Have you ever known that you didn't know something, something that you felt like you should know? That's how I was begining to feel about northern Uganda. Living in Gulu Town I get tastes of it - meeting former rebels, seeing the scars on victims, working in Koro IDP camp. But still I felt like I was seeing a rinsed, abbreviated version of the reality. I was riding the Materhorn instead of hiking the Alps.
Then I took a chance. Walter, a 24-year-old with a bounce in his step and a salesman's smile came up to me on the road and asked for my assistance with his fledging NGO. He told me about the disabled people in his home town, some 10 miles away, who had no income and no hope of employment. He told me about the orphans and the widows and the former rebels returned from the bush. And he told me, with his face oscillating between smile and consternation, that he wanted to help them all, and that he needed me to help him help them. I told him that I was poor and that I had no money to give him. With a minimum of disappointment he said that he would still appreciate any help that I could give him.
I met with him again a few weeks later. Still we had come up with no way for me to help him, but he invited me to come and meet the people that he was trying to assist. I was a bit dubious. You would hardly believe how often I am approached by people who only want a glimpse inside my wallet. So I invited him to join me that day as I finished up some work and we continued to talk. I wanted to know who he was, whether he had any interest in talking about things that didn't relate to me giving him money. By the end of that day I had a growing hope for his sincerity, so I accepted the invitation and we set the date.
Yesterday I met Walter just as he was coming out of church at 9am. We walked to a hut that he is renting nearby for about $4 per month and picked up his bicycle, with which he intended to carry both of us the ten miles over dirt roads to his home. Noting the solid iron grate on which I was to sit and the lack of anything resembling a shock absorber on the frame, I offered to hire a bodaboda. We both sat down behind the driver and off the boda whined, out of Gulu Town and into the reality of northern Uganda.
Roughly 90% of the population of northern Uganda currently lives in IDP camps. Many of these camps are a day's hike or more from the local town. In order for the people to live, the camps must be self-sufficient. The problem is, they aren't.
Awer (pronounced ah-WAY) Camp, where Walter's family has lived since they were forced from their village in 1996, is far enough from Gulu that I got a sense of what this means. As we creseted the top of a loping hill the plains of northern Uganda appeared like a garden just created. I had seen only glimpses of their beauty, either from a bus shooting down Kampala Road or between trees near Lacor's Catholic Mission, where telephone wires mar the view. Here they were open and wireless. The grasses covered miles of subtle hills, dotted with various trees and hiding antelope and all manner of wild African animals. I wanted to walk away into them.
Coming to a large, thick congregation of thatch-roofed huts Walter announced that we had arrived. The huts were the same as Koro, but the tone was different. In Koro people commonly commute to town to look for work or buy some necessity. Here it was obvious that most people stayed. The small, gray shops were plotted along the main rutted dirt path into the camp. People sat in their doors with a peaceful resignation, without the tumultuous hopes of Koro, where busses and expensive SUVs pass every few minutes.
I sat in the humble office of Walter's NGO for almost an hour - a small gray room with a broken folding table and a few wooden chairs. People were in and out without saying a word, just sitting and playing witness to the white man's presence. Walter would tell me later that white people only come every few months. And then they come only once, never to be heard from again.
The community had planned for my arrival. I sat next to the camp leader as a group of widows and widowers sang me a welcome song and a troupe of orhpan boys did a traditional dance. They don't have money to pay school fees, and the nearest high school was shut down and its classes displaced to town, so these boys stay in the camp all the time, playing football and now, thanks to Walter, learning the traditions of the Acholi culture.
After the welcome there was a short meeting in which Walter answered the community's questions about his organization, and the people asked me not to forget them when I leave. I was served a lunch that was extravagent by their standards, and against my better judgement I finished the whole thing. Looking out of our little room we could see a storm coming. Soon there were small drops buzzing in the air and we did our best to close the wooden doors. When the real rain came the dusty dirt path into the camp was turned into a wide, flowing stream inside of 3 minutes. It was Biblical.
When it finally stopped and some of the water had receded Walter led me on a tour through the camp, from it's tightly huddled huts to its small, dirty market, to the edges of the camp where the fertile Ugandan land rolled out to the deep, deep horizon, off limits to the farmers who once relied on it for their lives.
As we walked, Walter told me of a day in 1996. The rebellion was reaching its terrible height and the government had formed plans to round up the 2 million people of the north into camps in order to isolate the rebels. Government soldiers came to his village and told he and his family that they had 48 hours to leave their homes, or they would be shot. Many were.
Since then his family - parents, aunts, uncles - have lived in Awer camp. He says that they lack skills, and access to resources to gain them. Many in the camp live on $4/month, or you might say they live despite $4/month.
I'm going back to Awer soon. I want to get to know northern Uganda.
Supersize Me
Originally uploaded by visionerry.
