AGelbert ASSERTION: Pastor Tendo 🕊️☝🏻 is the most admirable example of a true Christian that I have ever read about. Nov 11 2022 By Shaun Robinson
🚨 ‘A death sentence’: Deportation looms for Ugandan refugee living in Colchester
SNIPPETS:
After his parents’ death, Tendo said he and his six siblings moved into a shared room in Uganda’s capital city of Kampala. He took on odd jobs at night to pay his school fees and went on to graduate from high school and later, in 2010, from college.
While still in school, he started a charitable organization called Eternal Life Organization International Ministries that began to grow rapidly.
After graduating, Tendo was ordained as a Pentecostal 🕊️ minister ☝🏻 and traveled around to preach.The nonprofit organization works across the country’s civil society supporting formerly incarcerated people, raising money for those living in poverty, building hospitals and schools and supporting voting rights, among other activities, Tendo said.
In 2010, Eternal Life Organization International Ministries signed an agreement with the Ugandan government to provide social services. But that relationship began to sour the following year, Tendo said, when the nonprofit started offering civic education programs focused on increasing voter turnout, especially among young people. (More than half the country's population is under the age of 18, according to UNICEF.)
Tendo said those efforts hastened after Uganda’s 2011 presidential election. Museveni won 68% of the vote, but international observers questioned the fairness of his victory.
After that election, Tendo said, he was called into a meeting with a government minister who told him to stop his organization's civic education work. Tendo and other volunteers began to receive threats, he said, but didn’t take them seriously at the time.
One day the following April, that changed.Tendo was at a gas station on his way to work when two men, one brandishing a gun, approached. The men put a sack over his head, forced him into the trunk of their car, then drove him around for the rest of the day, he recalled.
When the sack was pulled off, Tendo said, he was in a room that he would come to understand was in a makeshift prison dubbed, ironically, a “safe house.”
Two guards began to slap him, demanding that he tell them about his organization’s work.
Speaking last week at his home in Colchester, Tendo held up his left hand to show
two severed fingers. The 👿 guards cut them off with wire cutters, he explained, leaving him in
too much pain to speak to them.
Tendo then stuck out another finger. “
They smashed this finger and picked the fingernail out while I was watching,” he recalled. “I never thought that it would even come back.”
He recounted the ordeal matter-of-factly, betraying little emotion.After being in custody for about a week, he said he recognized one of the guards as a commander of the “Black Mamba,” a Ugandan-government sponsored anti-terrorist organization.
At one point, Tendo said,
🦍 guards put him in a pit with a live python that whipped his body with its tail, leaving him badly bruised. He was released about three months later with a warning to “stop his political activities,” he told the federal immigration judge.
Tendo didn’t heed the warning, saying in an interview he wouldn’t have even known how to. “They kept asking me stupid questions that I did not have answers to,” he said.
When officers raided Tendo’s office the following year, he stated in an appeal of the immigration judge’s decision, they told Tendo that he was going to be investigated for “trying to take down the government.”
According to Tendo, his organization continued its civic education work
for the next several years, and he continued to be arrested and tortured 🥵. At one point,
officers hung him from a board with a brick tied to his genitals, he said, leaving him there until he bled. He was doused with cold water and pepper spray; he was shot in the leg.
😱 ... ...
In an appeal, Tendo’s late attorney, Lisa Brodyaga of Texas, wrote that additional evidence of the danger Tendo would face in Uganda emerged after the judge’s decision. Early on Christmas morning in 2019, Brodyaga stated in court filings,
Tendo’s twin sister “was brutally attacked”by 🦍 government forces who were looking for Tendo. But once an 👿
immigration judge makes an adverse determination of someone’ credibility, it can be almost impossible to overturn through the appeal process, said Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College who has served as an expert witness in more than 100 asylum cases from Uganda and Cameroon.
Moreover, she said, asylum seekers’ testimony can sometimes seem unbelievable to those who don’t necessarily have expertise in a given country or part of the world.
“We don't want to believe that human beings can commit such horrific things on other human beings,” Dicklitch-Nelson said, but, “it's amazing how
creative human beings are in
torturing one another. And I think that is a hurdle in and of itself.”
The detention center where Tendo was held, Port Isabel, has been criticized for appearing and operating like a prison, even though most detainees there have never been charged with a crime. Tendo said he often felt like a prisoner, too.
In court documents, Tendo’s lawyers describe how his diabetes spiraled out of control due to the
inadequate medical care he received at Port Isabel:
He went blind in one eye, began to lose vision in the other, suffered numbness and tingling in his extremities, and had recurring boils on his body. The disease also decimated his immune system, and his lawyers said
he was denied many of the accommodations he would have needed to stay there safely, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Still 🕊️, Tendo said he regularly held church services inside the center that drew scores of attendees. He counseled other detainees and gave them advice for their own court proceedings.
Security guards at the facility — the same ones who Tendo alleged mistreated him — even came to him, in private, to get counseling as well, he said. 
Full article: https://vtdigger.org/2022/11/11/a-death-sentence-deportation-looms-for-ugandan-refugee-living-in-colchester/
