Divine Collision by Jim Gash

“Was I a do-gooder tourist, or was I willing to personally invest in the 16-year-old Ugandan prisoner  into whose eyes I was looking?” asks Jim Gash to himself in his new book Divine Collision: An African Boy, An American Lawyer, and Their Remarkable Battle for Freedom. Over the course of his career, Jim Gash has worked at one of the top law firms in the country and served as Dean of Students at Pepperdine University from where he graduated first in his class in 1993. Jim travelled to Uganda in 2010 on a juvenile justice project where he met Henry. Since then, he has returned to Uganda several times and in 2012, he became the Specialist Advisor to the High Court of Uganda. This book records the unlikely friendship between Jim and Henry and their perseverance in reforming the Ugandan criminal justice system. This book highlights the fact that relationships can surpass circumstance, culture and the cultural, social, and political walls we hide behind.