A Priest I Will Never Forget

I was brought up as a Roman Catholic; I just had to because both of my parents were, and still are, Catholics. As a boy growing up in the '90s, I attended mass every Sunday at my hometown Catholic Church where I interacted with nuns, priests, seminarians as well as fellow Christians, old and young alike. Among the priests I interacted with, and one I will never forget, was Fr. Deogratias Rwegasira. Or Fr. Deo in short.

A native of Tanzania, Fr. Deo was posted in the '90s to serve as a chaplain of Kiserian Junior Seminary, a high school that is next to my hometown Catholic Church. It was during his tenure in the junior seminary that I got to know him, for he would often come to our church to preach and teach songs to our church choir. He had a passion for music which was evident in the way he owned an amplifier and a piano keyboard on which he had inscribed his name.

When I began accompanying our church choir on the piano in 1998, I loved to hear the choir sing alongside a piano keyboard hooked to Fr. Deo's amplifier. So I would at times take the initiative of fetching the amplifier from Kiserian Junior Seminary and bring it to our church. I can still picture myself as a boy strutting on an aisle of a fully-packed church, with the bulky amplifier in my hands.

Back in the '90s, I once overheard a friend say that Fr. Deo could play only one Catholic hymn on the piano. I think the friend was right because I once observed Fr. Deo connect a piano keyboard to an electrical socket and then test it by playing the only Catholic hymn he was purported to know.

Although Fr. Deo could only play one Catholic hymn on the piano, he was a superbly gifted musician. He composed a number of songs that he taught our church choir. And wow! His songs were so tuneful and beautifully crafted that they stuck in my memory like glue on paper. To this day, I still find myself crooning them as I got about my daily business.

Besides his musical talent, the other traits of Fr. Deo that endeared him to me were his compassion and kindness. I vividly remember a Sunday afternoon in the late '90s when my friends and I spotted Fr. Deo approaching from a distance. On seeing him, we quickly and cleverly agreed amongst ourselves to yawn as Fr. Deo was passing by to show him we were hungry and arouse his sympathy. The ploy worked like magic because when Fr. Deo saw us yawning, he had compassion on us. He dug into one of his pockets, took out a Ksh. 100 note and gave it to us for buying something to eat.

Excited to receive the money, my friends and I went to our hometown of Kiserian where we bought from a food cafe a type of mandazi we used to call "half-cakes". The half-cakes we purchased were hot and fresh from the kitchen. I started eating my share with gusto but after several bites, the half-cake began to cloy due to too much fat.

Talking of his kindness, Fr. Deo once gently refused to give me a copy of the cassettes that our church choir produced in 1998. I kept nagging him to give me my own cassette to an extent of following him to wherever he went. Despite my persistent nagging, he never lost his cool. With kindness and consideration, he kept turning down my request to give me a cassette until I finally gave up pestering him. He truly practised the grand old biblical virtues of kindness and gentleness that I have seen lacking in some of the Christians I have interacted with over the years.

Because of his musical talkent as well as his compassion and kindness, Fr. Deo was a charismatic and well-liked priest. Some church congregants enjoyed listening to his sermons so much that I noticed how they would smile whenever he was preaching as if they were also listening with their teeth as well. Fr. Deo delivered his sermons with a passion that was rooted in his firm belief in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

Why lie, I also liked Fr. Deo. Unfortunately, I got out of touch with him after he left Kiserian Junior Seminary in the late '90s or early 2000s (I can't recall the exact year he left). Sometime in 2014 after someone shared his email address with me, I sent him a message, hoping to reconnect with him. For some reasons I can't tell, he never replied to the two emails I sent him. Last year when I googled his name, I gathered he was posted to a church in the United States where he was eventually granted American citizenship. So America must now be benefiting from his enormous musical talent and his extensive experience as a chaplain.

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RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on a priest I will never forget, you might also enjoy another one on "The Day I Visited My Mentors" which I wrote sometime in 2018. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.