Lake View Senior Secondary School and Saint Andrew’s Primary School
Fort Portal – Jinja, Uganda

From the beginning, Holy Cross ministry in Uganda has enjoyed the gift of having the entire Holy Cross family present — priests, brothers and sisters — to work together collaboratively.

Nine years after the priests arrived in 1958, Holy Cross Father (later Bishop) Vincent McCauley asked if the Holy Cross sisters would come to Fort Portal to take charge of the secondary school they had founded there with the White Sisters of Africa for the purpose of educating the indigenous sisters of the area, the Banyatereza. Under the leadership of Sister Catherine de Ricci Bartels, the school thrived and soon began accepting all girls, no matter what religion or tribe, as well as other religious, significantly contributing to the education of religious and young women in Uganda — even amid the war and violence of the Idi Amin years.

In the 1980s renewed energy came from the Ugandan women who were beginning to join the congregation — some of them as teachers. When several Holy Cross sisters accompanied the Holy Cross brothers to establish ministries in the eastern part of the country at Jinja, the sisters at Fort Portal continued their ministry of education in the local primary schools, in the nearby seminary, and at the novitiate they had established there.

In 1992 the Holy Cross brothers in Jinja asked Sister Mary Louise Wahler if she would serve as headmistress for their newly constructed Lake View Senior Secondary School overlooking Lake Victoria. Opening with a class of 55 boys and girls and six, mostly part-time, teachers, the school served the predominantly Protestant and Muslim population of the vicinity.

Today approximately 650 students are enrolled. The original single classroom has expanded to five buildings, with 35 teachers, two science laboratories and a library. Approximately 75 percent of the student body live as well as study there, rather than walk the four to 12 miles to and from school as they did before the school was expanded to include boarding accommodations.

In nearby Bugembe Parish, Holy Cross Sister Stella Maris Kunihira serves as headmistress at St. Andrew’s Holy Cross School, a primary school serving a diverse urban-industrial population of poor children. Teachers as well as students come from different tribes and backgrounds, and so the diversity of cultures and languages has made English the common language.

The school’s extracurricular program, which includes religious classes, a sports program, and trade-oriented projects such as tree-planting and brick-making, reflects both the Holy Cross emphasis on a well-rounded education and the context of a debt-ridden nation struggling to bring itself to economic maturity in the 21st century: “To educate and produce the well-disciplined, God-fearing and self-reliant citizens of the country.”

~From reports by Sisters Mary Louise Wahler, CSC, and Stella Maris Kunihira, CSC