Mushobozi (in his white robe) at a mission church in northwest Tanzania. The occasion is a wedding Mass. Photograph: Courtesy of Fr. Leopold Mushobozi

St. Josephine Bakhita parish occupies the remote and rugged northwestern corner of Tanzania, bordering Burundi and Rwanda. Named for the Sudanese slave who in 1890 became a Canossian nun, it was established in 2011, with Fr. Leopold Mushobozi, fresh from the School of Theology and Minstry’s MA program in pastoral ministry, at its head.

The parish’s 150-square-mile footprint takes in 15 small mission churches, as well as five public schools, a government-run health center, and a prison, all of which the Tanzanian Mushobozi, who was ordained in 2008, visits regularly. The area’s population is near 22,500; some 40 percent are Catholic (there are also Lutherans, Muslims, and Anglicans). Subsistence farming prevails. In the 1990s, more than a million refugees swarmed the territory from war-torn Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Perhaps 2,000 remain after a 1997 repatriation effort. Catholics call Mushobozi “Paroko,” the Swahili term for pastor; to other locals he is “Fr. Leo.”

Mushobozi’s days begin and end with prayer and include at least one Mass (three on Sunday). Much of the rest of his time, he says, is spent in meetings, whether at the parish seat in Kasulo, where a one-story brick rectory with offices is nearing completion, or “under the trees”: premarital seminars; sessions with married couples to “settle their misunderstandings”; conversations with youth groups about secularism, drugs and alcohol, and HIV/AIDS, which has ushered in a “rapid increase of orphans,” he says. Then there are the meetings on parish business, with committees for finance, construction, vocation, and peace and justice. For special gatherings they may “slaughter a goat or two” from the small farm that Mushobozi arranged for the parish to buy.

Mushobozi travels the parish in a white Toyota pickup, the gift of a church outside Boston. “One day I had to leave my vehicle in the bush and walk for half an hour,” he says. “When I got back I found that passing elephants had knocked down trees, which had hit the truck and also blocked the road.” At times, the truck serves as a community ambulance, with Mushobozi at the wheel.

The land is fertile and a river, the Ruvubu, “flows throughout the year,” Mushobozi says. “But the people lack the skills in subjects like small-scale farming, hydropower, or microfinance to put these resources to use. . . . Ignorance is the greatest challenge, even to evangelization.”

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