By Peggy Noll
What do a Ugandan Honors College student in her first year at Uganda Christian University (UCU) and a retired American English teacher and former missionary have in common?
More than you might imagine at first glance, as Christy Asiimwe and I are discovering in our new roles as mentor and mentee, through a program started early in 2021 through the Honors College at UCU.
In one of our virtual monthly meetings, I told Christy that I always learned more as a teacher than I did as a student, by way of affirming she had made a good choice to work as a teaching assistant at her father’s school during her off-semester. I think the same might be true now, where I, as the mentor, may benefit more than Christy, the one being mentored!
After three or four virtual conferences of about an hour each and intermittent emails, I have already been encouraged in at least three areas of mutual interest.
First, in our initial encounter on zoom, it was Christy who suggested that since we did not know one another, we might start by giving our testimonies. As my husband and I have prayed over the years for UCU to be a genuinely Christian university and not Christian in name only, I was thrilled that over 10 years after our departure, I would meet a student serious about her faith as well as her education.
Again, at my request, Christy sent me a copy of the devotion she had written for her students based on John 15:9-17, “Why do you think God created man? To love Him and to be loved by Him.”
Next, we were able to meet online by zoom or Google Meeting only because Christy, not I, had the skills to set up the meeting. I told her that when we arrived in Mukono in 2000, there were only two computers on campus, both dial-up, one in the VC’s office and the other in the library. Just 20 years later, she as a first-year student has computer access and skills we could not have imagined then.
In yet a third area of overlapping interests, Christy’s long-term goals include working in education, possibly curriculum development, and becoming a servant leader in that sphere. The week before the conversation where she shared these goals, our son Peter, who heads an NGO that runs a hospital for the poor in Oaxaca, Mexico, had sent me online a recent draft of his newsletter to proofread, in which an interview he had organized and written up was titled, “Servant Leadership with Friar Carlos Eduardo.”
I challenged Christy to think about how she would define “servant leadership” and forwarded the interview to her as an example of someone in faraway southern Mexico with a desire similar to her own to follow Christ as a servant leader.
At my request, Christy sent me the link to ACE, the Christian curriculum used by her father’s teaching center outside Kampala, where she is currently helping him. In our conversation about the books she was reading with her students, she mentioned several titles by the English author Patricia St. John. Again, I had some background knowledge of the author I could share with her. St. John was a long-term missionary in North Africa. She was also invited to visit Rwanda and write an account of the East African Revival, which she titled Breath of Life. I have a copy here on my shelf in Pennsylvania, with an Introduction written by the Rev. Festo Kivingere! In a timely coincidence, I was able to send Christy a book I thought she would enjoy, the autobiography of the same author titled An Ordinary Woman with Extraordinary Faith.
Many, many years ago, my father, who spent most of his career working as a lawyer for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., was invited to leave his post to teach at a law school which he chose to do because, as he explained to me then, he had learned a lot in the practice of law that he would like to pass on to young people at the start of their careers.
Being a mentor for Christy brought that conversation back to my mind. I feel I learned a lot teaching English language and literature at a community college in the U.S. and, added to the privilege of living and teaching at UCU for 10 years, I now might be able to pass on some small bit of what I have learned to the next generation of students at the University still so close to our hearts. In the process of being a mentor, I am being blessed by hearing about Christy’s hopes and plans for her future.
If you are reading this article and are asked to be a mentor, I would urge you to consider saying “Yes,” and I predict you will be the biggest benefactor in the relationship!
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