Ugo’s memories of the Catholic missionaries on Ukerewe Island are not pleasant. He found them intolerant towards members of other Christian denominations, many of whom were Maria and Ugo’s friends. The missionaries preached that the only way to salvation was theirs, and the Protestants could have led them to perdition. On their arrival on the island they found that a special personal pew had been reserved for them, separate from those of the Africans. They immediately refused it.

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There was no running water on the island, and the missionaries did not allow anyone access to their well. Maria used to occasionally go out at night to steal their water to wash the nappies in. Eventually they got their own water tank.

Of course the missionaries did a lot of good: they offered education and medical facilities. However, Ugo began to feel that these services were just a means towards persuading the inhabitants to renounce millenary beliefs, traditions and habits, and he felt this was wrong.

Another example of what Ugo considers to be the un-Christian attitude of the missionaries: the Sisters in charge of the Dispensary where he worked, and where the patients had to pay a small fee, did not allow him to perform his first hare-lip operation until he personally paid the fee of 30 shillings that the patient (who was a catechist at the Mission) couldn’t afford. The result of the operation – there is ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographical evidence of this - was extremely successful. The Fathers and Sisters criticized him for the operation, because the catechist, who now had a decent face, took a second younger wife, a common practice on the island, which met with the missionaries’ disapproval.

One evening, after 6, Ugo was assisting a woman in difficult labour, helped by a German nurse, when the Mother Superior started knocking furiously at the door, shouting at his assistant because she was late for evening prayer.

Ugo and Maria had not gone to work in a Catholic Mission for religious convictions, but for an instinctive sensation that - instead of starting to work in private practice in the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, which would have been a much easier and remunerative solution of their financial problems – a new world, rich in precious values and genuine satisfactions, would have been open to them and their children on the island of Ukerewe.

Maria, a more pragmatic person than Ugo, had already more or less solved her existential problems, not worrying any longer about the fact that there were no answers. Ugo describes himself as ‘a naïve dreamer’ in his youth, and says that instead of beginning to reason around the age of sixteen, ‘like everybody else’; it took him until the end of his period on the island, when he was thirty, to lose faith and hope.

But aside from the negative experiences which caused him to lose his faith, his memories of that time are pleasant. He says he must have made a lot of errors in his work, because of his ignorance and lack of experience; but he always tried to make up for his failings with patience and good will.

And many patients were grateful to him. On one occasion, he performed a curettage on the wife of a school teacher, who had not had any children yet after many years of marriage. After the procedure, she became pregnant and had a baby. Her husband was very happy and wrote him a letter (in English, because he was a school teacher) saying at the end :'Thank you, doctor, you are the pioneer of my wife’s pregnancy!' After that he was often teased in a friendly way as the ‘pioneer’ of pregnancies. ‘And today, have you pioneered anybody else?’