There's a stretch of wetland on the northern shore of Lake Victoria — Lake Nalubaale, as it's known locally, the source of the Nile — that most people passing through Uganda would never notice. Reeds, papyrus, a smear of mist at dawn. Herons picking their way through the shallows. It's the kind of place developers see and think “resort.” The kind of place a military planner sees and thinks “base.” And it's the kind of place a Buddhist monk sees and thinks something else entirely.

That monk is Bhante Buddharakkhita, and the wetland in question sits directly next to the Uganda Buddhist Centre, the small but stubbornly persistent community he founded twenty years ago near Entebbe. This year, as the centre marks its second decade, a group of teachers and longtime supporters is trying to raise nearly two million dollars to buy thirteen acres of that wetland — before someone else does.

Why This Piece of Land Matters

The plan, if the money comes through, is to build what organizers are calling the first retreat centre on the African continent constructed specifically to share the dhamma. Not a repurposed guesthouse. Not a wing tacked onto an existing temple. A purpose-built place where people can sit, walk, eat in silence, and stay long enough for something to shift.

That's a big claim, and worth pausing on. Africa has Buddhists — the community in South Africa is decades old, and there are pockets of practice from Senegal to Kenya — but a dedicated retreat centre, the kind of thing Westerners take for granted when they book a week at Spirit Rock or IMS, has not existed on the continent. If UBC pulls this off, they're building a piece of infrastructure the dharma world in Africa has never had.

The wetland matters for another reason too. It feeds the schools, the orphanage, and the villages that ring the centre. Fill it in, pave it over, put a resort or a barracks on top of it, and you don't just lose the birds. You lose the food security and water table that a lot of children depend on. So the fundraising pitch is really two pitches at once: preserve an ecosystem, and build a place where people can learn to sit with themselves.

Who Is Bhante Buddharakkhita?

If you haven't come across him before, the short version is this. He was born Steven Kaboggoza, into a Ugandan Roman Catholic family, and stumbled into Buddhism in 1990 while studying business in India. Two of his hostel-mates were Thai monks. He got curious. Then he met the Dalai Lama, and by his own account was “hooked.”

He was ordained in 2002 in San Jose, California, by Sayadaw U Silananda — making him one of the first African Buddhist monks anywhere. He then spent eight years training under Bhante Gunaratana, the Sri Lankan elder who wrote Mindfulness in Plain English, at the Bhavana Society in West Virginia. In 2005 he went home.

Going home was not simple. He's talked openly about the hostility he faced early on — local communities sometimes misread the robes, misread the mission, and on at least one occasion someone shot at him. He calls his approach “Afro-Dhamma,” a phrase he uses to describe what happens when traditional Theravada practice meets African culture, African trauma, and African ways of healing. It's not a marketing slogan. It's what twenty years of teaching in a country still working through its own history has actually looked like.

What UBC Has Built Over Twenty Years

The centre started in 2005 as a small meditation hall. It's grown into something more like a campus. There's a pre-school and primary school called the Buddhist Peace School. There's an African Buddhist High School. There's water infrastructure the surrounding community uses. There's medical outreach.

This matters because it complicates the story. UBC isn't a silent retreat compound sealed off from a village. It's woven into the village. The kids in the schools aren't all Buddhists — most aren't. The families using the wells aren't all Buddhists. When supporters talk about protecting the wetland, they're also talking about protecting a small ecosystem of services that a few thousand people rely on.

The other thing worth saying: this is a Buddhist project built by an African monk, teaching mostly Africans, in Africa. That's still rare enough to be worth naming out loud. A lot of the dharma that has crossed the ocean in the last fifty years has flowed one direction — Asia to the West, or West to Africa via Western teachers. UBC is a different current.

The Numbers, Plainly

Here's where things stand, as of the current campaign push:

• Asking price for the thirteen acres: $1.75 million.
• Total campaign goal, including legal fees and taxes: $2 million.
• Raised so far: roughly $781,888, which includes about $760,000 in pledges from anonymous donors.
• Deposit deadline (half the total): September 15.
• Balance due — the remaining $875,000 plus fees: November 15.

Those are real deadlines, not soft targets. If the deposit doesn't land in time, the parcel goes back on the open market, and the most likely buyers are the ones organizers have been trying to head off — resort developers or a military installation.

Why This Story Belongs in a Broader Conversation About Retreats

Most people reading this are probably weighing a retreat of their own — maybe an ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon, maybe a psilocybin container in the Netherlands, maybe a ten-day vipassana closer to home. The UBC story isn't directly about any of that. But it's connected, and here's how.

The retreat centres we take for granted — the ones with clean lodging, trained facilitators, medical protocols, and enough physical space to actually drop in — didn't appear by accident. Someone bought the land. Someone raised the money. Someone convinced a village council or a zoning board that this weird thing was worth protecting. Every retreat you might book anywhere in the world exists because a small group of stubborn people made it exist, usually against long odds.

UBC is that story happening in real time, on a continent that hasn't had its version of it yet. Whether or not you ever end up sitting in Uganda, the fact that the option might exist a few years from now is the kind of quiet expansion of the practice-verse that changes things over decades.

How to Help, If You Want To

The organizers have been careful to frame this as a “stretch gift” at whatever level is meaningful — a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand, both count. Because Bhante Buddharakkhita is a monk and doesn't solicit funds himself, the campaign is run by lay supporters through a GoFundMe page. Donations via donor-advised fund or ACH transfer go through the campaign organizers directly. A quick search for the Uganda Buddhist Centre expansion campaign will get you there.

If you're the kind of reader who's already spent time on the cushion — or who's considering a longer contemplative retreat as part of your own path, whether alongside plant medicine work or separate from it — this is one of those rare projects where a small contribution meaningfully changes what's possible for a lot of other people. And if broader retreat exploration is on your mind, a range of contemplative and plant-medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here.

The wetland has been there a long time. Whether it stays a wetland — and becomes, alongside it, a place where people learn to sit still — will be decided in the next few weeks.