Cultural and Economic Diversity Award:
Hugo Kamya

Jay King

For outstanding work on culture and economic diversity.
Clinical service, training programs, community outreach, and research.

I would like to start by saying a few words about the person who is getting the award and then a few words about why the organization made a good choice when they nominated Dr. Kamya for this award.

Dr. Kamya was born in very humble surroundings in East Africa in a country that many of the natives pronounce Ooganda as in short for Buganda, the largest ethnic group when the country recaptured its independence in 1964. He was raised there along with 10 siblings, two sets of twins, and his mother and dad in a one room home that was approximately 10 feet by 10 feet. He has several siblings who have been to the states including a sister who has recently moved here and a brother, Ponsiano, who is probably more American that I am and can tell you every ball player on the Yankees and can tell you how many votes Bush needed to win the election that he lost in 2000. A few years ago Hugo built a new home next to his parents home which has 5 bedrooms and a deck that is 40 feet by 40 feet.

During the summer of 2002 I traveled with Dr. Kamya to his homeland and met his family and stayed with them for several weeks. My experience with them helped me to put into perspective who Dr. Kamya is, why he lives his life the way he does, and how he has become the right person for this award.

I grew up at a time when school children were told that Africa was a place where savages lived in the jungle and they were so poor that they had no food and no clothes and that when they got desperate they ate each other. So when you travel to a country that is described the way his country was described, the last thing most Americans expect is the extraordinary generosity of the Ugandan families. Especially the type of generosity that my family saw and especially when the people being generous had so much less materially than those on the receiving end of the generosity. Dr. Kamya is a living example of what his parents and the people of Uganda exemplified for my family and me.

Let me say a few words about his professional journey. He was a young adult and a student during a time when students were being persecuted, incarcerated and killed in Uganda. After his father mysteriously disappeared and was thought to be dead, Hugo survived by leaving his home country and going to Kenya to complete his education. He completed his training at the St. Augustine seminar in 1980 and went on to complete a diploma in philosophy and religious studies in 1983. He then came to the states and completed a divinity degree at Harvard University in 1987 and a Masters degree in clinical social work at Boston College in 1989. At that point he decided that graduate school was too much fun to stop so he went on to complete a Ph.D. in psychology in 1993 and joined the social work faculty at Boston College in the graduate school of social work after finishing his psychology course work. A few years and about a dozen taught courses and a dozen publications later, Dr. Kamya applied for and was awarded tenure and became Associate Professor Kamya in 2000. He has done a few things on the side while accumulating his academic achievements. They are far too numerous to list here today. There are a few that I believe are among his most cherished holdings and I will name a hand full of those. I will start with his daughters Elizabeth and Sarah, and of course his wife Nora who did most of the work to bring his daughters into their lives. In addition to his role as father and husband, he is an extraordinary source of pride to his father John and his Immaculate. He is also a source of pride to his brothers and sisters and he is an exemplary friend, mentor and colleague.

The award that Dr. Kamya will receive today honors achievements in the area of clinical service, training programs, community outreach, and research. Dr. Kamya has engaged in not one or two of these activities but in every single one of them. One of the roles that has become central to Dr. Kamya in recent history is the work he has done to facilitate the development of counseling services for the Trinity Church in Boston, which provides pro-bono counseling service to the urban poor. In addition Dr. Kamya has been working with immigrants and refugees and more recently he has been offering transition groups for boys from Sudan and Ethiopia. His work has expanded and now also includes boys from Somalia, Uganda, South Africa and other countries. Quietly embedded in this effort to help African boys adjust to life in the States, he has also instituted a computer exchange program that provides African youth with rebuilt computers that he ships from the States to Africa. This work has made a dramatic difference in the adjustments that these boys are trying to make between two profoundly different worlds. It is hard to describe the joy and the smiles that you see on the faces of the children in Uganda when they meet with the man that they know is responsible for the computers and other opportunities that have arrived for them from North America.

In addition to his work with African youth he has recently developed an exchange program between Boston College and some of the major universities and seminaries in Uganda. This program will facilitate an active, long-range, intellectual, and cultural exchange between the two countries around ideas and scholarship about HIV/Aids, family and pastoral counseling, theology, psychology and social work.

It probably goes without saying that Dr. Kamya has a long list of publications on subjects such as Spirituality, Immigration, HIV/Aids, Refugees, Narrative Therapy, Family Therapy, Inter-racial couples and on and on. At the bottom of his achievements he only speaks five languages, and his energy is driven by very serious long lasting ever-ready batteries. Please welcome the man. Rev. Dr. Hugo Kamya.