I'm lucky enough to have been sent on a reporting trip last week to the beautiful country of Uganda, in central Africa. My China Daily colleague, Xiao Xiangyi, and I have been able see some of the dams, farms, and industrial parks being built by Chinese companies and entrepreneurs.

While driving back from the almost completed Isimba dam on the Nile River in the eastern part of the country, I saw a large crowd of people holding what looked like an outdoor festival in a village. Thinking I would just take a few photos, I asked the driver to stop.  

As I got closer, I could see that a Roman Catholic priest was holding an open-air mass, as lines of people waited for communion. I was surrounded by the incredibly beautiful African singing.

A man named Daniel, who is a teacher in the local school, explained to me that this was the funeral of an elder of the village. He invited Xiangyi and me to join in. Everyone else there was so warm and welcoming to two strangers who had just crashed a funeral. We met the ladies of the village gathered together preparing food for a festival and visit by the local bishop, scheduled for the next day. We were invited to have lunch with the priest.

After the service, the whole village joined in procession through some woods and fields to the burial place of the obviously much loved and respected elder. The whole time, we were enveloped by that other-worldly singing — so beautiful that I teared up.  

Busana village is poor, even by Ugandan standards. It has no electricity and no running water. It does not even have a well or a reliable nearby source of clean water. Life is hard there. But, the people do have a neighborliness, a feeling of brotherhood, which we seldom see in modern society.

Uganda reminds me very strongly of the southeastern part of the US when I was in elementary school, in the 1960s. It's not just that the landscape is similar — though it does look remarkably like north Florida, and the southern parts of Alabama and Georgia. If I didn't know where I was, I could easily be tricked into believing that I was driving down an old two-land highway in north Florida, not in central Africa.

More importantly, Ugandan culture seems very similar to Southern US culture, both white and black, from 60 years ago. I remember going to Sunday "dinners on the ground", where everyone gathered to cook and eat and talk for hours. Sometimes, I hated it as a child — I remember just wanting to go home — but I can now see the importance of such gatherings for a community. I'm not sure whether people still do this in the US, but my visit to the Ugandan village brought back many memories of my childhood.

In many material and social ways, there have been big improvements in the US since the 1960s. When I was a young child, few people had air-conditioning, TV was black & white with two channels, and, of course, computers were unheard of. Black people were discriminated against in horrible ways at that time.  

But, in other ways, the culture has deteriorated.  

The Amish are a religious group, mostly farmers in Pennsylvania and the Midwest states, who don't use modern technology. You can see their well-kept, productive farms if you visit the area around Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  For a long-time, I had a hard time understanding their rules. They will not own a car, but they are sometimes willing to ride in one. They don't own telephones, but they will borrow a neighbor's in an emergency. Some Amish communities allow their members to ride bicycles, others forbid it. 

It turns out that the logic of Amish rules is that they prohibit any technology that lessens the connectedness of the community. For example, they forbid car ownership, because all members of the community need to live close enough to help each other. 

Ugandan culture is far from perfect. I'm told that there is a lot of violence and high rates of deadbeat fathers. But, everyone who visits here comments on the warmth and honesty of the Ugandan people.

Modern technology has brought lots of benefits. But, my visit to the "dinner on the ground" in a Ugandan village reminds me that we have lost something important, too.

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