East Africa and Beyond

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.

Experience makes ideas authentic – and makes statistics either increasingly real or entirely dubious. The CIA says the average age in Uganda is 15. Today I met two sisters in the Otika family who, together, care for twenty-five children. Some of the children are theirs, others are left by deceased parents who fell victim to AIDS, war in the North or another unnecessary, untimely end. Fifty percent of Ugandans are under the age of 14. Such is the demographic of many poor countries, and caring for so many children makes moving forward difficult.

Yet the sisters I met do work to move forward. Emma works everyday except Sunday, twelve hours each day, in a store in Gulu that sells school supplies. She uses her earnings to pay for someone to watch her youngest children and to send the others to school. Joyce works at the local Catholic school as a teacher, sending her own kids to even better boarding schools in the capital of Kampala. But both the sisters have HIV, a disease that of course will likely bring them an early death. And information that suggests the CIA’s numbers on HIV in Uganda (4.1% of the population in 2003) are off. Of course, I could have simply happened to meet two people entirely unrepresentative of the whole, but that would speak to the manner in which statistics can mislead as well. For these two women and the twenty-five children in their care, Uganda’s HIV rate, whatever it is, is a vital issue.

I met these two women through my acquaintance with their brother Peter, who came to Pittsburgh as an asylum seeker, then fleeing government persecution and rebel violence due to his reporting for one of Uganda’s newspapers. Today I also met their mother, who has a faint scar stretching between her right ear and her nose, marking where government troops slashed her after killing one of her sons and leaving her to die in their burning home.

And they welcomed us enthusiastically – there is another Pittsburgher here, Megan Young, who has been collecting stories on behalf of Peter’s organization. They greeted us with open arms and treated us to great generosity. Much of the community came out to meet us. We ate a lunch of chicken, rice, malakwang (a local green), ground nuts, and boo (pronounced bow, another local green) with ant (yes, ant). The children gathered around us, happy to practice English (they speak Luo as a first language and learn English at school) and simply stare at white folks. We shared candy with them.

Emma walked us across the community to an open space where chairs and mats had been set out. We sat on the chairs with a group of adult men, most of whom were teachers. The children sat staring on the mats. We talked about Peter, a few of them were related to him, the World Cup, and the ongoing war. They showed me malakwang, boo, and simsim in the garden. One showed us into his hut. It was late afternoon, and we were again served food. This time we received sodas, beans and cornbread. Emma told us she’d never received a visit from an American before.

They all told us that what they’d like to share with the world most is their desire for peace in their region, and their desire to simply work their land and get access to education for their children. That, when I’m not writing here and learning more from them, is precisely what I’ll work on.

The first leg has been all travel, confirming my idiocy at looking at an African map in America and simply connecting the dots. Africa is huge, the second largest continent in the world. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone is nearly as large as all of Western Europe. And the roads are rough.

I got on a plane in New York on Sunday the 4th, near 5:30pm. Exhausted from a heavy night of celebrating an uncle’s birthday (long after he’d left the party), I fell to sleep before takeoff, but was up again after only half an hour. Wired, I read through the Sunday New York Times and – unable to get cranberry juice – settled for red wine. We went up past Boston, shot out from Nova Scotia, passed under Greenland and Iceland. I finished Aiden Hartley’s The Zanzibar Chest then fell to sleep again before THWACK! – a stewardess’s cart hit the seat next to mine. I looked across the aisle and out to a European sunrise.

From Switzerland I flew south over the Mediterranean, the Sahara, The Great Rift Valley, and into Dar es Salaam. I slept, then woke to see the Alps. I slept, and peered down over a patchwork of farms. On next waking, the blue med, then islands, then continuous tan beneath a hard row of clouds, desert giving way to brown scrubby trees, a massive river cutting through the brown – the Nile – with clumps of life on either side. Finally the desert gave way to patches of green, in ever larger clumps, then covering to the horizon.

I got my visa in the Dar airport and headed toward the taxi stand. The guidebooks tell you Dar is dangerous; not to trust a soul, to be on the lookout, and to always know the location of your valuables. I gave the taxi driver the name of a hostel that I actually hadn’t been able to confirm reservations from before leaving, and told him they were expecting me. The city was dark, with minimal streetlights. Roads were dirt and dust, and businesses were only behind security fencing. The hotel did not have space. The second hotel did not have space. I saw no white people. I wondered if I would be able to get dinner. The third hotel had space, for about $12 for the night. I tipped the taxi driver generously for his extra running around (we had agreed upon a fair at the airport), and went directly to my room.

I wasn’t yet comfortable with the idea of walking through Dar, and I didn’t want to pay to ride around in a taxi. I ate trail mix in my room and went to sleep. I woke extremely early, read, and heard the Muslim call to prayer at 5 am. It dominated the city for a solid 15 minutes. After breakfast I met two Swedish guys who were also headed for the bus station. We shared a cab and I got on a bus to Arusha, Tanzania. After my day of flying it was ten hours on the bus. I kept sliding in and out of sleep, mistaking dreams for reality, and feeling fully confused. I blamed it on exhaustion, but later remembered the malaria drug I had taken the night before is associated with vivid dreams and hallucination.

Halfway through the trip, at a bathroom stop along the road, I met a Peace Corps volunteer from a bus headed the other way. We met only because we were white. That’s the whole reason she came up to me. She could have asked any other person how long our leg of the journey had been, but she chose me. In South America, I’m able to blend in. In Africa, whiteness has meaning that I’ve never before experienced.

The road passed through lush open plain, spreading across the horizon, but the mountains were quickly visible. Tanzanians were hard at work: transporting large bags of crops on the backs of 1950s –style bicycles, selling food and drink to passing buses at brief stops, running in groups after taxi cabs that arrive at the bus stations – simply to get the ticket sale.

Arusha, at under 200,000 people, is about a tenth of the size of Dar, and when I arrived I felt it would be navigable. I took a taxi to Hotel Flamingo, where singles were unavailable but – still nervous about ever looking as if I don’t know where I’m going – I chose to pay the $15 for a double. Breakfast each of those first two days came with the hotel, and each day I also skipped lunch, uncertain about the long bus rides with unpredictable bathroom access. That night I wandered Arusha a bit and had an American dinner at a place that clearly caters to the Safari crowds that come through the area (strawberry shake, fries, cheeseburger).

I fell to sleep early, and woke again at 2am. I read and exercised. The call to prayer came at 5. This was becoming a routine. At 8:30 I got the bus headed toward Nairobi, Kenya. Soon after we passed out of town I saw small groups of Masai people leading goats and cattle out into a vast green-brown valley ringed by distant mountains. Near 10:30, there was a bang, followed by rapid thwopping. We’d blown a tire. Everyone filed out into a hot, sandy landscape peppered with Acacia trees. Beyond the tire, we needed a new part. The driver and his crewman flagged a passing car and sent someone back to town.

Three Masai boys eventually showed up and headed toward me and an Australian. The Aussie began taking pictures of them, and they seemed quite interested, so a I snapped a few photos of them looking at their faces in his digital display. Later they asked – In broken English – for money for the pictures I’d taken. I asked why, and didn’t part with any cash.

An hour or so later, we filed back on the bus and were soon at the border. I got a visa, traded money, and was waiting near the empty bus when a Rav 4 with two young white women in it drove quickly up to the customs office. The Land Rover in front of them started moving backward. The blond driver honked, stopping the Safari vehicle, and jumped out of the car to dart into the office. I was profoundly jealous of their vehicle and, it appeared, the speed with which they were about to move through the border zone. They shot back out, and headed down to the visa office. I looked after them, angry for not at least having said hello.

I sat there stewing, and eventually hopped up to quickly walk the 50 meters toward their car. I saw them come out of the office. They were still moving fast, making no eye contact. If I spoke up they’d ignore me – the currency and food hawkers at the borders are always yelling for attention. They were in the car. “Excuse me!” Nothing. Their hands went out to pull in the doors. “Excuse me!” The blond turned, “hello.”

Quickly and incoherently, I strongly hinted that I’d love a ride. “Are you stranded?” the blond said. “Well, not exactly stranded,” I replied, “but I could really use a ride.” I grabbed my bag from the bus and ran back, hopping into the back seat. I had my laptop with me and, with all of the crime warnings about travel in the region, felt myself begin to relax for the first time.

Kate and Maile (my-lee) will remain forever angels in my mind. If there’s an afterlife, they get it. I hadn’t been sure exactly where I’d stay in Nairobi (dubbed “Nairobbery in the travel books), but Kate, who works for an international aid organization, offered that I could freshen up at her place before moving on. I eventually stayed on the daybed in the living room, and sampled a little bit of expatriate life in Nairobi, going to an Italian restaurant that night with the two of them and Kate’s roommate Sarah.

The next day I was able to leave my bags in their apartment as I explored the city. I walked through downtown, picking up the bus ticket to Kampala, Uganda for that night, finding the electrical outlet adapter I needed, buying two books and checking the internet. Very recently the city has worked to crack down on crime in the downtown section where I was and, within reason, I basically felt comfortable. I still stuck out, and I still had a few people approach me with fraudulent conversation topics in an effort to lead me away, but I would gladly return to spend time there. I grabbed a coffee at Nairobi Java House and, in a bow to British influence in the region, had a cheese pie.

Later that day I was sick a few times and, assuming I’d eaten or drunk something bad, I again fasted for the rest of the day. I had a twelve hour bus trip to Kampala that night. After saying goodbye to the Nairobi crowd I headed to the Scandinavia bus terminal. The Scandinavia bus line is among the best in the region, and essentially operates vehicles equivalent to old greyhounds, without bathrooms. The bus was an hour late arriving, but for entertainment I met an Imodium-popping Australian in the terminal who told me that it was a good time to be traveling alone, at least for him, because his girlfriend might not understand his deep need to watch all the World Cup games, the French Open, and the Formula One race set to take place in Montreal.

After about two hours, sleeping was not possible. The bus cracked and thudded over bumps and through potholes. It was too loud to talk. Dust drifted in to cake our hair and faces. When I showered in Kampala the next day the water ran brown. We were at the border crossing at dawn. Another visa. Another stamp. The road got better as we entered Uganda. I was sleeping when I woke up to gunshot in my foot. Well, I thought at first that might be the case. It was just another tire, but this one had burst directly under the seat ahead of me, leaving a 30-inch crack in the floor. We stopped, but the driver decided we’d make it to Kampala.

In the capital city I borrowed a cell phone (I should have brought my cell phone; it’s possible to unlock them and then use a local company’s card to make calls) to call Louis Otika, the father of a friend in Pittsburgh who runs the Africa Project. He arrived with his driver, and they took me to his house. He was deeply welcoming, and we talked briefly before he showed me to the hotel where I stayed around the corner. We went to lunch with Jonathan, a young American that volunteered as a key strategist for the opposition party in Uganda’s most recent election. Mr. Otika has been employed by that party for many years, and he and Jonathan joke with one another like old politicos. Jonathan’s still there to work on a book on the many absurdities and heroic efforts involved in Ugandan Democracy. I learned much about that as he and I watched the first World Cup match at Bubbles O’Leary’s, Kampala’s major expat bar.

This morning Mr. Otika gave me a ride to the post-bus to Gulu. The bus takes the mail up the road, and carries passengers as well. We were racing to be on time, in an already-hectic traffic environment, when Otika rear-ended a small bus. The bus wasn’t damaged, but the car hood was bent-up. We moved on, but soon the police pulled us over to extort a bribe. They’d seen the damage and, assuming that meant there’d been a traffic violation, they wanted to make the most of it. Otika told him he’d just banged into his gate, but couldn’t convince them to let him off free. I gave him the 20,000 Ugandan Shillings - $10 – that they were looking for.

I am now in Gulu, settled. I’ve met up with Megan Young, the other Pittsburgher spending time here this summer to raise awareness about the child soldiers in the region, and I’m fully comfortable in a room that Peter Otika has secured at a special rate. My next few postings – I think – should be much more specific to this place and the issues people are facing here. I saw many of the camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) on the way into town. (IDP is the term given to people who are fleeing a war situation but do not cross a border and are therefore technically not refugees). In any event, apologies for the stream-of-consciousness-chronological-recall, but access or opportunity to type has been quite limited. More detail on more specific issues (perhaps) to follow.

Curiosity, among incessant travelers, is a core hunger. It forces you out the door, around the bend, over the ridge. Stories draw you further forward and tease you into action. I remember a child’s book I read in 3rd grade, about a young man’s tours of the United States on motorcycle. My mother was soon horrified to learn I wanted to grow up to be, just like the man in the book, a gypsy.

In college my international relations instructor, Dr. Farley, a man who has lived in dozens of countries, under communists, capitalists, and totalitarians, told us that we must spend a semester abroad; that it would be the easiest time in our lives to do so; that it would change us, shape us, mold us. During my semester in Scotland my flat mates wanted to know why I hadn’t seen all the states had to offer. Later that year I found myself pounding across the country with two cousins, reading On the Road.

Kerouac’s description of the Rockies rising out of the plains, from humble bump to towering fortress, pushed me to paste the pedal to the floor and squint all the way through Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. At last the mountains appeared, inspiring awe, humble reverence, and pure carnal rage. It’s been the same for me in the Andes: true mountains tap directly into deep wild nature; they house Gods and are Gods. They can do good or ill, at least according to many Andean religions. That is what I felt in Eastern Colorado – a connection to a set of communities I would only meet through future travel; an intuitive appeal to their spirituality and worldview that I would learn about later.

Then of course, like Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley, it sticks: “the sound of a jet engine, four hoarse blasts of a ship’s horn, even the clop of shod hooves on pavement… sets my heart to racing and stands the hair on my neck on end… in other words, once a bum, always a bum.”* Travel is a sly narcotic, working its way not into a physical addiction in your veins, but plowing into the depths of your mind, invading the forgotten cavities of your heart, and becoming a full-blown habit of necessity.

It taught me that snow-capped mountains hug the equator in Ecuador. It has provided me with a deeper understand of my own language, thrown me into bits of Italian, forced me to improve my Spanish, whisked me into Quechua, and introduced me to many other tongues. It forced me to stop stereotyping Germany, a beautiful land of wonderful people that have gotten a gray and totalitarian rap in the history books. It pushed me quite accidentally into a brothel in Bolivia and allowed me quite deliberately to sample a grub in the Amazon. It’s made me consider and reconsider, drop univeralsisms and prop them up again. It’s made me dizzy, and it continues to promise insight.

In that, Dr. Farley was right, travel educates. It educates the traveler about new people and places and it informs foreign communities about travelers. It can build bridges and bring people closer together. That, I believe, is desperately needed in the world, and is another core reason for my travel.

Africa is at times referred to as the Dark Continent. And what news Americans do see from there is grim, if not grotesque. Ethiopia’s 1984 famine is one of my first memories of Africa, starving children beamed around the world to our televisions screens. “Just give,” the commercials said, “and you will save a child’s life. It’s that simple.” We gave. We sponsored children. My family got cards describing our kids around the world. I don’t know what eventually happened with it. I don’t know what happened with them, but we do know now that it wasn’t that easy.

Resource scarcity has been a tremendous problem, but the core issues are deeper: colonial governments forming states where none existed still yield ethnic conflicts among people who did not intend to govern together; Cold War efforts by the Soviets and the States flooded the region with arms for the simple sake of adding one more name to either bloc; and sky-high interest rates on International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans crippled governments from taking real steps to offer basic education and social service opportunities.

Civil War was common. The now-infamous 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in which over 800,000 people were killed in four months, bordered Western Tanzania. East of Kenya, the Somali capital of Mogadishu was the setting for the events that inspired the film Black Hawk Down, about US attempts at humanitarian intervention there in 1992. Northwest of the city I’ll be staying in in Uganda, Gulu, a rebel army has harassed villagers and government troops for seventeen years. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is fighting to implement a society based on a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and to do so they are abducting children from villages to fight at their sides. But I am jumping ahead: those children are a good part of the third reason for my trip.

Before I discuss the child soldiers though, back to the second reason for the trip – travel gives an opportunity to see and share the things that are beautiful around the world. Africa is not all dark, and I’ll be able to better explain to others the treasures of East Africa: the beaches of Zanzibar, the endless wonders of a Serengeti Safari, the taste and texture of Ethiopian cuisine, and Hemingway’s old haunts around Mt. Kilimanjaro. I’ll work on putting into words what happens when Swahili culture and Indian and Arabic design mingle in the structure of buildings along the east coast. I’ll meet people, learn their human stories and experiences, and share mine with them. Less than twenty-five percent of Americans hold passports and, in college study abroad experiences, less than three percent of American students travel to Africa. So I go to try to build bridges, to respect the idea that we are all equally human and, if we continue to work and hope together, we may one day live in a world that actually values each of us equally.

That idea – the simple commitment to the value of human life – is a core part of the reason that many young Americans have been gathering in Gulu. They are there, working with the organizations Invisible Children (www.invisiblechildren.org), UgandaCan (www.ugandacan.org), and the Africa Project. Together, they are all raising awareness about the plight of child soldiers in Northern Uganda and providing increased access to education for former child soldiers. In Gulu children walk from their villages to the town center every night, so that they can sleep in hospital basements or under pavilions in parks, under the watchful eye of the government troops. They fear sleeping at home because the LRA rebels come to steal children in the night, taking them immediately away and quickly initiating them with such bald acts of violence as forcing a group of girls to step on an arbitrarily chosen group member until she dies.

They are forced to fight for the rebels. Attempts at escape meet torture and death. This is the area where I’ll be for the longest amount of time. I’ll be interviewing the kids and putting their stories together; working to bring more information to the outside world so that pressure can be put on the government and the rebels to resolve this conflict peacefully. There has been some, limited, reason for hope since the government of Sudan recently responded to international pressure to make greater efforts toward peace in Darfur. The same approach may work in Northern Uganda as well.

I’ll also be interviewing the other young Americans there. I’m seeing a great surge in interest in service and activism that focuses on Africa, and I want to know more about what’s motivating people, what their commitments are, and what their vision is.

I think part of the reason they’re there is the simple gut-level commitment one human can feel toward another. Deep down, they know national identity is one of the last morally accepted forms of outright discrimination, and they know that doesn’t make sense. We no longer suggest that it’s OK to treat African Americans or Jews differently, or that women or Hispanics ought not to have rights, but we continue to simply accept fundamentally massive global differences in life expectancy, access to education, access to healthcare, and simple freedom from arbitrary harm – that most fundamental individual right.

So, they’re traveling around the world to make a difference and I want to know what drives them too.

• I’m doing this quotation on the road, from memory, so it’s bound to be somewhat imperfect.