembered.

Eager for his release

Before leaving Hoima, Henry and I revisited the location of the shallow grave in their garden formerly occupied by the families’ herdsman that catalyzed our unlikely friendship.  It reminded me just how creative God can be as he interweaves the tapestry of our lives with those near, and not so near, to us.

Henry, his younger brother Joseph, and I said our goodbyes and hopped into the car and headed back to Kampala.  But not before I learned that Henry’s father was experiencing what seemed to be some potentially serious health problems, likely emanating from his liver.  Fortunately, an appointment Henry and I had the next day proved to be divinely scheduled.

Back in Kampala, Henry and I took Joseph to his first-ever mall and showed him a plethora of modern appliances he had never seen before.  “What does this one do?” played on a seemingly never-ending loop.  We Skyped with Joline and the kids before turning in.

The day before, I had weaned myself off of ambien as I finally adjusted to the eleven-hour time difference.  But Joseph was fighting a losing battle with a deep chest cough that I knew would keep me up all night.  At least that is how I rationalized my resumption of my heaven-in-a-bottle (non)addiction.  Next thing I knew, it was Monday morning, which meant a day full of visitations to Henry’s and Joseph’s dream schools.

More on that tomorrow.

Reuniting

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Just under a year ago, Pepperdine hosted an international conference focusing on the ethics and advisability of Inter-Country Adoption (ICA).  This topic had hit my radar screen in late 2011, just before my family moved to Uganda in January of 2012 for six months.  A close friend introduced me to an American family who had been denied legal guardianship over an orphan girl badly in need of a family.  After meeting with the family and learning their plight, I became involved in the appeal in the case through consulting with the Ugandan attorney representing them.  This involvement, in turn, crossed my paths with a British man living in Uganda who, along with his lovely wife, poured their heart and soul into securing Ugandan families for Ugandan kids in orphanages, mostly through reuniting the kids with their extended families and economically empowering the families to take care of these kids.

While the appeal was ultimately successful, my numerous conversations with the American family, the Ugandan attorney, and the Brit opened my eyes to the deep complexity of ICA I had never realized lurked beneath the surface.  The intensity of commitment of the American families, usuaully driven by an abiding conviction that God was directing their efforts to provide a home to institutionalized kids, was humbling an inspirational.  No less humbling and inspirational, however, was the intense commitment, driven by an abiding, faith-filled conviction that the availability of ICA directly led to documentable horrible decisions by Ugandans, including the falsification of death certificates, the coercion of young mothers to abandon their babies to orphanages involved in ICA so the children could have a better (Western) life, and the outright sale of children to those who could get the kids adopted to Western families.

No one on either side of this heart-breaking debate seems to dispute that both really good and really bad things are happening in the ICA realm.  The quibble is with percentages of each outcome.  This debate led me to suggest and assist in organizing the ICA conference in February of 2012.  Among the dozens of participants in this conference were (i) the Ugandan attorney representing the American family in the appeal, and (ii) the Brit with whom I had become quite friendly.  Both stayed with us in Malibu during the conference.

On Friday, I had a chance to reunite with each of them, though separately.  I had breakfast with the Brit and his lovely wife and so admire the dedication they have to intra-country solutions to the orphan challenges faced in Uganda.  They receive intense and personal criticism from all quarters, some of whom see them as a roadblock to ICA, while others complain about their openness to ICA in appropriate cases.  Yet they are here working tirelessly, day and night, on behalf of the lonely children of Uganda.

My visit with the Ugandan attorney was mostly social, but he also offered some words of advice for me to pass along about a family’s situation I became aware of just recently.

I also had a chance to meet up with one of the judges who recently visited Pepperdine, who has recently been reassigned from the Anti-Corruption Division of the High Court to the Family Division.  Several of our students have interned for her in the past, and she expressed a desire to have a student intern with her at the Family court this summer.

Following my meeting with her, Susan Vincent (Pepperdine Nootbaar Fellow) and I met with representatives of the Uganda Christian Lawyers’ Fraternity, Uganda Christian University, and Aaron (Sixty Feet legal intern) to discuss the next iterations of J-FASTER – the juvenile justice program that is moving kids through the judicial system at much more palatable rates than in the recent past.  Pepperdine is blessed to work with such dedicated and competent partners in our quest to serve the imprisoned juveniles of Uganda.

On Friday evening, Susan, Aaron, and I had dinner to with two Americans working for the U.S. State Department.  One of them lives here in Uganda and spends his days training Ugandan police officers in investigative techniques, and the other oversees from Washington, D.C. numerous projects around the world designed to promote the rule of law.  I had met a couple times before with the one living in Uganda, and they were eager to receive an update on our work on juvenile justice and plea bargaining.  We also sketched out some tentative plans to work a little more collaboratively in the future.

I spent a good portion of Saturday with Sixty Feet folks.  As I have written about previously, Sixty Feet is an Atlanta-based non-profit doing transformative work on behalf of imprisoned juveniles and abandoned children in Uganda, providing medical aid, counseling, material needs, and whatever else is needed.  They also have generously funded the financial costs associated with J-FASTER.  Each time I meet with them, I learn of additional projects they have undertaken to improve the lives of these kids who are so needy in so many ways.  A team from North Dakota had just landed the night before and was gearing up to spend the week doing much-needed repairs and construction projects in the remand home and prison in the Kampala area.  It is inspiring to see working people dedicate their own hard-earned money and God-given talents half-way around the world to assist those in need.

Saturday evening was spent with my closest friend in Uganda, Justice K, and his family.  I learn so much about Ugandan culture and life from Justice K each time we are together.  He is great man among great men and women in Uganda’s judiciary and is an excellent liaison for the Pepperdine program.  We had the chance to dream bigger dreams about the assistance Pepperdine can provide to the judiciary in the short- and long-term future.

Justice K and his law professor wife, Winnie, are expecting #3 in just over a month
Justice K, Susan, and I at Justice K’s House

Sunday morning, I am heading north to spend a few hours with Henry and his family before returning to Kampala with Henry for a tour of Makerere Medical School and a meeting with admissions officials to discuss the possibility of Henry enrolling there in August.

Obliterating Protocol

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Though Uganda is still a “developing country” by comparative world standards, its protocols and formalities are quite complex and exacting.  There is a particularized and expected method and order of introductions, of seating arrangements (even when riding in a car), and a manner high-ranking officials should be addressed and greeted.  This can be a minefield for the uninitiated.  On Thursday, I lost both of my legs, one arm, and an eye when I executed a cannon-ball dive onto a protocol mine.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to those who know me well.  I can be as dense as a pressurized slab of granite.  Fortunately, I was given the chance to demonstrate the depth of my obliviousness on Thursday to a packed ballroom of judges and lawyers.  And boy did I deliver.  The center fielder didn’t even take a step back as he watched my home run ball exit the stadium over his head.

The morning had started off promising enough, though about four hours earlier than I was hoping.  I am playing a losing game of hide and seek with Mr. Sandman.  Since I was already up, I got in a mini-marathon on a treadmill in my hotel.  I was drenched in sweat and breathing like a pneumonia-stricken asthmatic with only one lung, but I soldiered on and completed the entire mile, shattering the ten-minute barrier like it was merely a suggestion.

On my way to the conference hotel for the plea bargaining presentation I was to make, I stopped off at the High Court and delivered some American chocolates to the Criminal Division staff.  I have worked hard to cultivate the Pavlovian response I trigger when I walk in to the Registry.  Professor Jim = sweets.  There are many ways to engender loyalty in those around you.  Strength of character, fulfillment of promises, magnetism of personality, chiseled physique, chocolate.  Only the latter travels well in a suitcase.

While at the Registry, I also met with the current Registrar – the person who schedules the court sessions (including for juveniles).  He has proven to be a reliable advocate for the kids, but I learned he is being transferred early next month to a different division.  Back to square one.  This is one of the most frustrating parts of operating within the judicial structure here.  Personnel, including judges, are often shifted from one division to another just as soon as they become settled and efficient in their responsibilities.

At the conference hotel, Susan Vincent (Pepperdine alumnus and Nootbaar Fellow here in Uganda for a year) and I had lunch with the DPP Director Chibita (lead prosecutor for the country) and Justice Mukasa (head of the Criminal Division of the High Court).

Wisely, Director Chibita scheduled the conference to kick off with a 12:30 lunch.  In Uganda, start times of conferences are too often seen as opening offers in an arrival-time negotiation process.  But if one is incentivized with a spectacular buffet to arrive on time . . . things are different.  As Dean Ken Starr used to say, “While it may be true that you can’t herd cats, you can move the food.”  So true.

Accordingly, by the actual start time of 2:00 p.m., all sixty attendees were in place in the ballroom.  All but one, that is.  Protocol dictated that a head table was placed in the front of the horseshoe-shaped seating configuration where protocol also dictated that Director Chibita, Principal Judge Bamwine (in charge of entire High Court), and I, the main presenter, would be seated.  Protocol further dictated that Director Chibita would welcome everyone and introduce the Principal Judge who, according to Protocol, would deliver an initial address and then welcome me to the podium.

Unfortunately, official business detained the Principal Judge back at the court, so at 2:00 p.m., we had a problem.  Director Chibita brings a trains-run-on-time breath of fresh air to his position, so he decided we should get started and that I would simply pause when the Principal Judge arrived.  Perfectly reasonable and sensible.  The problem is that this put the microphone in my hands when he walked in, which meant that I would need to observe the proper protocol in the transition to his opening speech.  The block of granite resting on my shoulders failed to register this as a potential problem.

Things kicked off with the microphone being passed from person to person around the room for individual introductions.  In the audience were about thirty seasoned prosecutors, ten High Court judges, several top officials in the Uganda Law Society (governing body for lawyers), and a smattering of other governmental officials and lawyers.  Following a warm introduction of me by Director Chibita (which briefly traced my history with the judiciary, including mentioning my appearance in the Ugandan court of appeals as an advocate in Henry’s case (more on that here)), I was off and running.  Susan Vincent and I had been allotted two hours, the first of which was to be a presentation on the nature and benefits of plea bargaining in the criminal justice realm, and the second was slated for a guided discussion of the topic.

Untethered to the podium

 

With Director Chibita at the head table

I began by sharing my love for Uganda and its culture, and by tracing the development and depth of the relationship between Pepperdine and the Judiciary.  About halfway through this opening ten-minute segment, I spied with my little eye the Principal Judge enter the back of the room with his bodyguard.  Now, he has literally just stepped into a crowded ballroom not knowing exactly who was there, not knowing what protocols had already been observed, not knowing where we were in the scheduled agenda, and not knowing what had been decided with respect to when he would present his opening address.  With all the sense of a developmentally delayed toddler, I simply finished my sentence and declared, “looks like the guest of honor has arrived.  Welcome Principal Judge Bamwine” and then proceeded to offer him the microphone.

Even as I write this I am shaking my head.  What was I thinking?  Justice Bamwine would have been well within his rights to take the microphone and club me with it like I was the proverbial baby seal.  (Wait, was that not politically correct?)  Instead, he just raised his eyebrows and gave me an ever-so-slight shake of the head.  Fortunately, Director Chibita came to the rescue and gently suggested that I finish my overview of the relationship between Pepperdine and the Judiciary before I formally introduced Justice Bamwine.  Hmm, good idea.  Why didn’t I think of that?

From that point (just south of the Mariana Trench), things took a decided turn for the better.  I recovered from my protocol obliteration and even managed to improv a reasonably good introduction of the Principal Judge, which included a PowerPoint slide picturing him at my house taken a couple years back.  By the time he took the stage, he had been briefed by Director Chibita on where things stood and who was in the room (important, because protocol demands welcoming them in the proper order and with proper titles).

After his speech about the judiciary’s commitment to adopting plea bargaining, he kindly welcomed me back to the podium.  We then transitioned to Susan’s portion of the presentation, during which she gave an excellent overview of the nature and prevalence of plea bargaining around the world, including its obvious benefits.  I then received back the microphone, but promptly ditched it.  I am used to speaking to large crowds (of students) in larger rooms without a microphone, and they confirmed they could hear me just fine.  Though I didn’t seek confirmation, I am confident they could all also see what appeared to be a small animal burrowing into my lower lip.  As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am nursing a baby-frightening cold sore to adulthood at just the right time to draw attention away from the substance of my talk.

Fortunately, the rest of the presentation went entirely according to plan.  The audience was engaged and embraced the ideas we conveyed.  The question and answer session was vibrant and probing, full of energy and enthusiasm to take this important step in the delivery of justice to the incarcerated in Uganda.  Director Chibita closed the gathering with a rousing and persuasive call to action.  It was all smiles when the curtain fell.

Afterward, they presented me with a beautiful framed painting entitled “The Pearl of Africa,” named after the moniker Winston Churchill bestowed on this majestic country.

Before I had begun my speech, I had noticed a familiar face in the crowd.  It took me a moment to place it, but when I did, the memories flooded back to last March when I argued Henry’s case in the court of appeals.  In the audience was the prosecutor against whom I had argued the case.  She had done an excellent job, but we really hadn’t had the opportunity to talk either before or after the argument.  So I tracked her down after the conference and discovered how delightful and kind she is.  We had a wonderful chat about plea bargaining and about Henry’s appeal.  Incidentally, we are still awaiting the ruling.  She shared with me her prediction on the eventual outcome of the appeal, but that moment will remain private.

I fought hard to stay awake until 10:00 p.m. so I could get a normal night of sleep, but it wasn’t to be.  3:20 a.m. beckoned to me like we had a long-scheduled appointment.

Friday is packed with meetings with old and new friends, both Ugandan and American.  More tomorrow.  Thanks for following along.

Getting Revenge in Uganda

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In Uganda, when someone extends to you warm hospitality, you are obliged to “get revenge” by reciprocating.  During the late October visit of six members of the Ugandan Judiciary to Pepperdine, they spoke often of “getting revenge” when I returned to Uganda.  Over the next seven days that I will be here in Uganda, I look forward to reconnecting with old and new friends.

October’s visit included the Acting Chief Justice of Uganda, the Director of Public Prosecutions (head prosecutor for the country), and several other judicial leaders.  Over the course of their jam-packed week, they met with professors, federal and state judges (both trial and appellate), federal and state prosecutors, the FBI, the LAPD, and lots and lots of students.  Highlights included insightful visits with Los Angeles District Attorney Lacy and US Attorney Birotte.

Group photo with LA DA Jackie Lacey
Conferring with US Attorney Andre Birotte

The judges capped off their intensive week of plea bargaining study with a trip to Disneyland and the celebration of Herb Nootbaar’s 105th birthday party.  Herb is the benefactor for the Nootbaar Institute for Law, Religion, and Ethics under which our Global Justice Program operates.

Following this visit, DPP Director Chibita invited me to come and give a talk to his deputies and others about the implementation/expansion of plea bargaining into the adult realm in Uganda, following on the heels of the successful roll out in the juvenile realm while I was living in Uganda in 2012.  That presentation takes place later today (Thursday), and should involve a vibrant and productive discussion.  They truly want to deliver top-quality justice to the imprisoned and it is an honor to be asked to offer them encouragement.

As usual, the flight over was exhausting, especially since the night before was so short.  For the second time in my twelve trips to Uganda, my recalcitrant computer decided to pin the needle on my blood pressure the day before I boarded the plane.  On Sunday, I acquired some sort of computer virus immediately after visiting a Uganda news site.  This left me playing a losing game of whack-a-mole with my computer screen.  Every few seconds, my virus software would tell me that it detected an intruder.  The software then sheepishly confessed its impotence to repel the threat.  Then, ten seconds later, the software would heroically proclaim it had cleaned my computer of the virus.  Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

In response to my pleas for help, the Pepperdine IT guys rallied in support, configuring a replacement laptop for me late into the wee hours of Monday morning while I sat on hold with the Dell support line for three and half hours before finally giving up.  On the plus side, I learned a few new catchy (East) Indian songs Dell was kind enough to loop for me while I waited.   On the minus side, we only had time to transfer a small portion of my computer files to the new laptop before I boarded the plane, and there was no extra battery for this new computer, drastically limiting my productivity on the long flights.

My itinerary took me through Amsterdam again, but with only a one-hour layover, I didn’t have a chance to re-charge my battery.  I prayed to the baggage gods that my luggage would make the transition.  Fortunately, the real God took it upon himself to intercept – and grant – my prayer request.  I am now 8 for 12 in the baggage-arrival-with-me department on my trips to Uganda.

I made it to my hotel just before midnight, gobbled a handful of ambien (just kidding mom, I only took the recommended dose (at least as far as you know)), and tried to get adjusted to the eleven-hour time difference.  Didn’t work.  At 4:50 a.m. Wednesday morning, I was wide awake.

Wednesday was a day of meetings and preparation for Thursday’s presentation.  Along the way, I made sure to visit the two malls about which multiple terrorist warnings were issued late last year following the massacre in Kenya.  This was not intentional, but necessary.  Private security was in full force, though it only took my usual smart-aleck comment while in the passenger seat of a taxi to get us waved through.  The security guard, however, got her revenge when she noticed the cold sore I am carefully incubating on my lower lip.

Me: No weapons today, ma’am.  And we did not bring any bombs either.

Guard: (Smiling) That is good, sir.  What happened to your mouth?  Did you try to eat your lip while chewing your food?

Good thing I learned the Luganda translation of the B-word while I was living here.  I let her have it.  That is, if she can read minds.  I suspect she can’t because she allowed us to pass.

While at the mall, I had a chance to get my internet stick (wireless internet via the cell phone lines) connected to the replacement laptop, and had coffee (diet coke) with an American who is encountering some difficulty in a worthy project she is trying to accomplish here in Uganda.  She and her family are an inspiration – following all of the rules and trusting that God’s plans are better than their own.  I offered her some encouragement and shared with her some of my experiences, but I fear my contribution to her cause will be limited to prayers on her family’s behalf.

Wednesday night’s sleep was rather like trying to do a layup over LaBron James.   He knocked my stuff into the bleachers.  I went to bed at 11:00 p.m. and was wide awake at 2:50 a.m.  There is something about Africa and sleep that eludes me.

This next week holds the promise of more progress on lots of fronts.  I will endeavor to provide daily updates, and will try to keep them reasonably brief and informative, sprinkled with some humor, if possible.