We have a good friend visiting Uganda right now and he is going to see our old home and the friends we have there. He is traveling there with some packages for our friends, letters with words written to express our heart to those we once were able to speak, and pictures to replace our very presence there. These thoughts stir echoes of a different time and a longing to return. Langston Hughes expressed it well in a poem not spoken from the same source that our longing derives its soul, yet somehow rings true even to my comparatively small experience there. So I wanted to share it with you…

Afro-American Fragment

So long,

So far away

Is Africa.

Not even memories alive

Save those that history books create,

Save those that songs

Beat back into the blood-

Beat out of blood with words sad-sung

In strange un-Negro tongue-

So long,

So far away

Is Africa.

Subdued and time-lost

Are the drums — and yet

Through some vast mist of race

There comes this song

I do not understand,

This song of atavistic land,

Of bitter yearnings lost

Without a place-

So long,

So far away

Is Africa’s

Dark face.