Uganda Dispatch #7: An Old Emergency

It's not easy to write about something that hurts to understand. But it's getting harder to keep quiet.

This is an emergency.

It's strange to think of northern Uganda's internally displaced persons (IDP) camps that way. After all, they've been around for ten years, their residents enduring the endemic hardships with the rising of each hot African sun. Walking through one of these camps today the languid bustle and smiling faces of the place will lull you into a calm indignation, an easy shake of the head.

But this situation is not calm. It is violent and turbulent, and accepted only through the slow execution of hope. Northern Uganda is a building whose base was set on fire 20 years ago. But no one came to put out the flames. Year by year, in fact day by day the flames climb up the sides and burn through the floors. Homes are destroyed, people consumed. For 20 years no one came. Now the building is in full flame and finally people see it; the world sees it. But even looking at the flames, at the people trapped, burning, dying, the world is saying things equivalent to, "We should give seminars on the dangers of fire," or "Let's start a program that, over the next 2 years, will teach them how to use a hose."

Can't they see that above all we need to put out the flames? We need to save lives! Whether a building has been burning for two minutes or two decades, it's still an emergency. The flames have different names in this case: names like poverty, hunger, disease, thirst; and their fuel sources have bigger, more controversal names like forced displacement, informed neglect, international apathy. But the point is to stop the burning.

To learn more about what you can to, start at UgandaCAN, and keep posted here on JamesTravels.com for upcoming projects that you can be instrumental in accomplishing.