PLANNED GIVING
LAYING THE
FOUNDATION STONES A young Jew from Uganda begins a year in San Diego l BY NATALIE JACOBS
PHOTOS BY LEETAL ELMALEH
The Cesna 127 – a dual engine plane with retractable landing gear – will be Armstrong's final conquest at SDFTI.
A
t one time, Israel-visionary Theodore Herzl proposed Uganda as the first site for the Jewish state. Although that didn’t happen, there continues to be a Jewish presence in the region, in the eastern Ugandan town of Mbale. Called Abayudaya, meaning “people of Judah,” there are only about 1,500 members left in this community. From 1986 to 2006, Uganda was besieged by militants from the Lord’s Resistance Army. The U.S. Department of State reports that at the height of the war in the region, this fundamentalist group was responsible for displacing nearly 2 million people. After moving 80 www.SDJewishJournal.com l April 2014
on from Uganda in 2006, it is reported that the group has settled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of South Sudan. In its wake, Uganda struggles to develop a modern economy built on a solid and reliable infrastructure. But one Abayudaya Jew is hoping to catalyze change, after he returns from the United States with a commercial pilot’s license.
OPPORTUNITY WHERE THERE WAS NONE Deb Plotnik met Gidongo Armstrong when she visited the Abayudaya in 2011. A year prior, she had started an organization called U-TOUCH to
create technology centers throughout Uganda, providing access to modern technologies as well as instruction on how to use them. When she was speaking with the town’s rabbi about her work, she explained that in order to create a U-TOUCH digital center for the Abayudaya, she’d need the help of a really smart local. Armstrong was the clear choice and the two made an immediate “soul connection.” How he got here last month and enrolled at San Diego Flight Training International, was a bit more complicated. As part of her work with U-TOUCH, Plotnik takes groups of “voluntourists” to Uganda during the summer to “engage with the people in the