~ Bazurizi Vicent
[Written by Hayley White]
Growing up in rural Bunyaruguru, it’s only fitting that Bazurizi would spend his career devoted to improving livelihoods of impoverished people in his home area. With COVOID, he trained community members in microfinance activities and with another organization, he was active in raising awareness about human rights. Though he worked all hours, 7 days a week, Bazurizi was also committed to his family and in the process of constructing a new family home for his wife and 7 kids. He was also starting a large-scale poultry project to supplement his family’s income.
Bazurizi came from a very humble background and dropped out of school after level S3, when he was about 15. A decade or so later, after starting his family, he decided to return to school, finishing the obligatory level S4 (like 10th grade), advancing to S5 and S6, and then completing a diploma in Development Studies. Can you imagine walking the halls of high school as a 23-year-old junior? That’s Bazurizi.
He had his eccentricities. As many unique, determined, and hardworking individuals are, Bazurizi was a relentless, shall we say….troublemaker. He told it like it was. He created arguments just to rip common ideas apart and build them back up again into something new—and you always loved him the more for it in the end. I called him “omutabuzi” or, destroyer, but we all knew that he was more truthfully the opposite. He had a knack for showing up to work at precisely the time lunch was being served. He stole my phone charger for a whole month. He was so determined to keep me in Uganda forever that he scoured the community and found the best man he could for me to marry—uh….thanks. He ran 5 miles every morning to “protect against laziness.” He climbed guava trees with the spry of a teenager. He tucked his pants into his socks when it was muddy. He was STUBBORN.
He was the first, and the only, Ugandan to ever admit to me that he doesn’t believe in God. He’s also one of the few I’ve met to have really ever given the issue a whole lot of critical thought. When asked for his reasons, he stated simply that he didn’t think the timing and the science of the Bible could be all right. When I suggested, in a way more curious than persuasive, that some people view the Bible’s “timeline” of creation and later events to be largely symbolic and not exclusive of science and evolution at all, he looked at me in a way more thoughtful than I’d intended to make him and replied, “well, that could change everything, couldn’t it?” His mouth was always flapping, but his mind was always open. He studied the Bible an awful lot for someone who doesn’t believe it. Bazurizi loved people, and served people, and laughed with people for his entire life and WITH his entire life. So what makes someone a Christian anyway?
His Christian name, Vicent, is a version of Vincent that was misspelled on official school paperwork and attached to him out of legal convenience. Therefore, it’s best to remember him as most knew him, as Bazurizi (Bah-zoo-ruh-zee)—meaning, the martyrs. Though an active lover of life and far from a willing self-sacrifice, we can still be hopeful that he died for something and that his memory can guide the rest of us to walk forward to fill his enormous shadow of kind-heartedness, curiosity, and community service.
~ Treva Elizabeth Manbeck Fahrney (aka “Grandma Fahrney”)
Grandma was a woman who had quite a sense of humor. I remember her telling a story of when she was younger, how she put her younger sister (Arlene) up to peeing down through a loft in a barn on their family farm. Unfortunately, Arlene was peeing as a farmhand entered the barn. [Oops!]
One time when my sister Amie and I spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, Grandma took her top dentures out in the morning and told me it was my turn to take MY teeth out. I tried a few times and told her I couldn’t take my teeth out like she could. She insisted that I could and we went back and forth about it (making me very frustrated). Amie decided to join in and told me, “Nicole, if Grandma can take HER teeth out don’t you think you can take YOUR teeth out?” (Word has it that Grandma teased my cousin’s children and tried to get them to remove their teeth, too.)
Some of the things she taught her family and friends was the importance of family… unconditional love… and forgiveness. She had an amazing capacity to forgive. There’s not one single person among her extended family or friends who has ever been perfect. She had the ability to forgive each of us and love us regardless of our flaws and mishaps. She never missed an opportunity to ask someone what they were up to, or what their hopes for the future were. She always encouraged us in all of our endeavors.
A woman with a great sense of humor and a great capacity to love. She is dearly missed yet fondly remembered.
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