Save me!

I never told you about Bible Man. Bible Man is an American television show. It involves a man dressed up as a superhero talking about Jesus. We struggle to get American anti-retrovirals but we have no lack of American Christian television. I watched it for 2 minutes once. Bible Man spurned some poor child and he ran to a female superhero and she patted his head and told him Bible Man was just having a bad day. One aspect of life here that differs from Canada is the importance of religion. Heathens walk all over Canada side by side with the pious and nobody ever knows the difference because it’s not really something you talk about and who cares anyway? Here, conversion is around every corner, and despite the sizeable Muslim population it seems that a few people can’t fathom the existence of anything outside of their particular form of Christianity. Member of the United Church of Canada? You need saving. Synagogue? You need saving. Devoted humanist? You’re gonna burn baby, better get saved quick. It started on my flight over here. I sat next to a Southern Baptist from South Carolina on his way to Mbale to start a few churches. We’re on the London to Entebbe flight and he asks me where I’m going. “Kampala,” I say, “And you?” “U-GAAIN-DUH,” he bleets. Of course everyone on the plane is going to Uganda but apparently he hasn’t clued into that yet. Perhaps he thinks Kampala is some kind of independent fiefdom. Anyway, he might not know the capital of the country he’s converting people in, but he sure knows his Bible. He brings out a folding cube with pictures on it that show people living in fiery sin, the death of Jesus, and everyone happily marching up to heaven. He cites Scripture and makes clever analogies between what he reads there and my work as a lawyer. I’m sitting in my seat quaking with fear about coming to Africa for the first time and this man is trying to get me to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. Save me! I am polite but unbending and eventually we come to an uneasy truce. I put on my headphones and pretend to be asleep. Eventually, I really am sleeping.

We have some local neighbours who have made it their mission to save us. People who are saved are called Savedees and they can’t fathom why we haven’t done it yet and why we consistently refuse to come to their church to be reborn. My neighbour Rebecca befriended a local man and we met him at a café. He turned out to be a minister and tried to drag us to his church. One woman made the mistake of telling him where she worked and when she got there on Monday he’d been there to drop off a copy of his uplifting spiritual book about the importance of being saved. Now, I have nothing against church. In fact, I would very much like to visit some of the ones here, as I am told they are full of wonderful singing and dancing, but all these attempts at conversion definitely grate on my nerves. I haven’t been approached this much since university, when people stalked the campus, stopping suspected heathens and inviting them to their churches so they could be saved from eternal damnation. There was someone for everybody on the main street on campus -converted Catholics, Jews for Jesus, you name it- and the school gave us all a handbook with a section devoted to aggressive religious recruiting.

There are more than just Christian shows on Ugandan television though. There are a couple of gems. Canada’s Just For Laughs Gags, where you get to watch Canadians doing funny things on the streets of Montreal. I ignore the gags and just stare at the streets and the shops and the people in their coats. I think about smoked meat sandwiches and dill pickles. There is also a cartoon with singing vegetables. I think it might be British and by the same people who made Wallace and Grommit. The singing vegetables show is the funniest thing in the history of the world, even funnier than Bible Man. They sing songs about cheeseburgers and yodelling doctors and I roll around laughing in hysterics and feeling thankful for British humour.