Uganda

Today I visited the Unyama Camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). IDPs get a softer rap than refugees in the press and in the aid world. But that’s misguided. Internally simply refers to the fact that the human flows don’t cross a national border. If they crossed a border in a similar situation they’d be refugees. Displaced actually means sufficiently terrified for your life that you give up your land, your livelihood, your kids’ access to schools, and you move – by truck, by motorcycle, by bike, or most often by foot – closer to security, which in this case means closer to Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Force barracks.

Megan had organized a visit through a local friend, but as we arrived I remembered an email I’d received suggesting that camps should not be visited without a UN security detail. But we were already there, and Megan had done this before. We hopped off the boda bodas – 50cc motorcycles that ferry everyone in this region – and started looking for the camp leader. Megan wanted permission to videotape camp conditions to better increase awareness at home.

Our local guide, a twenty-something former LRA abductee named Sandy, led us in among the huts. The circular mud-brick, grass-roofed homes stretched to thousands. There are over 1.5 million internally displaced people in Northern Uganda, only about 11,000 of them in Unyama.

It was near 4:00 in the afternoon, but the equatorial sun still beat mercilessly. We wound between huts, past okra and beans drying in the sun, astonishing locals with our meager understanding of Luo, “Kopano, opwoy, arimabe…” We were getting nowhere. We stopped in dust among a group of huts that repeated itself endlessly in each direction. Sun, dust, Kopano, opwoyo, arimabe, sun, dust, huts. Sandy conferred with a young woman: where is the camp leader? He convinced her to take us there. Megan gave her a bar of soap.

Our new guide led us to a stop. She couldn’t find the leader. The pack of children following us had grown. Megan gave out candy; she had a full bag to share. But there were too many, and lollipops are too exciting. Where babies have swollen bellies and walk naked, angry sobs soon pierced the camp quiet not because of the challenges of daily living but – there were not enough sweets for everyone.

Sandy dispersed the children with orders in Luo. While the candy was distributed we had met a camp councilor, an individual who has an official dispute-resolution role among the people living there. He offered to guide us through. When Megan explained she had a letter from the Regional District Commissioner, he said she should be able to video.

The councilor, David, was tall and thin, with hands that never stopped shaking, but his eyes focused intently on me when we spoke, and he was deeply thankful when I told him our hope in being here was to increase awareness about Northern Uganda. He had been living in the camp since 1996, when it began to exist. David led us to a camp market area. Between two rows of huts stretched vendors selling tomatoes, grilled corn, sardines, cooked fish – anything that might be produced or sold within this small economy.

As we were halfway through the market row a man came purposefully toward us from among the huts. “This is the camp leader,” David said quickly. Megan stopped filming, and was immediately peppered with questions. In the same moment, I’d noticed a tall woman moving our direction through the market. She was singing and dancing erratically.

Megan – always quick to charm on first encounters – was swiftly explaining her purposes to the camp leader when the dancer halted near our group, threw down what she’d been carrying, began screaming and crying, and tore her shirt off her scarred body.

The camp leader was unfazed. He removed glasses from his shirt pocket to read Megan’s letter. A crowd watched the hysterical woman. She gathered up the shirt she’d thrown off and picked up two small bags, then moved closer to us. Pine cones fell out of the first bag as she overturned it, orange peels and more organic matter came from the second. She threw all this down near our group, stood tall again and screamed. David muttered “mentally disturbed.” The camp leader walked slowly away. Our group followed. The woman followed.

We shared information. I stayed quiet as Megan flattered and joked. The woman threw down her shirt, pine cones, orange peels, screamed, chanted. We walked away. The camp leader was steadily friendlier. He explained the official process that should be followed: since Megan has the RDC letter, she should begin every camp visit with a meeting with the county leader, then the sub-county leader, then the camp leader, to be certain to ascertain all the necessary approvals. Yes, thank you, she said, she’d be sure to do that in the future. And we could film, just not near the army barracks, or we’d get into trouble with the military.

We walked on. We have footage: of fertile ground trampled to unyielding dust due to too much, too congested human traffic; of people sitting restlessly under hot sun, wishing for safe return to their fields and homes, but too terrorized by a militia of children and their abductors to yet go home; and of the temporary school, built to paste together a semblance of an education for the displaced children, where 1500 students share 10 teachers.

I’d been in another camp two days previously. There were many similarities: too many people, huts too small, few employment opportunities, dust, sun, hunger. But that camp, Koro, differed from Unyama in a few important ways. First, it was about half the size, which made the pressing issues involved seem more addressable. Second, it was south of Gulu on the main road to Kampala, so more commerce did move through and around the area. Even though most people in Koro still didn’t have access to employment, there was a more palpable sense that it might be possible. And third, very importantly, Invisible Children (www.invisiblechildren.com) have two small centers dedicated to their bracelet campaign in Koro Camp.

The bracelet campaign grew out of the Invisible Children film. People in the camps make the bracelets and get a very good local wage. Film viewers and other supporters in the US buy the bracelets, and extra proceeds go to support more scholarships for kids in school here. It’s very small – there are just a few dozen people employed by the program in the Koro camp, but it’s vitally important for everyone involved, and its effects are growing. One of the bracelet makers has already saved enough money to open a small kiosk, broadening local economic opportunities.

A cousin sent me an email yesterday saying she just bought two bracelets. All these small acts go great distances together, and the purchase of two bracelets produces enough revenue to go a very long way in Uganda. Thank you.

Small travel-related update for family members who ask to be kept abreast of such things: I’m leaving Gulu on Saturday for Kampala. Monday the 19th I head to Bukoba, Tanzania, and on the morning of the 20th I will travel from Bukoba to a rural hospital Amizade (www.amizade.org) has worked with for several years. After two days there I’ll travel with the Amizade group across Tanzania, through the Serengeti to Arusha, arriving on the evening of the 26th. I expect internet access through many of those days to be limited at best.

10,000.
25,000.
50,000.
These are the estimates I’ve seen for the number of children abducted in this war in Northern Uganda. This morning I met with Robert, Program Director at GUSCO, Gulu Support the Children Organization, who said 25,000 was most likely accurate. GUSCO, he explained, has already worked to rehabilitate over 7,000 returning children. World Vision, he also knew, has seen more than 9,000 others. 50,000, he thought, was far too high an estimate. But the dozens I saw scattered through GUSCO’s reception center this morning would be too many even if they alone were the only such children in the world.

In a single fenced compound, about one hundred yards wide and fifty deep, one massive white canvas tent housed bunk beds for scores of boys, another held the same for as many girls. The tents sagged under a thick brown layer of dust; United Nations was printed on the side. International aid was apparent elsewhere in the compound, which included a small building housing a kitchen, storehouse, and office, and another little structure for classrooms. Boxes of vegetable oil marked USA were stacked in the corner of a room otherwise filled with sacks of rice from the UN World Food Program.

Yesterday I asked a group of men in the community of Layibi what the most effective aid organizations in the area were. I’d expected them to answer with the name of a local outfit that would necessarily know the communities and culture better, or perhaps with a large international nongovernmental organization like World Vision, which should have a clear mission and focus. In addition to all the negative press on the UN coming from the US right, many of my left-leaning friends who work in international development have been exasperated by the hulking bureaucracy’s inefficiencies. But without hesitating the men said World Food Program. That’s the United Nations’ World Food Program. They were quick to point out why they believed it’s most effective: “Because they have the most money.”

That’s a decent point. In a region where over 1.5 million people have been displaced over twenty years of sporadic fighting, it takes a lot of resources to feed everyone. Many people still work to farm plots near their temporary huts, and even more commute many miles on foot everyday to farm near their previous homes, but they must hurry back before dark. Some people are now too far from their homes to make the commute, and most have seen their food production drop with the daily hours dedicated to walking, so the UN is supplementing these – over 1.5 million – innocent civilians.

And among those supplemented were the children at GUSCO, where two toddlers looked at me quizzically from the edge of the girls’ tent. I asked Anthony, the social worker I spoke with there, why children so young would be abducted. He told me they were children born in the bush, children whose mothers were abducted to be the wives of rebel soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Yesterday I met three other children born to an LRA soldier in the bush. Their father is the wanted war criminal and rebel leader Joseph Kony. The oldest boy, 7, clearly had his father’s eyes. But the similarities end at facial qualities. When he wasn’t shyly turning away he was smiling kindly. Their mother, Lilly, now worries mostly about how she’ll support the kids. She was in the bush for fourteen years. She was trained as a soldier at the age of 8, became a teenager, was selected to be one of Kony’s many wives, had three children, and was captured by the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Force in November of last year.

The Ugandan Amnesty Commission gives returning abductees 260,000 Ugandan Shillings to get their lives started again. That’s about 130 US Dollars. GUSCO’s rehabilitation program typically lasts 21 days, with three follow-up visits through the following year. And some of the returnees receive vocational training. Lilly hadn’t yet received any training, but was hoping for a 9-month business course. The effectiveness of that strategy seems questionable, even if it comes to fruition, as she hasn’t had any formal schooling since she was abducted at eight years of age. For the time being, she said, she had used some of the money to rent a hut and was using the remaining part for a small business selling charcoal.

The situation here is clearly stark. That’s part of the reason why the American college students who founded the Invisible Children movement have received such a strong response: young people know injustice when they see it. The three guys who started Invisible Children filmed a documentary about child soldiers here and began showing it in the states in June 2004. The audience pressed them for ways to address the issues, and over the last three years Invisible Children has developed into an international service and advocacy organization that is sponsoring over 300 children in school here and raising awareness about the issue internationally. They’ve shown the film to US Senators, State Department officials, and USAID representatives, and they continue to press for more resources on the ground and more international pressure to end the war.

Part of the genius in the Invisible Children movement is how effectively they’ve embraced youth idealism through existing organizations. They started with churches – many of the core group members are Christian – and they’ve now shown the film at synagogues, mosques, colleges and universities as well. Young people are literally dropping everything and traveling around the world because of the film. While I was talking with three Invisible Children representatives here they received a visit from Amy Hampton, a twenty-ish woman from Dallas, Texas, who had seen the film in a friend’s dorm room at UT-Austin.

She tried to volunteer to work for Invisible Children here. But they’ve been backlogged – they currently have four people in a San Diego office dedicated almost exclusively to answering emails, and their inbox still almost never drops under 1,000 messages. She felt, strongly, she’d been called as a Christian to take action. So she didn’t wait. She found some missionaries working farther north and has arrived “just to do whatever I can, to love them, serve them, do Christ’s work in the world.”

Heads nodded up and down around our table. The idea of Christian service has been central to each of their journeys to Gulu. But, they agreed, the movement as a whole has been careful not to be exclusively Christian. Adam Fink, Invisible Children’s Education Director, said that he was able to show the film to friends who wouldn’t have viewed it if the focus has been exclusively Christ-centered. And the movement, the purpose – helping these children – has benefited from their pluralism. Katie Scott, Invisible Children’s Gulu Office Manager, said that one of her biggest supporters is a Jewish woman who was moved by the film. She provided financial sponsorship for Katie’s work.

A call to service is central to the presence of most – if not all – of the white people in the area. I showed the Invisible Children film on Pitt’s campus in March. Peter Otika-Okema, a Pitt graduate and former resident of this region, introduced the film. Megan Young was in the audience, and she decided she would do whatever she could to help this summer. She teamed up with Peter, who is also the founder and director of the Africa Project, a Pittsburgh-based effort to raise awareness about the war and offer sponsorship for children to complete school in Gulu.

Megan is now in here, writing reports for GUSCO, collecting abductees’ stories for a book that Peter is assembling, and documenting the effects of the war. Megan paid for her plane ticket, bought candies and soaps to share with people she meets, and personally decided to give each interviewee about ten dollars for their trouble, which is a substantial economic boost here. Megan is not rich. Like many young Americans, she’s fully saddled with over $20,000 in student loan debt.

But here it is clear that we all have a great deal, and a great deal to give. Another group initiated by American college students, UgandaCan, lobbies for more effort to end the war and help these children. Please visit their website at www.ugandacan.org if you’d like more information on the policy side. If you’d like to support Peter and Megan’s work to increase awareness and raise funds for education for young people in Northern Uganda, please visit http://www.africaproject.net/page4.html for donation information. To learn more about Invisible Children, check www.invisiblechildren.com, or GUSCO: www.gusco.org.