Rose Nanyongas faith pilgrimage has been a journey of transformation
– from an African witch doctor-in-training to a nursing student in Dallas.
Rose Nanyongas faith pilgrimage has been a journey of transformation
– from an African witch doctor-in-training to a nursing student in Dallas.
She now attends nursing classes and works as an intensive-care nurse, a striking
departure from her beginnings as a witch doctors acolyte in Uganda.
She still is uncertain how her father was able to get her approved for witchcraft
training, which usually is restricted to males. But she knows a witch doctors
prophesy before she was conceived played a part.
“My mother had four sons and no daughters, so, she was taken to the witch
doctor,” Nanyonga recalls. “My father was on the verge of turning
her out because daughters were valued for the dowry they would bring at marriage.
The witch doctor told my mother she would have a girl, and she would be significant
to the family.”
Her training as a witch doctor began when she was about 8 years old, just after
her mother died. Nanyongas family went to great expense, but they knew
if she succeeded in training, as a female witch doctor, she would have celebrity
status and could command top price for her services.
“The family had risked a lot, but they would soon be seeing a lot of gain
for that,” Nanyonga explains. “I would become a witch doctor and a
famous witch doctor that people would come from across the country to see. They
would have to pay a lot to see me, and my family would gain ultimately and become
very rich.”
Every training session began with cleansing rituals in which she was covered
with animal blood. Her training was about two things – learning about plants
with healing properties and learning self-discipline.
“There was a great deal of focus on discipline,” she says. “That
was the reason for the cleansing process, to make you a good medium and a conduit
for the spirits.”
The spiritual turning point in her life began when she was about 15 years old.
Nanyonga was reading alone in a class when, she says she heard a voice distinctly
saying – “You must be born again.”
“I had been trained to hear voices as a witch doctor, so, the first time,
I thought it must be the spirits,” she admits. “That didnt feel
right, though.”
After hearing the voice again, Nanyonga told her father about it and asked
what the message meant. He referred her to witchcraft instructors, who adamantly
told her not to listen to such voices.
A month later, a Christian evangelistic crusade came to the village, and the
message the evangelists were preaching was familiar – “You must be
born again.”
She initially resisted the message but accepted the gift of a Bible, which
she says she read from cover to cover in three days. And she began attending
worship services at the Christian church in the village.
Her father said it was fine for her to attend church services, as long as it
did not interfere with her witch-doctor training. For two years, it did not.
Each week, Nanyonga entered the church, sat in the back and did not speak to
anyone.
“Looking back, I am so glad I went to those church services,” she
says.
“I think hearing that teaching for those two years – something was
getting through. Even though I was not offering any challenges to my teachers,
a change was taking place inside me.”
“During that second year, I became aware that the two worlds I was trying
to live in were a total opposite, and I could not be a part of those two worlds,”
Nanyonga adds. “I had to choose between them.”
Still, leaving witchcraft was a difficult decision for her to make.
“I was passionate about my role as a witch doctor,” she says. “I
had learned a lot. I had mastered the discipline. I was a person of stature.
I was the hope of my family. I was the person who was going to make everything
all right.”
Finally, she decided to embrace Christianity openly. She told the pastor of
the village church that if he would stay and pray with her, she would skip the
upcoming family gathering to celebrate her training as a witch doctor.
“When we had these large gatherings, the family would travel many miles
to be there, but nothing would begin until I entered the shrine,” she recalls.
“Then, the alarm would sound, letting everyone know that the ceremony would
begin. This time my family met and waited and waited and waited. I didnt
show up.”
When she returned home, she says her father was furious.
“Ive never seen a man so angry,” Nanyonga recalls. “I
was frightened. He threatened to kill everybody – the pastor, other Christians,
anyone who was influencing me. He threatened to close the church. In the end,
he locked me up.”
One of Nanyongas brothers was foreman at a remote cotton gin. She was
taken there and locked in a storage room with only a mattress, a blanket and
just enough food to keep her alive.
Her father and brothers threatened every Christian in the village with death
if they ever spoke to Nanyonga again. But one Christian found out where she
had been taken. He came and slipped her pieces of paper with Bible verses on
them. She read them, meditated on them and then ate them to keep her family
from discovering the evidence, she says.
After 30 days of isolation, she was brought before a disciplinary committee
made up of her family and the village elders. Her father made a lengthy speech,
stating his reasons why his daughter should obey his wishes. Then, he told the
assembled gathering that she should be given three days to decide. If she followed
the path of Christianity, she was told that she no longer would be a part of
the family or village.
“I dont think Ive ever felt as lost as I did those three days,”
she says. “I was so angry at whoever this God was, whoever this Jesus Christ
was. When you first hear the gospel, its always about the hope and the
joy. They dont tell you about the sacrifice and the struggle that can
be involved. I didnt know if this Christianity was worth it.”
Making matters worse, Nanyonga had always been taught that if she ever turned
her back on witchcraft, the spirits would kill her. And she felt sure if the
spirits did not, her father and brothers would.
“I thought I was going to die, and I begin to realize that I wanted to
die for something more liberating than enslaving,” Nanyonga says. “So,
I went on faith. … I finally decided that if God was who he said he was, he
was worth dying for.”
After three days, she appeared before the assembly. She told them she wanted
to remain in the village as a Christian. Her father said that would not be allowed.
She was not killed, but she was cast out.
“I became a disgrace,” she says. “As I left, everyone spit on
me. I walked out of there not knowing where I was going.”
She did not go to the other Christians in the village for fear she would bring
reprisals on them. She simply started walking. She walked for a week. Finally,
on the verge of collapse many miles from home, she stopped at a hut to beg for
food and water. She recognized the woman who answered the door as the mother
of a Christian in her home village.
The woman took her in for a month. Then, a Christian she had known in school
told her about a missionary from Ireland who was looking for help to set up
a clinic about 60 kilometers away.
The woman gave her money for transportation, and Nanyonga met the people she
now refers to as her Irish parents, Ian and Ruby Clarke. “It was so far
away from my family and people who would know me,” she says. “It was
a place to start over.”
She worked with the Clarkes for the next few years, and their relationship
evolved into much more than co-workers. They became the family she had lost,
she says.
“My Irish family recognized I had potential and enrolled me in nursing
school in Uganda,” Nanyonga recounts.
After graduating in 1995, Nanyonga returned to what had grown to be a hospital
and also began working at a nearby orphanage. In 1998, she came to the United
States with a performing group of children from the orphanage who came to spread
awareness about the AIDS epidemic.
During that trip, she met a congressman. He helped her make connections that
ultimately resulted in a scholarship to a nursing school in Arkansas.
Nanyongas desire is to return to Uganda and make changes in public health-care
policy. To be heard, she will need at least a masters degree, she explained.
She learned about the family nurse practitioner program at Baylor Universitys
Louise Herrington School of Nursing. She knew it was what she had been seeking.
After financial aid was established, she enrolled and is set to graduate in
about a year.
Nanyonga says she sees the hand of God evident in her life. “This is not
my own doing,” she insists. “I couldnt really have played any
part of it.”
Nanyonga still is estranged from much of her African family, although she reconciled
with her father days before his death.
“There was no anger left in his eyes, just a lot of sadness,” she
says. “On his death bed, he reached out and said, Rose, Im
sorry. That was more liberating than a hundred I love yous.”
(ABP)