Facing the challenges of Bible work
in Uganda

KAMPALA, Uganda — How do you fund the work of the Bible Society in a country where most people are poor and unemployment is high? How do you keep prices low as production costs rise? And how do you deliver Scriptures in a country where all but the main roads are varying grades of dirt?

Bible Society of Uganda warehouse worker Joseph Sauli helps load the delivery truck that will take the Scriptures to the country’s remote villages and market places. Kampala, Uganda. Photo: UBS/Larry Jerden (UGA02DJ-140.JPG)

These and other challenges form the daily work of the staff and volunteers of the Bible Society of Uganda. And they are responding to them with some success.

Local fundraising is a small but growing part of a 650 million Shilling (US$325,000) income, says Simon Peter Mukhama, the Bible Society’s Public Relations Officer who handles both church relations and fundraising. He says that fundraising produces about five per cent of the annual income. He and his assistant, Chris Lumu, are always trying to increase this in new and innovative ways.

Staying in touch with the Society’s 600 members can be difficult, however.
“Communication has always been a challenge,” Mr Mukhama explains. “We send things out by post, but sometimes members move house but don’t leave a forwarding address. So we rely on telephone calls quite a bit. You see many people on the street use mobile phones, and that is good for us, because we can reach them with both text messages and direct calls.”

Good links

The Society also finds schools an excellent arena for raising awareness of and support for its work. Over the last few years it has established good links with a number of schools, and has had an enthusiastic response from students inspired by presentations about the scope of Bible work in Uganda and around the world. Some of them have even expressed an interest in becoming involved in Bible work as a career.

To keep this link with school children, the Society holds an annual concert at which school choirs perform. The event attracts about 200 people who are encouraged to support the work of the Bible Society.

But raising funds in Uganda, where many people are unemployed and have little disposable income, is not easy.

“When we do promotion in churches, maybe 100 people will express willingness to support the Bible Society but after we leave, perhaps only about 20 will fulfil their pledges,” Mr Mukhama says. “People are sincere about wanting to donate money, but their economic situation may be difficult. We have to spend a lot of time and money in follow-up, and that reduces our net income.”

An uncomfortable reality is that because of travel costs and the concentration of capital, most of the support for the Bible Society is centred in Kampala. To address this situation, the Society has begun to establish regional branches, starting with one in Fort Portal in the west and one in Namutamba, 50 miles outside Kampala.

Blanket the country

“Peter and Chris want to blanket the country with branches!” explains Ezra Ndagije, the Society’s Marketing and Program Manager. “Whenever we get 10 members in an area, we want to form a branch. They will form a governing committee and promote the Bible Society on a local level. They will also communicate to us about their needs for Scriptures.”

Women are proving a formidable force in generating interest in Bible work across the country, according to Mr Mukhama. In recent years, the Women’s Task Force was established, and has become, in his words, “a powerful arm of the Bible Society”, organising a range of fundraising activities and participating in Bible Week. This year, their annual luncheon raised US$6,000 – double the amount raised by any previous Bible Society fundraising event.

But raising awareness and support is only part of the Bible Society’s challenge – physically getting Scriptures to people who need them can also prove difficult. The distribution team makes two trips each month in their one large vehicle, going on a ‘northern’ trip and an ‘eastern’ leg. And there are no superhighways in Uganda.

“The team goes out for a week, sometimes two, in order to reach people in remote areas,” explains Christopher Kiyimba, who works in the Kampala warehouse and bookshop. “The roads are not good, but things have improved in some places – I remember when the teams used to go to rural areas where there were so many potholes that vehicles would wear out so quickly. Now it is much better, except in areas in the north where there is still an insurgency.”

Hardships

Despite the hardships, men like Distribution Assistant Andrew Wewayo make the trips, supplying Scriptures to bookshops in towns and selling them in open-air markets in more remote villages.

“In the bookshops, English Bibles are more popular, but in the markets people tend to buy mostly vernacular Scriptures,” he explains. “By getting Bibles to bookshops and open-air markets, we are reaching two very different audiences.” (WR 381/10 - 11.03)