The vice chancellor of Makerere University in Uganda, Luboobi Livingstone visited Japan with 6 AIDS orphans who joined the 5th ASHINAGA International Camp for Orphans in January 2005. He gave ASHINAGA orphaned college students a lecture titled as ¡ÈMy Life¡É at Kobe Rainbow House, a day-care center for parentless children.   Here is his summary on the lecture for Ashinaga Students.

 

My Life

Professor Livingstone S. Luboobi

January15, 2005

Lecture

Thank you very much chairman Mr. Tamai for giving me this opportunity to speak to young Japanese people here. They are very far from Africa. Therefore it is a different culture. While I have spent the last week here, I have found your culture somehow overlaps with ours. Therefore I am going to talk about my life since I was born, up to today, here in Japan. And I hope that you will learn something from my experiences, and you will realize what forms a society as it goes forward. I have not set up each of you with notebooks and pens because this is not a lecture for course work. But I do ask you just feel free and ask questions.

 

I will start by saying I was the first born in my family, first born of my mother and father. I was born on Christmas day, after my mom had attended the service, returned from church, and in the evening gave birth. That was the beginning of my life. Now as I said I was the first born, there were no other children in family. So my mother had a lot of work to do. After I was one year old, she got pregnant and was preparing for her second born. She was worried about how she could manage. So my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, took me on from the age of one year up to the time I am started the school. And at that time we never used nursery schools, so you had to go straight to primary schools.

 

Now the time I spent with my grandmother, I learned a lot about customs because she had thoughts and communicated them to me. First of all, I had to wake up early in the morning. Because to leave and break up the ground, and then go to fetch water. There was not natural way to provide water. Here in Japan you may not know about this issue, since the water you find here is in your houses; for us, we have to go far to get fresh water from a well, the water for cooking, washing, for everything in the houses. But I would like to highlight one of my experiences I had when I was still in my grandmother¡Çs house. I had an uncle staying in same place; he was quite old but I was less than seven years old.  One year, as the rainy season was coming, we had to prepare the ground.  So I prepared my piece of land, for beans and maize. At the end of the season the maize came up for me, but my uncle never harvested it for us.  When the maize was ready for us, my uncle was the first to have it, the maize from my garden. So I was very unhappy about it. I had to go to my grandfather and report to him about my uncle¡Çs bad deed. So from that time, I remember my grandfather made his comment that ¡Èyou will be very brave man, and you will be very productive¡É.  I always recorded his words, because through my few life studies, I don¡Çt want to worry.  

 

Now I will talk about my primary and secondary school. There was no school near my grandmother. So I had to leave my grandmother. I moved to another relative, another aunt. That is the way I led my family school life, I wanted to bring it as example to illustrate to you the extended family we have in Uganda. Even though my parents were there, I didn¡Çt have to be with them for the time my other relatives could take care of me. So I can tell you in my lifetime, I only spent two years with my parents by the time I was at the end of my primary school period.  But I have been happy, and not being with my parents made me personally responsible to work, and sometimes even to do something almost impossible. So that was part of actually nurturing me. If one does not go through difficulty, you found the future to be difficult. At one time you may wonder why you go through these difficulties. But once you go through them, future difficulties become different, more manageable. So those difficulties actually sharpened me, and sharpened me for my education at the university. You may think that the work I was used to doing in the village had no relationship with the academic work in universities. However, there is a big relationship. It is part of the training and nurturing of somebody. I see you are young people, accepting responsibilities when you have challenges, and once you do, you would build the courage to reach the end. Once you have done it and you become surer of your future, you will are able to deal with more difficult problems.

 

At the University, I have gone through different paths, one academic and one administration. I will talk about the administration. My part in administrative was one of being head of the department of mathematics. So we coordinated academic programs, and we were responsible for the students taking their subjects.  Because I had experienced students coming to me with many problems, I could prepare his or her background, and provide the kind of help that students needed. Remember I said, if you have not gone through these experiences, you never get to know about it. And if somebody had not gone through the difficulty, you may not be prepared. So the character of somebody is built from experiencing many difficulties. It is build from being involved in activities. So for young people, this is very important. I know some of you are fatherless, and you may feel that the life is very hard for you. But to challenge you, you can get through these difficult times, and you can also help many others who need support.

 

Now remember that I mentioned culture and how to differentiate the Uganda culture and the Japanese culture. But of course it is dangerous to say that all traditional cultures want to go modern. The danger of moving something, saying this is modern and this is old, causes you to actually lose your identity. You should be very proud as Japanese, I am proud as Ugandan. And this world should be diversified at living in harmony. Let me give an example. Today I was the second one through the line with my meal, demonstrating how my family would have a meal, how you seat for the meal. I was telling chairman Tamai that is how we used be when we grew up, but this is no longer what I felt important. Unfortunately that¡Çs good part of uniqueness of society, because way down it was changed. So for me to achieve being different does not make us that different. I appreciate knowing the differences between us. If you look for similarity, in most cases you will fail to find them. So the best we can do is accept our differences, but we can still act.  I see it in our Africa University in Uganda; now that it is diversified and one of the biggest universities in Africa where we have different students from different backgrounds and different countries, you can never enforce people to have the same wants. So it is important to know how people of different cultures and character present their enthusiasm. You then don¡Çt make a mistake how reach them. So that you will be advised, your people will receive preparation from trained students when they come to Uganda. They will be given an orientation so they don¡Çt have culture shock.  And there will be students there who want to know different people, and you will be made aware about many related topics.

 

Now I will go to back to my academic experience and give the student backgrounds as I mentioned. They go to the university and school to get degrees for certain kinds of careers. However sometimes we tend to over emphasize it, and we mean to point at the university¡Çs school to do other training beyond what it does. I want to say that the academic achievement may not have only an educational but also a community focus.  So you have to combine society and academics into one program to know what¡Çs going on and teach how to interact to influence others and learn that different people know how to handle different problems. So in addition to just sitting in the classes, you must do social things. You will now almost make it through without this; this was a mistake I made at first.  As I talked to you about when I was young boy, I was very active and did many activities like gardening. But when I went to school, I only read books. So at the university, for my first degree, I think I had only two friends. It was later I found out I should have more friends. So sometimes you meet different characters, and you don¡Çt know how to handle different characters. So let there be lots of opportunity to interact, learn different behavior, how you handle different situations rather than only reading books at there. So that is a very important component of education. And left alone when you get academic questions, it becomes hard because of the different characters that you could encounter in administration. When I realized that and I opened up, I think it was when I became a dean of scientific department, I was able to interact and even to grow and be much more productive. I do not have the opportunity the Japanese have to handle their different problems, but I will tell you my philosophy and make you aware of some issues. I want you to handle problems there in Uganda if you should come, and then if it should be necessary to talk to a person, we will get directly involved as to whether it is a bad or good thing they are doing there, rather than trying to cover that here. And I must tell you that because people knew how I do my work and that I am open, that is how I was voted into the vice-chancellor. So now I have covered a long way from my childhood, I was born on Christmas and celebrated Christmas 4 weeks ago, so I came here as a 60 year old. So I really needed 60 years to summarize. If you have any question, please feel free to ask.  First of all, I would like to thank to Mr. Tamai for inviting me to this conference. In closing, the experience for me, for us in Uganda is that we have and are used to the HIV problem. But here we have three groups: earthquake victims, recently we have earthquake-tsunami victims in Indonesia, and the fatherless children we discussed earlier. We have different problems, but we must go on together and show the young people how help others realize their goals despite the problems.

 

Thank you very much.