Week II • Saturday
East Africa
Week II • Saturday
Voices from the Landscape
In East Africa, the story was told of an American doctor who has given twenty-five years of his life to a displaced forest-dwelling community. Removed from their ancestral land to make space for wildlife conservation and tourism, the people found themselves on territory where the animals consumed any crops they planted. Their distance from political power left them voiceless; their lack of access to education kept them vulnerable.
But the doctor refused to accept this as the end of their story. Through persistent advocacy, begging support wherever he could find it, he established a hospital, a primary school, and is now raising a university. He invests not only in infrastructure but in people — sponsoring young leaders through Masters and PhD programmes so that hope may grow from within the community itself.
When we spoke, what struck me most was his joy. I asked how he sustained it. He told me of the day he was beaten, robbed, and left for dead in a ditch in Kampala. “But I lived,” he said. “Every day since has been more joyful than that experience.”
Their language has no future tense – only the present. And yet he described them as hopeful people: not because they imagine a distant improvement, but because they choose to live hopefully each day.
His witness reminded me of Francis, who called it perfect joy to be rejected and mistreated for Christ’s sake, and still choose love. Hope, in this African landscape, is not a distant promise. It is a daily practice.
wonderings
- I wonder how hope might look if it became a daily practice rather than a distant expectation.
- I wonder where God is inviting me to stand in solidarity with those whose stories are fragile or unheard.
- I wonder how Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – might reshape my understanding of Christian joy.
Reflection
African theologians help us hear this story with deeper resonance. Laurenti Magesa teaches that African morality is life-centred: anything that nurtures life is holy; anything that diminishes it is sin. In the missionary’s work we see this life-centred ethic embodied – healing, educating, empowering, restoring dignity. His joy is not triumph but participation in the flow of life God intends.
Mercy Amba Oduyoye reminds us through Ubuntu that “no one can be whole alone.” The suffering of this displaced community is not theirs alone; it belongs to the whole human family. In choosing to remain with them, the doctor embodies an Ubuntu-shaped discipleship – not charity from above, but shared humanity from within.
John Mbiti famously stated, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” Christian hope, in this light, becomes communal rather than individualistic. To bring hope to another is also to receive hope; to heal another is to be healed.
This story reveals not a God who intervenes from a distance, but a God who works through human solidarity: God with us. Grace and love is not a supernatural interruption but the holy depth of human compassion.
Franciscan theology aligns closely with this African vision. Francis saw joy in humiliation not because suffering is good, but because love endures in these moments – restoring communion where it has been broken.
The African community who lives without a future tense teaches us something profoundly Christian: hope need not be postponed. It can be lived in the present, practised in each act of justice, breathed in each moment of courage. Hope is a way of being now.
prayer
God of life and communal hope,
teach us to live hopefully today.
Where the world is wounded,
make us instruments of healing;
where joy is fragile,
make us companions of courage;
and where belonging is broken,
restore us in the spirit of Ubuntu. Amen.
bible reading
John 4:1–26 :
The Samaritan Woman at the Well
The meeting at the well between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a profound moment of truth-telling and reconciliation.
In the book No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Desmond Tutu insists that truth must precede reconciliation. Jesus does not avoid the woman’s history; he names it with compassion rather than condemnation: “You have had five husbands…” This is truth spoken in love. It is a recognition that healing requires honesty. For Tutu, this encounter models the deep spiritual process at the heart of restorative justice: not denial or forgetting, but the courage to face what is broken so that forgiveness can begin to flow.
This bible story also highlight the crossing of boundaries. Jesus, a Jewish man, initiates conversation with a Samaritan woman – someone doubly marginalised by ethnicity and gender. In that moment, exclusion is undone. For Tutu, who lived his ministry in a society fractured by apartheid, this is what divine grace looks like: the dismantling of the walls that divide human beings, the discovery that “our humanity is bound up together.” The well in this account becomes a sign of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – as Jesus reveals that living water is offered to all, not through privilege but through presence.
Tutu’s theology is always rooted in joy after lament. He would have seen the Samaritan woman’s transformation – leaving her jar of water at the well in order to tell her community- as the fruit of forgiveness: shame turned to testimony, isolation turned to belonging. It was the same movement that Tutu witnessed again and again in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when victims and perpetrators alike found freedom through truth and mercy.
In this season of Lent, the story reminds us that repentance is not about self-condemnation but about coming to the well, letting ourselves be seen, and discovering that grace runs deeper than shame.
reflective action
Choose one small act today that nurtures life – an email of encouragement, a donation, a forgiveness offered, a conversation shared with someone overlooked.
Let your action be your prayer: a way of living hopefully in the present, in solidarity with those who hope simply by surviving.
journalling prompt
Imagine yourself sitting with this displaced community beside their developing university –
feel the warmth of the sun, hear the voices of children learning, sense the resilience in the air.
What does hope look like there?
What part of your own life feels connected to their story?
Write or sketch what rises within you – a word, an image, a prayer – allowing your imagination to inhabit their hopeful present.
Or
Draw or sketch your own “well” – a simple circle, a stone outline, even a doorway.
Inside the well, write the truths you feel ready to acknowledge before God: emotions, memories, fears, or hopes you normally keep hidden.
Around the outside of the well, write or draw the “living water” you long for – healing, courage, reconciliation, companionship, or clarity.
Or
Using colour or texture (pens, pastels, watercolours, collage), show the movement from dryness to living water.
This can be abstract. Let the colours represent the journey from shame to joy, or from isolation to belonging.
Allow the page to become a prayer in shape and colour, not only words.
