October 1934
Entebbe is twenty-eight glorious miles from Kampala, on the shores of blue Lake Victoria. This is the seat of Government, and, except for the "town", which Indians have made very dirty and ugly with their shops, it is a paradise of wide avenues, spacious bungalows and hundreds of lawns.

Photo : View of Lake Victoria from Entebbe

I was born in the Welsh mountains; I have seen Florence and Genoa and a sunset at Carthage; I have drunk in the beauty of Killarney, "Where angels fold their wings and rest", but never have I been so ecstatically moved as by my first view of Entebbe on the lake.(photo) I suppose it is the brightness which gives it, that extra touch of beauty. The wide green slope of English golf-course, the green islands in the distance and the lake scintillating every shade of sparkling colour made us say "Lord, it is good to be here". But, while I gazed near the lake, two long crocodiles glided along the surface and a green (a wondrously beautiful green) snake wriggled gracefully out of the undergrowth across my path. I am learning that under its beauty Africa is an untamed country yet.

Tea at the mission was a surprise. Fresh white bread (flour from Kenya), butter from "our cows, Father," goat-cheese "from our own goats and made by the Sisters, Father," and paw-paw to give local colour. Through the window I could see near that dazzling lake two hundred head of "our cattle, Father". We sell the milk to the European population and the staffs of two missions are kept on the proceeds.

To the church for Benediction. The church? Not so lovely. I am told that the natives like the gaudy colours which bespatter the walls and many large pillars in endless variety. I cannot believe that anybody likes it, or at least, that anyone would like it if he were shown something delicate and harmonious. My impression is deepened when I see how tastefully chosen are the shades of cloth with which the women are adorned.

The Rosary recited in Luganda by hundreds of natives was very long. I said two Rosaries in leisurely English before an end was reached of the pleasant, sing-songed "Aves" in the native tongue.

Invited to partner another White Father at tennis against two natives, I had vain thoughts of showing off. Abject humiliation. Result 0—6. My respect for the natives is now very high.

Entebbe nights are hot and slimy and at the Mission which is almost on the Lake one wakes from sleep feeling like something dragged out of a river. Here is a page from my Diary written after my first night there.

18th October, 1934. Entebbe
Night? Bad. Heat? Slimy. Noises of animals scampering somewhere in my room. I think, over the floor. I got up several times to investigate. I could see (in spirit) snakes under the bed, between the blankets, under the pillow (not so hard), in corners and hanging from the ceiling. Well, it is only my second night in Africa and the Fathers did rather pile it on this evening. I found just nothing. Worried all the same. England seems farther and farther away and a much better place.

During the morning I visited the Sisters of Mary Réparatrix up on the hill. There is a large "JESUS" on the roof; the word standing out in different coloured tiles. It is said that the Prince of Wales (Duke of Windsor) saw it from an aeroplane and asked questions about it. He visited the Convent later and, it is also said, upset the programme arranged for him, by staying half an hour talking to the Sisters. I saw his name in the visitors' book.

The Sisters train hundreds of girls; have a dispensary and workshops. They also have an affiliated community of native nuns. The place is a bee-hive of industry but chiefly, the sisters live lives of prayer and penance in reparation for the sins of Africans. This convent is the supernatural power-house of Uganda, and partly explains why Uganda is, as the Holy Father says, "The Pearl of all the Missions". It is the place of the "transfusion of blood" in the spiritual sphere.

A leaf of my Diary dated 12th July, 1938, reads: "I have just finished preaching the annual retreat to the Sisters of Mary Réparatrix. The language was French. A Spanish Sister, less French than I, said to me, "Father, I understood you so well during the retreat that sometimes I thought you were speaking Spanish". I trust that the good nun did not know the saying, "Parler Frangais comme une vache espagnole" (To speak French like a Spanish cow is to speak it very badly indeed.)

I visited also the boys' elementary school, where a hundred lads from 10 to 14 years of age were working hard under four native teachers, and had my first lesson in Luganda from a native priest. He is at Entebbe being trained in economics, for he is to be the Procurator General of the Native Clergy. He is charming and has brains.

A thoroughly frightening thunderstorm, with flashes of lightning like furnaces, and claps of thunder like a thousand big guns firing simultaneously througb rain like sheet-glass, caused me to feel still farther away two home. There was no damage done except to my nerves. An amusing interlude. A woman was walking calmly and very slowly through the storm. Someone called out to her, "Why don't you run out of the Rain? "

"Sebo," (Father) she answered, "and miss an easy bath?"

That reminded me of the first Millganda I ever met. It was in England in 1927. He was a chief, and I was his guide on a tour through England and Scotland. At Oxford I saw that our London train was waiting in the station and I urged the chief to run or we should miss it. He stopped dead in his tracks and said, "Chiefs don't ran!" We missed the train and waited nearly two houn for another. The chief answered my remonstrances with "It is a very nice platform with seats". I am learning again that you cannot ruffle a native. He has cold blood. Shake hands with him and feel how cold he is. You will be surprised; I was.

21st October, 1934
More noises and more midright searches with an equally negative result. Better ask and risk being once again laughed out of court as a green-horn. I did and I was. "Only bats, Father. Bats won't hurt you, Father. Not afraid of BATSs are you? Just bats in the roof.", I felt that if this went on much longer I shoud have bats, too, in the belfry.

Distributed very many hundreds of Communions this morning, both at the early Mass and before and after the High Mass. The entire congregation sang the latter, the children forming one choir and the adults the answering body. Grand! Not as musical but infinitely suitable than a fancy choir and a mute congregation The women's voices appear to me the most savage ant the most flat, and they slow up the tempo. The men ain the most normal, according to our standards, and the children simply let go with clear, hard yells which shake the rafters.

Crowds outside the church. Everyone meets everyone on a Sunday morning. Now he comes to greet me and to say Kulika! Congratulations on a safe journey. I heard the word five hundred thousand, four hundred, twenty-nine and a half times. The half came from a little boy who started it just when I was about to try to say something in reply. His father put a banana in his mouth.

It was a lovely scene. Several men wore collars and ties, socks and boots, coats and trousers. (Now I know where Oxford bags came from.) Most men, however, are wearing long white cotton or silk smocks; all spotlessly clean to-day. The women have many yards of delicately coloured cloth wound round them, and held under the armpits, leaving the shoulders bare. I spot a few with the brown or terra-cotta bark cloth. None have skins (animal). They shed their skins long ago. Between 1797 and 1814 there reigned a King called Senakokiro. He began to trade in cotton cloth and so he ordered his people to throw away their skins (animal) and wear cotton. But let us be fair to his memory. He also commanded his people to plant, in their own plots of ground, bark-cloth trees. I have a list of sixty-seven kinds of these trees before me as I write. The people became skilful in the art of making bark-cloth, and only lazy people need be poorly dressed, for this bark-cloth is a marvel of softness.

If the native fashions are beautiful, some of the styles worn in imitation of Europeans are not so lovely. . , I saw a tiny boy in too-long, light-blue shorts, a too-small home-knitted (by a schoolgirl learning — more power to her needles) rose-coloured, very thick jersey (how could he have survived that church!), and a huge sailor-cap — H.M.S. Hood — which completely hid his little ears.

The school-children have khaki or white uniforms, both boys and girls. They are exceedingly clean and smart, but I noticed that down in the village the uniforms disappear, and anything else takes their place. A "first pair of pants" was a puzzle to more than one small boy. Thev made a fine double bag to carry earth in for one of them, while another found that, rolled up and tied tied with banana-tree fibre, pants made a splendid football—quite as good as any London East-ender's cap. Buttons are obviously meant to be chewed.

Many of the very tiny children wear only a medal—a claim to the protection of their Heavenly Mother—and a string of bells round an ankle—an assurance to the attentive ear of their earthly one.

February 1935
At an almost deserted spot in old Entebbe, not very far from Government House, there stands to-day a little monument. It marks the very spot where two White Fathers first landed from a "dug-out" boat , after a month's journey across Lake Victoria in which you could drown Ireland, from the shores of Tanganyika. To-do, I had the honour of speaking their praises when Lady Bourdillon, the wife of the Governor of Uganda, unveiled that monument, and the Vicar-Apostolic blessed it. I talked there with an old native, who, as a terrified Sam boy, had seen the exhausted white men arrive. The boy had hidden behind a tree to watch them. They knelt down and made the sign of the Cross, which the boy thought was magic. They slept under a tree which the man pointed out to me, and "in the morning they went to Rubaga to see the King". That was how the first Catholic missionaries came to Uganda in 1878.

I once talked in France with Father Girault who had made the historic journey from the coast, but arrived in Uganda a little later. He lost his sight through the glare of the sun (to regain some of it later on) and to-day sixty years later, when the monument was blessed we sent him a telegram from almost-Christian Uganda, and that surely gave him great comfort in his old-age exile is Europe.

I sat at lunch next to another old native, and I left the table hungry; for that old man was Denis Kannyouba, a Knight of St. Gregory. He was in Rome when the Martyrs of Uganda were beatified in 1921, because he himself had been actually tied up in reeds, ready to be thrown on the martyrs' fire, but had, at the last moment, been released. He told me of his life-long regrets and of his heart-breaking sorrow at Rome, in St. Peter's mighty church, when his twenty-two friends were beatified while he was still on earth.

Photo : The two survivors of the massacre, one of whom was Denis

He told me how he, one of the Kabaka's pages, used to crawl at night out through the King's palisade, and steal silently to the Father's hut, where at the risk of his life, he learned the good news of peace and of eternal life. He told me that he was baptised also at dead of night, and made his first Holy Communion which he thought would be his Viaticum. It was a thrilling tale, bike the tales one's mother told of the catacombs, or of the days of persecution in our own land, and listening, one marvelled at the power of the grace of God, which, only six years after the coming of the priests, had made martyrs of so many black-boys. But one no longer marvelled at the prodigious extension of God's Kingdom in this country which Our Holy Father has named, "The Pearl of all the Missions of the World".

I forgot to eat, and coming out into the open I passed an ant-hill as tall as a man, as round as an orange, and as wide as an underground railway tunnel. A woman had thrown some bark-cloth over it, she had lit a fire within it and was catching most of the millions of ants as they ran into her sack over a hole. Some of the ants escaped, to be grabbed by lots of children, who ate them crouching them like nuts in their strong white teeth. I was very hungry, but I don't like raw ants. Missionaries often eat them, but fried in butter.

After this ultra-native exhibition I went out to tea with some English people. Beautiful green lawn table under the trees; tea served by liveried "boys"—all, except for the "boys' " colour, as English as English could be. When I got home, a schoolmaster was brought to me. He had been sitting in his hut reading when a snake took a meal off his toe. The young man was very frightened—but not as much as I should have been had it been my toe. Father Superior looked after him, and said he would be quite all right. Africa is funny. You eat grasshoppers, have a lawn tea and cure snakebites all in the same hour. Anyhow none can complain of monotony.

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