AN HOMAGE TO HOME
Canadian couple’s wedding honours Ugandan roots
When Lorna Mutegyeki came to Edmonton in 2005 from Uganda, Edward Mutegyeki was the first person she met.
“When I arrived at the airport, Edward was there to pick me up,” she says. “We had a mutual friend. His was the first face I saw.”
Lorna had come to study genetics at the University of Alberta, and Edward, who arrived from Uganda in 2000, was just finishing his accounting degree. They developed a close friendship, and started dating four years later.
In July 2014, after spending a year finding the right ruby and designing the right engagement ring (he knew Lorna didn’t like diamonds), Edward proposed after a dinner in the private Elevator Shaft room at Characters (characters.ca) restaurant on 105th Street downtown.
“I was expecting him to propose at any time, but I was shocked when he just knelt down in the street,” says Lorna, who is now starting an organization to help women in developing countries gain independence by making their own living.
By that time, they had been dating for several years. They’d already thought about their wedding and they knew one thing for sure: they were not going to get married in Uganda. Ugandan weddings were typically huge with hundreds of guests. Lorna and Edward were introverts and didn’t want strangers to be part of their special day.
“That was our mutual agreement,” Lorna says. “We always wanted a little, idyllic Greek or Italian island off somewhere, just us and very close family and friends.”
So, how, exactly, did they find themselves — two summers later — having not one, but two weddings in Uganda?
“When it came down to it, once we were going to get married and we actually said, ‘OK, time to pick the island!’ we gave it more thought,” Lorna says.
“We were born in Uganda and raised there. Canada is really home for us now, so we wanted to pay homage to where we came from and what our roots are. Now, we feel that we belong in Canada, and we just wanted to give those last respects to Uganda.”
Coincidentally, their parents were from the same region in Uganda.
“That’s actually weird,” Edward says.
“We are both from a place in the Western part of Uganda called Mbarara. It’s surprising that our parents have never met each other. Our parents’ villages and where they were born are so close to each other.”
“It’s nuts,” Lorna says. “We came to the opposite side of the world to end up marrying somebody from exactly where we came from.”
Planning a wedding in Uganda from Edmonton was a challenge — not just because of the physical distance.
“I think that was the most challenging period of both our lives,” Edward says. “Trying to plan a wedding from here. Having the different culture norms and different perceptions. Luckily, we had relatives there.”
“It was a lot of back and forth, because we were technically our own wedding planners,” Lorna says. “Back home, they do have wedding planners, but we couldn’t trust someone to put our vision in place, because it was so foreign. So it was us working with my sister on the phone, sending pictures, texting and talking to people on the phone.”
Their vision was to invite only their closest family and friends — ultimately 100 guests — and to have two ceremonies: both a traditional Ugandan one, and a Western Catholic one.
Traditionally, a Ugandan wedding ceremony takes three weeks.
In today’s Uganda, this long process of families meeting and negotiating and getting to know one another is often shortened and modernized.
Lorna and Ed squeezed the three weeks of action into one weekend.
“We did that in one weekend, an then the following week we got married the Christian way,” Edward
says.
In the week between the weddings, the bride and groom explored the country with some of their guests — 20 of whom travelled with them from Canada.
“We travelled through Western Uganda, went into the mountains, went gorilla trekking,” Lorna says.
For their Catholic wedding on July 30, they celebrated on a game reserve along the river Nile. The specific venue was Chobe Safari Lodge — which they chose both for its strict capacity (they wanted to limit the guests they could invite) and its remote location (no surprise guests turning up).
Their ceremony was in the morning, although Lorna was an hour late (“she really did put the Uganda into Uganda,” Edward jokes, referring to the country’s relaxed attitude toward time).
Lunch followed, then drinks and music by afro-jazz artist Isaiah Katumwa, who Lorna idolized since she was a child. The celebration continued into dinner, and was topped off with a disco.
“So basically, we partied from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m.,” Lorna says, at which point their guests stumbled to their lodge accommodations.
Whenever she got butterflies or “mini panic attacks,” all the bride needed to do to regain calm was look at her groom.
“I would see his face, and when he was right in front of me, I’d be like, ‘Yes! I know what’s going on here. I know what we’re doing.’”
By the end, the couple were so grateful that they’d put in the work for their Uganda celebrations, and even the bride and groom’s parents — who were initially troubled by the low guest count — were praising the wedding by the end.
It didn’t totally go off without a hitch. At one point, Lorna’s dress got left behind in the city, four hours away. And the decor wasn’t exactly what Lorna expected.
But those little things didn’t matter.
“When those moments came, I thought of all our friends who had come all the way to be in those moments with us; having the most important people right there with us in that moment. I can’t explain the feeling … How far they had to travel to be there and that they all came. It was so special and it was just the best feeling,” the bride says.
“At the end of the day, those people made the wedding. It’s not the clothes or decor or anything. It comes down to the people. That’s the lesson actually. It sounds cliché, but it was so true.”