In Loving Memory of Ayermo Filder

[This post is dedicated to the late Ayermo Filder, an Invisible Children bracelet maker who sadly and suddenly passed away this weekend. Her loss is a tragic reminder of the terrible conditions in northern Uganda's IDP camps and the unflinching tyranny of HIV/AIDS. Below is a reflection on my experiences of the day of her death.]

The sky and its blinding white clouds hum; they seem to shudder with the same nervous electricity that I feel in my lungs. The long green savannah is layered in swathes of fidgeting sunlight. Wet, red road flings past us and up in small bits from the tires. We await death in the bouncing cab of a Toyota pickup.

Walking now, a wet and winding path through an internally displaced persons camp, dodging huts and small pools of milky water. Children waving, but do I wave back today? I do, but sadly.

There is a crying. A single bold crying in the air and then we are among the brightly colored women with sad faces. Three men carry the body wrapped in a rough gray blanket quickly into a hut. The observation is blunt and immediate and her body disappears into darkness. Then women that I know, old African women with tear-filled wrinkles stagger to me and cry on my shoulder.

We sit in furniture that came from nowhere. Just sit and witness the mourning. Women sit on the ground and stare down through heavy eyes. Sometimes a wailing rises up from a nearby hut, shrill and purposeful. An old woman with one arm wipes her eyes.

I mourn too, for the state of the world as evidenced by this camp and the gray covered body. I watch the women and study their faces as they decide what mourning looks like and my eyes are grabbed by movement. Twelve feet away from the hut carrying the gray-covered corpse a young girl dances. She’s facing away from the sad women, her body alive in the fast and slightly provocative movements of a traditional courtship dance. And she is so close! Dancing in this thick air of death, dancing in the middle of a concentration camp, dancing on top of the mourning, above the years of sorrow, her feet pushing the ground and its mud away, dancing the dream of every girl, and with that the dream of all who suffer.

Life and death dance so closely here; and it’s this moment, when we quietly acquiesce to our own weakness, that we hear hope most clearly.

The dancer and her friend laugh to each other and run away. I get up and walk out of the mourning and make a phone call, planning tomorrow’s burial. When I come back to my chair the slow, silent heartbeat of sadness is quickened by a group of soft-feathered ducklings, chirping their fairy chorus as they emerge curiously out from under my seat and playfully wander into a nearby hut.

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.