Taking off the rosy glasses

The Ugandan government has lately been rather bubbly about the resettlement of IDPs in the north. The media followed suit, republishing figures and statistics that were all a little mysterious to those of us here among the displaced people. I found myself asking, "Are they going to the same camps that I am?" Turns out they weren't, as this article from Uganda's 'Daily Monitor' explains. It's a very informative read.

The report from the Refugee Law Project that the article cites claims that only about 10% of IDPs in the Acholi subregion have begun returning home. This number, which seems accurate in my experience, reflects the continuing sense of insecurity among residents of northern Uganda. They still live in fear of a return to war. It's happened before. Twice.

And the negotiating parties in Juba who have responsibility for establishing peace in the long embattled region still seem to think it's okay to risk progress for the sake of exchanging witty barbs at each others' expense, as this current controversy over the LRA's request for $2 million has shown.

We are not out of the woods yet, my friends. Not with the ICC still looming like an immutable cloud over the proceedings and Joseph Kony still firmly entrenched in a remote region of the already remote Democratic Republic of Congo. Instead of my predictions I'll give my hopes: The US sends a high-level envoy to observe the talks and finds them progressing, but sees the road block that is ICC warrants waiting to halt progress not far away. The US works together with other international stake holders to convince the ICC to suspend the warrants for a period of time in order to allow the government of Uganda and the LRA to engage in local peace processes that will fulfill the ICC's conditions for justice. Thereafter the warrants are dropped and peace settles like a deep breath over northern Uganda. My friends move out of the camps and know freedom, some for the first time.

Now is the time to make this happen. Work with Resolve, Enough, UgandaCAN and Invisible Children to get this ball rolling before it's too late.

Displace Me Koro, Day 3

I'm sitting in the Brussels airport, reflecting foggily back upon Koro and Uganda, waiting for a connecting flight to JFK, then San Diego. My laptop bears the rust red markings of Ugandan soil nested in scratches from hard use. My shoes also hold the red soil, and the nose pieces of my glasses.

The morning of our third and final day at Koro was far better than the previous morning. I had been too tired to worry about rats and mosquitoes that second night and had slept deeply to the rhythm of Martin's snoring. This morning being Sunday there would be no digging. I woke with the family and immediately knew something was planned. Martin was delaying in the room and looking outside anxiously. There's always something planned.

Within 30 minutes several more bracelet makers arrived in Martin's little home and sat in the small wooden chairs. Martin's wife Susan brought in tea and began preparing it - three heaping tablespoons of sugar to each small cup. She stirred thoroughly. With tea she brought deep fried mundazi. Sugar and oil - everyone's favorite beginning to a day. After downing the sweet crystal dregs of the tea, Martin brought out his surprise - soda and cookies. I was given a Marinda Fruity, an ostensibly fruit flavored soda that tastes consistently like carbonated sugar syrup. And Martin, with a wide grin, handed me a small package of cookies, which I immediately offered around the room for fear of having to finish them myself.

Once my blood glucose was sufficiently elevated, like a jet elevates, we walked through the camp to David's place. His family immediately ushered me into his hut where I was served, wait for it, sweet tea and mundazi. We left for church directly afterwards, my hands shaking around my Bible.

The short Anglican service was held in an elementary school across the street, in one of the dim, worn classrooms with a scarred chalkboard hanging behind the priest. It culminated in an offering, the men competing against the women to see who would give the most. Pauline, David's wife, handed me, Tiffany and Kerri each a 100 shilling coin to deposit in the waiting baskets. In this moment she had more than us, and she wouldn't let us miss the opportunity to give.

After church we had planned to visit Abole, a resettlement camp about 2 miles from Koro. Resettlement camps are small areas where people from the larger IDP camps can move to be closer to their homes. The government and some NGOs have encouraged people in the large camps to find these smaller sites and move there, though in practice it hasn't been as simple as it sounds. These resettlement sites aren't served by the World Food Program, which IDPs rely heavily on, and often times they don't have clean water or provisions for sanitation. And when stats count people who have 'resettled' they often include these people who have simply moved to a smaller camp.

David had requisitioned about 7 bicycles for our ride to Abole. I rode on the back of one of them, with one of the bracelet makers peddling. As we traversed the dirt road to Abole David pointed out large swathes of land on each side of the road - this one belongs to Jimmy, that one to Issac, etc. In all he pointed out the farms of eight bracelet makers, neglected farms with falling homes.

This is where they should live. On they way back from Abole I borrowed one of the bikes and raced with them back over the rough roads, past their bright green land, past their weed filled farms, past their crumbling homes, and finally back into the crowded, impoverished camp. They smiled and laughed the whole way, enjoying the fact that a white man can ride a bike, just like them.

Just as we were preparing to leave the camp, Martin invited us to his home. I told him that we didn't have time to stay there, and he said we wouldn't stay, but he wanted us to say goodbye to his family. I knew he was lying and I told him. He assured me he was not. I knew that he was still lying.

But we walked there nonetheless and found his wife Susan with a freshly prepared chicken and some rice. A last, desperate meal. We laughed as I nicknamed Martin The Deceiver, and his wife The Delayer. As we neared the end of the chicken, all of us late for something in town and ready to leave, Martin handed me some part of the chicken, specially reserved for the guest of honor. At first he said it was the gullet, but it didn't look like a gullet, and one of the other Ugandans said that it was near the liver. I tried to politely decline, and when that didn't work I tried to rudely decline. Still they insisted. I split it with the girls, after much coaxing.

It's so strange to me that he would lie in order to be hospitable, and that he would force people to eat what they don't want in order to show respect.

When we finished I offered to take a photo of Martin and his family. They posed in front of a heavy metal gate, painted green, guarding the building they live in. A gate that is afforded them by the money from my bracelet program. A gate that they need because that money makes them richer than everyone else in the camp. It's a gate that protects them from their neighbors, blocks their friends from view, gives them a sense of security and prestige. It's the same gate that lines our border with Mexico, that confines our news programs, that relegates stories about the poor to page 10 or midnight infomercials. It's a gate in the mind and the heart. It's the same gate I walked through when I first entered Koro two days before.


Martin and his family have no choice but to walk out of it every day and experience the world around them as it is. We have that choice. We can stay inside, guarded in our little compound, or we can choose any one of 100 ways out. The choice is always yours.

We began walking back to Gulu town under a torn sunset. Like my thoughts at the time it was disorderly, improvised, bright, fading.

The Rains Have Come, the Flames Remain

I'm in the office. It's 6:00pm. Waterfalls drop from the low clouds and from our roof drainage. In minutes the ground is turned to swamp - deep red quicksand. The rainy season announced its victory over dust today.

This morning we drove the dusty road to Atanga IDP camp where some Invisible Children employees had spent almost two weeks last month. Not long after they left a fire chewed through the camp, consuming huts and everything inside them, and two people. Daniel, one of the children that the IC crew had known during their stay, had lost everything. He gave us a tour of the destruction.

We heard that some huts now hold 20 sleepers per night. To my eyes they would be utterly full with six. It's a displacement of the displaced. Huts of which the roof was burnt but the walls remain were given tarps. We entered the tarp topped hut that Daniel now stays in. The air from outside feared that place. Air under the tarp screamed with heat and drowned in moisture. It felt like the sauna in Ukraine, the one in which men commonly lose hair due to the heat. It was unlivable. Almost 6,000 people lost their homes at Atanga and now live in the unlivable.

Consider it pure joy, says James. And I look at the residents of Atanga and can't bring myself to tell them. Not because I don't believe it. In fact I believe it more than ever. I just don't think I could do it in their shoes, and so feel petty and ignorant giving them advice on suffering. They are the experts.

But hope still peeks from corners of the blackened camp. It's a simmer now, a smoking kindling. But I know from watching this land that as huts are rebuilt and families resume the lives that they've learned to live in the camps, hope will boil again. Maybe all we can do is help to turn up the heat.

IDP's have faces to

The term "internally displaced persons" is so formal and dry that we might forget that these persons are people. Individual people with families and hopes, fears and faces. This is one face of an IDP.

Joyce's Story, continued

There was a little girl named Joyce who lived on the beautiful African savanna. The savanna is like a field, only it goes on forever in every direction, with a sky the size and depth of a hundred oceans above it. Most eyes can't take in a scene as big as the savanna and its sky, but Joyce's can. They are big, brown eyes that might be as deep as one hundred oceans and one.

Long ago I told one of Joyce's stories , a sad, sad story that will shape many of her stories to come. But today I heard another story, older than the first and just as tragic. It too will write pages in her life, and shorten its book.

The land of Uganda is situated just over the rim of your world and a little to the right. When you come to Africa, look for the biggest lake and stop just a hair to the north of it; that's Uganda. It's a small country full of busy people with the darkest skin and brightest smiles. Walking around the streets of southern Uganda reminds me of recess - everyone is out talking to each other, some playing games, some making fun, many laughing, one crying.

But mention the north to these southerners and their eyes grow distant, their smiles fade, and they look away. They are frightened and ashamed. In fact, although Uganda has been a country for over 40 years, many southerners don't consider the north part of their nation.

Joyce lives in the north.

Since long before Joyce was born war has darkened the lives of people living in northern Uganda. Roughshod rebels have roamed the land, carrying guns in their arms and a swirling confusion of darkened dreams in their hearts. The dreams come from a place that, if you close your eyes, looks like a crumbling cliff that tumbles down below the light and ends in a pool that is really a mirage, but swallows you just the same.

Many believe, as Joyce might someday come to think, that if southern Uganda had cared about the north these rebels would have been stopped before they could do much harm. But they weren't stopped, as Joyce's life shouts in its small, devastating, living testimony.

You see, it's not only rebels and their guns that kill people in northern Uganda, there is also a plague, and the frightened people of the north have been forced to live in such a way that the plague spreads like bateria on a doorhandle.

In the story of Joyce's that I last told, you heard that she was burned badly over much of her body, and that her mother was killed at the same time by the guns of rebels. But bullets or no, the war had already claimed Joyce's mother. She had the dread plague of HIV that hides hideously in the camps of the north.

Weeks ago Joyce began to cough in her hut on the wide savanna. It got worse and worse, and soon it was unavoidable that she must be taken to a hospital. She was tested and was found to have tuberculosis, a terrible lung infection that, untreated, would lead to death. But the doctors fears were not assuaged by the prescription of antibiotics. They know that tuberculosis is a friend of a plague, sneaking in the doors of bodies that the plague has left open, so she was tested for HIV as well.

She is positive.

She is positive.

She is the butt of every distasteful joke this land can muster, the depository for the misery of a 20-year war. And she sits, eyes so wide and deep, holding it all within her frail body in the hospital in Gulu, and she breathes.

By God's careful manipulation a movie star and a journalist were with Joyce when she was tested, and they have vowed to spend their money to extend the boundaries of her shrunken life. Someday, I hope, she will be strong enough to present herself to the world as evidence of its own misdeeds, and her deep eyes and easy breaths evidence that it need not be that way.