Beauty and Pain... Northern Uganda and the LRA

I have gone to Northern Uganda on two other occasions, both times to visit our Invisible Children partner school, Keyo Secondary School. This time I went to Lira and Gulu with my mom, and I hope that my post will illustrate what Northern Uganda is like.

Northern Uganda is full of bright smiles and joy now. But the wounds from the twenty year long insurgency are still extremely fresh and open. Most people outside of the towns live in little huts with thatched roofs, the same sort of accommodation they had when they were packed like sardines into Internally Displaced Person’s Camps. The insurgency is over, at least in Uganda, though the Lord’s Resistance Army continues attacking in the DRC, CAR, and South Sudan.

The lasting, remaining pain mixes so incomprehensibly with the joy sometimes that it is hard to make any sense of it all.

As soon as we got out of the car, I received a massive hug from an older woman (who I later learned was named Mrs. Tomali) as she told me how glad she was to see me. She just exuded great strength and amazing joy. As it turned out she was the leader of Father’s House, the orphanage we were headed to. Over coffee at a surprisingly western restaurant, I began to ask her about the orphans. She told me several stories.

Mrs. Tamali told me that while all of these orphans had some sort of guardian, they were from totally destitute homes. She illustrated this point with the story of one family where the father went crazy, shot the mother and several of his children, and then was killed himself later on. He left some orphans, who lived with their grandmother in a single hut where there was literally nothing. No clothes, no mats to sleep on, no furniture. Nothing.

Mrs. Tamali’s unfaltering smile finally faded as she told me that several of the children had been tied to trees while their parents were hacked to death with pangas (machetes) by the rebels. The trauma from that, as she said, was still fresh and very difficult to help children deal with.

The next morning we drove for over an hour out to Bar-Lonya, a former IDP camp which had been attacked by the rebels. The man who is now the village leader and had been the camp leader at the time came and told us the story of the night. The rebels, he said, surrounded the camp and began killing. They set fire to the thatched roofs and shot as many people as they could, killing others with pangas. This man along with some of the camp members escaped, and returned to find the camp burned down and people dying everywhere. The army finally arrived and started transporting the wounded and dying over 29 kilometers of horrible road to the hospital, where the number overwhelmed the staff and the people died. The President of Uganda presided over a memorial service in March of 2004 where the marker states that 121 people were buried there. However, the camp leader told us that when he and the other people returned in 2006, after there was peace, they dug up the bodies with the help of a doctor to document the numbers buried there. In their accounting, over 300 people are buried at that site.The picture below shows the memorial and the camp leader (right) with our translator

The hard part, he told us, was that people had returned to where the camp had been, and most of them did not know for sure whether their missing relative was among the 300 buried in a mass grave, or what their fate had been. To make matters worse, there is a whole group of children whose parents were killed that night and have returned without any form of guardian to watch over them. We stood at the mass grave, while two young orphans, Gerald and Innocent who are in the picture below, covered from head to toe in mud climbed around the memorial. We looked out and saw the rebuilt huts, and realized how much pain these people still live with.

That night, we went to Father’s House. The 48 children sang and danced for us with their huge smiles. Mrs. Tamali told us that aside from some clothes, the only object the children owned was a bucket to use to bathe. Eventually my mother and the others who had come along with us sat in front of the children, as Mrs. Tamali narrated some more of their stories. One of the boys, Emmanuel Okello, was orphaned by the rebels at two months old. He was taken to another woman who was caring for forty orphans. Eventually, he was transferred to Father’s House.

Another orphan’s father had put a spear through his mother’s lips and mouth, killing her. Each child had his or her own story.

Following these stories, I presented the gifts that were collected in the US by a friend and sent over in a container by my home church. There was a stuffed animal for each and every one of the children. As I called their names out, many of them dove off of their benches, landing on their knees in front of me, and clutching their first stuffed animal as closely as they could. Some of them, including the boys, actually started pretending to nurse them. They all sat there, just hugging their new friends. It was beautiful, and amazing, to see these children experience true joy and love after everything they had suffered through.

I can’t help but wonder, if something as small as a stuffed animal can make such a difference to these children, then what more can be done? And what about all of the others in Lira, and Gulu, and other parts of Northern Uganda, who don’t have an amazing place like Father’s House?

The next day I made my way with my mom to Gulu, where we visited Keyo SS for the third time. On my first trip there, almost two years ago, I found wooden shacks that students were attending class in. They had tin roofs, but no floors, make-shift chalk boards and canvas room dividers, and the desks were packed with students. I spent the day with a girl named Faith.

On my first trip there I learned that the brutalities performed by the rebels were so close to each of these students. One of Faith’s friends described her experience of running away when the rebels attacked her school. She escaped, while her classmates were abducted and forced to become rebels, and those found unworthy were locked in a classroom and burned alive. Each of the students described living without food, water, or clothing. Their childhood memories consisted of hiding in the trees to avoid being abducted by the rebels and turned into child soldiers. The pain of their experiences was palpable.

Yet even stronger than the pain was the hope they expressed. Each of them has a plan now that the war is over for what they want to do with their lives, and some of them want to do whatever they can to help others. When I asked if they feared the rebels’ return they answered me “Yes. But we have faith in God. He has brought us this far. We never thought we would be here, chatting and laughing and remembering our experiences. We thought we were going to die in the camps. But we are here today. We are alive today.”

On Saturday I had the exciting chance to meet with Faith and the head teacher at Keyo SS. Faith and I were so happy to see each other again. She showed me the new construction at Keyo, partly being done by Invisible Children, and then we walked down to the trading center where I bought her a soda and she taught me how to eat sugar cane. It was wonderful to spend time with her. Faith, however, is struggling. Her father had died several years ago, and her mother is now unable to pay her school fees. The school let her sit her final Ordinary level exams (it’s a British/Ugandan thing, you have to take exams at the end of 10^th grade), but she is struggling to pay for her next two years of education.

The pain of the war is far from forgotten. Everyone in the North has been affected. While some people face the day with smiles as large as Mrs. Tamali’s or Faith’s, many still cannot afford food. We cannot forget these children who have been orphaned, or the wounds which are still present in the North. But if something as small as a stuffed animal can have such a big impact on a young orphan, or if a visit to Faith can create so much joy, then surely we should all find a way to be involved.

There is still such a need for help in the North. While many NGO’s are involved in Gulu, Lira and other, more remote areas need help. All social structures were destroyed by the war in the North. One example of this, as a study showed, is that children slept in the same hut as their parents, which goes against cultural norms. Many people suffer from trauma, and there is a need for counseling and the rebuilding of traditional support structures. And more than anything, there is a whole region full of people who need to know that they were never forgotten and that they are loved by God.