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.