Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in June 2012 undergraduate Shea Houlihan interviewed Fr. Tony Wach, S.J., a Jesuit originally from the Wisconsin Province who is the founder and project director of OCER Campion College and has lived in Uganda since 1991. In this interview, Fr. Wach discusses his personal background, the history of Jesuit involvement in Uganda, and how OCER got started.

How did you first join the Society of Jesus? Please describe your personal history while being in the order.

I was the oldest child from a strong Catholic family. I went to Campion Jesuit High School in the late 1950s. I was thinking about being a priest and then I met the Jesuits. I really liked the idea of community, and they worked in schools. I didn’t have a big desire to be a parish priest. So I joined the Jesuits in 1960.

I did 20 years from 1972 to 1991 at Creighton Prep, a Jesuit high school in Nebraska. I ended up being there about 18 years. A couple years earlier as a scholastic, I did a lot of social justice stuff there besides teaching. That’s when we started a lot of courses in these Jesuit schools—to get more explicit about the poor, minorities, education for justice (not just education for upward mobility). That high school [Creighton Prep] started 130 years ago, and it started for immigrant kids. There wasn’t even tuition for the first 40 years. Now it has a lot of middle-class and wealthy kids.

I taught literature and stuff. I grew up in the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, so I was already bringing in social justice into my teaching. After Vatican II, we taught a lot of stuff on the vocation of laypeople and the Church in the modern world. We were convinced you had to get kids out to help disadvantaged people. All of us were concerned about getting more minority students in our school—we wanted to become more proactive.

I was named the superior [at Creighton Prep] in the late 1970s, so I had a lot better place to advocate this sort of thing. When I finished as superior in 1984 and 1985, I took a sabbatical—did some stuff with minority issues in St Louis and so forth. I came back and we started a formal minority program that I headed. We were trying to find good kids from the African-American (AA) community, and we were trying to fundraise. I helped attract two excellent AA teachers. I did that for six years. I gave a lot of retreats and counseling, but I was also working a lot with the kids and board.

How did you come to Uganda?

One of our priests who is a good friend of mine was taken from our school and sent here to start this mission [in Uganda] in 1987. Africa was new on our horizon; Korea had always been our home. The mission here was only intended to be five to six years, and everyone spoke English.

I asked to come here in 1989 to visit my friend for seven weeks in the summer. I didn’t have any intention of staying. But Xavier House [a Jesuit house in Kampala] had just been built, and I saw that I could survive here. When I went back to Omaha, I couldn’t forget this experience, especially when I was teaching issues on social justice. I was 46, and I had taught there for 18 years. I am getting tired of teaching high school kids. So when the Province of East Africa started looking for volunteers, I was sent here in 1991. I never missed the high school or the United States.

I was here at Xavier House from 1991 until 2010, almost 18 years. Here I did a lot of different jobs. We were mostly expatriates from different provinces. One of our works, especially those from the United States, was to help Jesuits get established here. I did a lot of workshops for religious formation. There were a lot of Ugandan nuns, brothers, seminarians, and priests that I helped train. There was a lot of faith, but there wasn’t much opportunity for formation and education. We also started an alcohol treatment center. And I got the vocations director job.

After I had been here for three years, I was just trying to understand Uganda and to see what I could do. After three years, some opportunities came up. I was one of the leaders to get more serious commitment to social justice, especially among the religious. I was chairperson of the Association of Religious of Uganda. We were trying to educate the religious that being Christian is more than going to Mass and saying the rosary. It also means taking care of widows, voting better, fighting corruption, educating people. There was a lot of apathy here, mainly because you would be killed if you opened your mouth. We had all kinds of refugees and poor people showing up. In 1996 I was asked to be superior again for Uganda and did that for seven years. I got out of that for three years, and then I was made superior again for four years. Meanwhile, we have more and more young African Jesuits getting higher in formation and getting involved.

Along the way, I helped found the John Paul II Justice and Peace Center. We have to reach more than just the nuns and brothers. John Paul II had just died, and in remembering him, few had listened to his teaching on social strategies. We wanted it to be a Catholic center, even though we serve other people and come from different orders. It’s not a Jesuit institution. We found other good people and we animated a lot of activity. The JP Centre is a little more explicitly religious than some of our other organizations. For example, the Serenity Center is a Catholic alcoholic treatment center but cares for people of other faiths.

What does being a Jesuit mean?

I became a Jesuit—I mean I was from strong Catholic family, went to Jesuit high school. I felt mysteriously that God was calling me, and I tried to delay, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. If God is the most important reality, then that could be one of the best things I could do with my life. Someone has to make it a full-time job to remind others why we were born and that we will meet our maker.

As the years went on, I was already interested in social justice. In St. Louis, at university, we would tutor young black kids and work in the slums. Many of our peers were out marching. When I got closer to ordination, I had to think a lot about this. I wasn’t doing anything for God; God had been working for and through me since before I was born. The real thing was to make God’s love known—not out of obligation but out of gratitude. I wanted to be a Christ-like person.

A lot of men come here and want to serve, which is great. It’s great to have concern for justice and service, but what has grown for me is that we are called to be companions for Christ. More and more being a Jesuit is about trying to be a very good friend of Jesus. I used to teach this: the Church is the friends of Jesus, and the friends try to act like him. You pay attention to what he did and said: he went out to the unclean, the prostitutes, all the sinners. He is always smashing the religious people—the scribes, the Pharisees, etc.—for laying burdens on God’s people and for their hypocrisy.

I always make clear the motive for me is Christ. Even if you don’t believe, the motive is the dignity of human beings. There is no peace without justice, unless people feel like they have some basic justice.

What is the history of the Jesuits in Uganda?

They first sent Jesuits here in 1969, under Father General Pedro Arrupe. The Uganda martyrs had just been sainted in 1964. Pope Paul VI came to Uganda in 1969 and said, “Africans, it's time you be missionaries to yourselves.” His message was, this is a very Catholic country—you can’t depend on foreigners.

Meanwhile, the father general of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe, was new. Uganda was a very Catholic country—it was ripe for vocations to the missionary and religious life. Our question was, how will they be missionaries to themselves if we don’t send them missionaries to teach? So we came in 1969. Jesuits mainly taught in seminary high schools or gave retreats. We didn’t have many Jesuits in 1970s because Idi Amin [third president of Uganda and military dictator, 1971-1979] came to power—we sent older guys here and told them to keep their heads down.

In 1987, the country looked like it was ready for peace. The Eastern Africa Province had just formed, and there was interest in establishing Jesuit presence. We were interested in building a mission. Eventually, the Eastern Africa Province was twinned with the Wisconsin Province back in the United States. The idea was we [from the Wisconsin Province] would be here for a few years for specific jobs and then go back home to educate more people in schools and communities. Most guys were only here for a few years.

What have you learned about best practices in education?

In Uganda, there is more and more self-criticism by the public and columnists in the newspapers. A lot of education is the British system, an exam-oriented culture. What gets rewarded is the high marks on the national exams. Teachers [who] are rewarded are those with the highest performing students; [they] give awards for promptness, best example, etc., most inspiring. We want to change that attitude. Later we want to judge our graduates not on how much money they make, but how they are as human beings. We’re trying to foster the idea of service.

Another challenge is that the national curriculum is so packed that you have to fight to find time for extracurricular activities. Last year, S1 students took seven subjects, and the school offered 14, including agriculture and religious education. But I believe that students should get involved. You have to make them think for themselves. Also, you can’t just talk about service—they need to experience it for themselves by getting out there and working.

What is the role of education in peacebuilding and reconstruction?

Education is meant to develop people’s brains and the world, and to learn how to learn. In Uganda, it’s all about learning by rote memory. Part of the reason for it is because this is an oral culture, not a reading culture. But education is supposed to make humans become more humane. We are meant to ask, why are we here? It’s about more than just making money, things like that.

Of course we want to develop basic skills and knowledge, teach them where to find stuff, prepare them for university. We want to get their imagination to be more involved. For that reason, we try to build a beautiful campus on beautiful land. We want to develop the faith of the Catholic students and those interested in becoming Catholic. Our motto is, “Learning, Loving, Serving.” It’s not just head knowledge—we also want them to have affection for God’s creation. We want to develop community leaders with integrity.

Education will help undergird stability. Everything is developing now—more and more people are moving [into northern Uganda]. Now that there is peace, a lot of people working that is bringing some income, and we have a school. We want to plant seeds. There’s a Ugandan tradition where if you go to school, you don’t get your hands dirty. All the kids take agriculture—we’re trying to foster pride. We want them to get their hands dirty—work for their food, work to maintain equipment and buildings. By getting the students to help, and by passing on knowledge to them, education and government can spread out from there.

What is OCER’s history?

In the early 1990s, I had been working with younger African brothers. All those years people were saying we need an institution, but we didn’t have enough people. We thought about building a parish, but none of us were prepared to be a parish priest.

We were getting a lot of young African Jesuits going through formation. They were long-sighted and wanted institutions. It really started evolving by early 2000s. The top priority of young Africans was education—they thought that would be the best contribution by the Jesuits. It wasn’t enough saying, “I’m interested in service.” It’s about Jesus and serving in his spirit—teaching in the way he taught.

I was fine with the idea of a high school, because I thought it was a good idea and I saw it was a high priority for young Africans. In a school, you have captive audience for Christianity, and you can share human knowledge so students have some impact. The next question was, where are we going to do it? We had a lot of options. As time went on, it was clear to me that we have to go to the north when it’s safe. The need was the greatest in the north, coming out of 20 years of war. There are very few options for good schools.

I was involved because I was superior in Kampala. So I went to a meeting in Nairobi in 2005. The new provincial was interested in starting a lot of stuff—schools in Tanzania, Mombasa, etc. I got worked up, stood up, and said, “What about Uganda?” We needed something here—especially for the north, where the need is greatest. The next morning, the new provincial tells me to start looking for land in Gulu. I was willing to get involved because I had the experience of an excellent Jesuit school. Very few of the current African Jesuits have gone to a Jesuit high school. I did a lot of groundwork and consulted a lot of people.

We next approached the archbishop in Gulu. He was very active for peace and had made that war known in the United States and Europe. I had lobbied [the Jesuit Refugee Service, JRS] to start some projects with IDPs [internally displaced people] up there. We got on the ground with JRS laypeople. Then we started talking about the school. Father Jim Strzok [president of the Building Committee for the Eastern Africa Province] and I went to Gulu. We thought we needed about 100 acres of land. The provincial said we would not buy the land—if the archdiocese wants it, the diocese had to get us land. The archbishop sent a few people looking for land. We ended up on the east side of town, in part because they needed a parish and there was a university.

In early 2006, Jim and I were up there. A lot of new politicians were elected into government who were mostly Catholic and mostly anti-Museveni [the president of Uganda]. They wanted to meet a lot of religious leaders, and we were invited to the meeting. We listed to them, and then we were introduced. Afterwards, a member of Parliament came over and shared that he had an idea for a school too. Two weeks later he telephones from Parliament and says he found some land. We went up to Gulu with him, and he introduced us to a family who was interested in giving us the land for a school. At that time, it was just 35 acres. Within a few weeks, we hired the family to work with us, and after talking with them, we ended up with 98.5 acres.

What do you do for fundraising?

The office of the Wisconsin Province sends out fundraising flyers and such. Our main target group is the alumni from the Campion Jesuit High School in Wisconsin. Me and Father Jim graduated from there, and we have an active alumni group. They closed the school in the 1970s because enrollment had gone down, other boarding schools had grown up, and vocations had gone down. A lot of Campion graduates were really angry. Building on that passion, we contacted a lot of them and told them our idea was to build a new Campion high school in Uganda.

The economic crisis hit when I was home fundraising. So I said we are going to do this incrementally. We started off as a day school because we couldn’t get the money for boarding. We build the girls’ dormitory, for both sexes, and now we are building the boys’ dormitory. We adapt. The original group was 35 students from the local area. Now we are up to 240 students.

Overall we’ve received or been promised 3 to 3.5 million dollars. Some of it is from a USAID grant for education that incorporates American values in some way, 1 million is from an anonymous alumnus from the original Campion high school, and other significant contributions have come from other groups and individuals.

What are the current and future challenges you face?

It costs a lot to ship building materials to northern Uganda. The prices of concrete and steel have gone way up—a year ago the price of inflation on construction was 30 percent. But overall, I am trying to build people, not buildings. I am committed that we should have poor kids who are bright and wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity. I am always beating the bushes for kids; I ask local priests and nuns and other people to keep an eye out. I steer quite a bit of money to these kids, trying to get people to sponsor kids. The challenge is to get the right culture at OCER—we’re trying to get the right standards and tradition, something that will last 100 years.