Governor Bill Ritter’s African Journey

By James Ainsworth

Father Bill Morel believes it was divine intervention that led Bill Ritter and his wife Jeannie to become lay missionaries at the Mongu nutrition center in Zambia, Africa, in August 1987. As a head administrator of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Father Morel was responsible for the religious order’s missions in Africa and other parts of the world, and yet his organization had never accepted a lay couple as part of its work before. But the future Colorado governor and his wife would prove to be an extraordinary exception.

Morel first met Ritter when the latter was an idealistic high school student coming to San Antonio, Texas to study at St. Anthony’s, a Catholic high school for young men considering becoming missionaries and priests. Ritter stayed at the school for his freshmen and sophomore year, and though he eventually decided to follow a secular path, he was deeply impressed by his mentors. Nearly 20 years after his seminary experience, Ritter felt a strong spiritual urge for service. He called Morel with a special request.

“He called and said, ‘Father Bill, I don’t know if you remember me, but you taught me as a sophomore. I don’t want you to interrupt me, because I have something to say all at once, or I won’t have the courage to say it,’” Morel said, recalling Ritter’s nervous voice over the phone. “’I’m married to Jeannie and we have a one year-old child and we want to work as lay missionaries in Zambia, with Oblates of Mary Immaculate.’”

Ritter didn’t know that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate did not work with lay couples; he also had no idea that Morel had received an unusual letter from the Bishop of Zambia that very day. The Bishop’s letter explained that a very important nutrition center in Zambia needed new leaders, and the Bishop requested a lay couple. Morel was stunned.

“To me it was perfectly clear – I had never in my life seen such a clear example of God intervening in kind of a coincidental way,” Morel said.

After he told Ritter about the letter, Morel declared that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were going to change their rules, despite their usual concerns about the complications of housing and accommodating lay missionary couples. The Ritters were going to see their wish come true.

While going through a year of training and evaluation, the Ritters sold their house and most of their possessions in preparation for their three-year missionary service in Africa . It would prove to be an indelible experience. They were profoundly impacted by witnessing crushing poverty, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, horrible diseases and malnutrition and experiencing beautiful traditional cultures and the great love and dignity of the Zambian people.

The Oblates mission was in the town of Mongu, the capital of the Western Province of Zambia. In reality, the provincial “capitol” was little more than an isolated back-country hamlet.

“The paved streets were probably only a mile long through Mongu town. Most of the people there lived in villages with thatched huts,” Ritter recalled, adding that there were only a few other expatriates in the area. “We were saturated by Zambian friends, Zambian workmates and Zambian culture.”

Ritter said the mission involved 45 “bush depots” that been established for distributing food to rural villages. He and Jeannie created more depots and worked on diversifying the mission’s activities to stimulate economic development and help the mission achieve sustainability. They ran a nutrition education program for village mothers, set up a poultry program, expanded a fisheries project and sold fishing nets to fishermen along the Zambezi River.

Ritter estimated that the mission moved 60 tons of agricultural commodities per month between Mongu, the rural village depots and Lusaka, Zambia ’s capitol. Through buying and selling, Ritter was able to raise a cash fund that was eventually used to build rice mills, a significant expansion of a rice project that Japanese aid workers had introduced 10 years earlier.

“Today it functions as a cooperative and outpost that helps in agricultural economic development and that was part of our vision,” Ritter said. “We began thinking about it in broader terms than just feeding people; we began thinking about it in terms of economic development. That was a really important part of us doing the right thing.”

Despite Ritter’s success with the Oblates mission, he was dismayed by many of the overwhelming needs. He had arrived at a time when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to make an impact, and the rapid spread of the disease was disheartening.

“The interesting thing about sub-Saharan Africa is you can work really hard on health and nutrition issues, but with something like AIDS, as much as you wind up doing, you are (only) keeping the score down, unless you engage in other kinds of prevention work,” Ritter points out. “But what I always say – and this is absolutely true – what may be even more clear to me than the devastating affects of poverty, disease and AIDS is the grace with which these people handled all that.”

Beyond fulfilling Christian service work and providing tangible aid to the region, the Ritters’ experience in Zambia had a lasting effect on their family. When they arrived in Mondu, Ritter’s eldest son, Augustine, was a year and four months old; their second son, Abraham, was born in Zambia in June 1988; and by the time they left in June 1990, Jeannie was pregnant with her third son, Sam. Augustine played almost exclusively with Zambian children and was deeply affected on a subconscious level. Ritter said he loves to tell a story about how his son was somewhat confused when he returned to Colorado.

“I have 10 brothers and sisters, and they all have children, so he has all these cousins who came in the first few days we were home and they just mauled him. And he looked at me after we had been home three days and he said, ‘Dad, are we white?’” Ritter said with a chuckle. “It’s a great story, if you think about it. It speaks to the innocence of childhood. It never had occurred to him that in spite of the fact that he was white – he was blond-haired and blue-eyed, with a light skin tone – it hadn’t occurred to him that he was different from all of his (African) playmates.”

By the time the Ritters returned from Africa, Augustine had acquired a British accent with a hint of an African Bantu dialect. Augustine lost his accent over time, but his father said he believes that all of his children were affected by the family experience in Africa, which had “some kind of positive impact on the breadth of their thinking.”

Abraham recently returned to Africa, visiting Ethiopia with the Four Quarters for Kids program, run by Noel Cunningham, the owner of Strings restaurant.

Ritter keeps up with political events in Africa, particularly the situation in Darfur, Sudan, civil unrest in Zimbabwe, the ongoing conflict the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the International War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha on the genocide in Rwanda. Beyond his faith and concern for Christian social justice issues, Ritter said his experience affected his view of political leadership.

“I think that with all that I’ve seen in the way of devastation and the really serious crises that I’ve witnessed, I have some perspective,” he said. “We have serious issues here I’ll have to handle as governor… But I think I have some perspective and it gives me some ability to remain calm as we walk through some of the difficult issues we face as a state.”

The governor added, “Zambians are people who have a different pace than the Western pace. While I work hard and work long days, there is something I think to being more focused on trying to do the right thing rather than the quick thing. And that I think has always been a help and a benefit to me.”