Bishop Hopes to Shed Light on Homeland

Retired Bishop William Rukirande has come to power-strapped California to find the answer for his country’s energy crisis.

While Californians contend with blackouts and mammoth rate increases, many of Rukirande’s countrymen in Uganda are strangers to electricity. They use burning bamboo sticks for illumination. Students study without light. Entire villages are dark.

So Rukirande has spent the last two months going from schools to churches here, raising money to equip schools, health clinics, orphanages and churches back home with solar panels. As a result, he believes some Ugandans will be able to experience what they’ve never known: electric light.

This week, Rukirande visited students at St. George’s Episcopal Academy in Laguna Hills, showing them the bamboo stalks that have been the lone source of light in many impoverished areas of his homeland.

Rukirande is touring the United States to raise awareness and money for Solar Light for the Churches of Africa, a project jointly undertaken by the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Uganda. He will conclude his Orange County visit today and push north to Santa Barbara.

Dressed in a violet shirt, with a large wooden cross hanging from a chain around his neck, Rukirande held a map of Uganda as he told the students that about 23 million people live in the African nation, most without electricity.

“When the darkness comes, we stop our work and we go home into the darkness,” Rukirande said. Poor families light bamboo sticks, while those with greater means use metal cans filled with kerosene.

Holding up a tomato can with a welded top allowing a rag to peep through, Rukirande told students that this is what would pass for a reading lamp in some families, especially for students who need to study. The kerosene provides a brighter light than the bamboo stick, but burning kerosene is unhealthy and dangerous.

The cost of providing electricity to now-darkened homes and schools is steep. Rukirande said it costs about $1,400 to purchase a single solar panel that provides enough power to operate six lightbulbs in a home. Rukirande is trying to raise 50% of the cost in the United States. So far, the project, which began in 1997, has resulted in the installation of 1,000 solar-power units. The goal is at least another 4,000 units.

Fifth-grader Laura Dyball, 10, of Orange was impressed. She contributed $2 to the cause.

“I felt really sorry for the children over there,” Laura said. “If I had all the money in the world, I’d give it to them to help with the electricity.”

Although solar energy is the focus of his tour, Rukirande said, he is working toward something greater.

“The burden I carry for Africa is for it to grow and develop,” he said, “and, if possible, to get rid of the poverty, disease and ignorance.”