Book group
Aug. 25th, 2025 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI finished read Now I Am Known and we had book group and chose Thursday Night Murders for next month.
It was a nice conversation, altho people had mostly forgotten or hadn’t read the book. M. didn’t attend because her granddaughters had visited and the ensuing chaos meant she didn’t get to read it and was thoroughly social-ed out.
ETA:
Peter Mutabazi’s Now I Am Known is extremely readable, which is impressive given how difficult some of the material in it is. He tells the story of growing up in a small village in Uganda on the border with Rwanda. His abusive father frightens him enough that Peter literally does the Goes Out for Cigarettes and Never Comes Back move. His dad sends him for a few cigarettes in the rain in the middle of the night, and Peter takes money he earned selling peanuts (IIRC) to people at the bus station to buy a ticket to Kampala. Once arrived in Kampala (he’s 10), he has no idea what to do, so he hangs out with other kids at the bus station, cleaning buses, lifting plaintains and similar from vendors and bus passengers, and offering to help carry things in exchange for food and similar. Once he’s been there for a few years, he develops a connection with someone who ultimately offers to send him to boarding school. While he struggles to accept the offer of help, and then to adapt to the extremely different environment and different conditions, he does, and this becomes the first of many massive changes in his life. From the boarding school, he goes to Makerere college in Kampala, where he develops connections with Uganda’s educated class, and works for relief organizations as a translator and in other capacities, including going into Rwanda after the genocide to get aid to the childrens’ camps.
The connections he makes helping visiting missionaries and similar turn into an offer to attend Oak Hill College in England for a Crisis Management degree, then to California to attend another college, and finally Masters’ University. A classmate invites him to speak at a church that is fundraising to sponsor children in Africa, and Mutabazi is far more successful at this than anyone has been before and this leads to job with extensive travel doing on a larger scale what he had been doing while still in Uganda.
But it’s clear that Mutabazi is not necessarily articulating in the memoir that he’s got an unmet need, a strong desire to be a father, and to do so without marrying a woman. Once he comes to understand the foster system, and the unmet needs of children there even in wealthy USA, and perhaps most importantly that this is a path where a man from Uganda who is single could still adopt, he fully commits — changing his home and his career so that he can foster children and ultimately adopt a few.
While a lot of this material is very grim, Mutabazi’s forthright tone, humility and the way he focuses his faith relentlessly on finding ways to help others thrive, makes this a highly readable and inspiring book. A.S. recommended it to book group, along with the second book by him (Love Does Not Conquer All), and I don’t regret reading it at all, which is a surprising thing for me to say about something so explicitly Christian coming out of Uganda. The publisher is a Evangelical publishing house, so if directing your money to that kind of organization bothers you, consider getting it from the library.
It was a nice conversation, altho people had mostly forgotten or hadn’t read the book. M. didn’t attend because her granddaughters had visited and the ensuing chaos meant she didn’t get to read it and was thoroughly social-ed out.
ETA:
Peter Mutabazi’s Now I Am Known is extremely readable, which is impressive given how difficult some of the material in it is. He tells the story of growing up in a small village in Uganda on the border with Rwanda. His abusive father frightens him enough that Peter literally does the Goes Out for Cigarettes and Never Comes Back move. His dad sends him for a few cigarettes in the rain in the middle of the night, and Peter takes money he earned selling peanuts (IIRC) to people at the bus station to buy a ticket to Kampala. Once arrived in Kampala (he’s 10), he has no idea what to do, so he hangs out with other kids at the bus station, cleaning buses, lifting plaintains and similar from vendors and bus passengers, and offering to help carry things in exchange for food and similar. Once he’s been there for a few years, he develops a connection with someone who ultimately offers to send him to boarding school. While he struggles to accept the offer of help, and then to adapt to the extremely different environment and different conditions, he does, and this becomes the first of many massive changes in his life. From the boarding school, he goes to Makerere college in Kampala, where he develops connections with Uganda’s educated class, and works for relief organizations as a translator and in other capacities, including going into Rwanda after the genocide to get aid to the childrens’ camps.
The connections he makes helping visiting missionaries and similar turn into an offer to attend Oak Hill College in England for a Crisis Management degree, then to California to attend another college, and finally Masters’ University. A classmate invites him to speak at a church that is fundraising to sponsor children in Africa, and Mutabazi is far more successful at this than anyone has been before and this leads to job with extensive travel doing on a larger scale what he had been doing while still in Uganda.
But it’s clear that Mutabazi is not necessarily articulating in the memoir that he’s got an unmet need, a strong desire to be a father, and to do so without marrying a woman. Once he comes to understand the foster system, and the unmet needs of children there even in wealthy USA, and perhaps most importantly that this is a path where a man from Uganda who is single could still adopt, he fully commits — changing his home and his career so that he can foster children and ultimately adopt a few.
While a lot of this material is very grim, Mutabazi’s forthright tone, humility and the way he focuses his faith relentlessly on finding ways to help others thrive, makes this a highly readable and inspiring book. A.S. recommended it to book group, along with the second book by him (Love Does Not Conquer All), and I don’t regret reading it at all, which is a surprising thing for me to say about something so explicitly Christian coming out of Uganda. The publisher is a Evangelical publishing house, so if directing your money to that kind of organization bothers you, consider getting it from the library.