Sunrise: A Preview

Sunrise on my first morning in Koro-Abili IDP camp. Stories and photos forthcoming.

Displace Me, Saturday

The peace talks for northern Uganda are set to restart today. Two days later, this Saturday April 28, Invisible Children is hosting the largest ever demonstration of international support to end this war. The event is called Displace Me, and Invisible Children is calling on Americans to show their compassion by spending one night in a mock displacement camp. I am asking you to join them.

Over 90% of the population of northern Uganda has been displaced by this war. What this means in reality is that families who rely completely on seasonal harvests have been removed from their farms, their livelihoods. Children that make it past infanthood are thin, with the bloated bellies of malnourishment and worms. Mothers watch their children battle malaria, meningitis, cholera, and children watch their parents slowly succumb to AIDS. What this means in reality is that a culture is slowly perishing, and that a baby born two weeks ago to my friend Walter, his first child, might never take her first steps.

The only hope of these people is peace. They want to go home but cannot until they are assured that the bullets will not rain on their villages again. On April 28 you have the chance to bring them this peace. Uganda relies heavily on American support and is therefore very sensitive to American political pressure. If the American government wants these peace talks to succeed, they will likely succeed. But various geopolitical interests make our leaders hesitant to apply this pressure. They need our encouragement. Especially at this critical historical moment, when the peace talks offer the best opportunity ever for peace in northern Uganda, we can make a difference.

Our voices matter, especially with elections on the horizon. Let’s use them to give Walter’s baby a chance at life and prosperity. Let’s come together at Displace Me and with one voice lead our leaders to bring peace to northern Uganda.

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As you commute to mock displacement camps in America, I will be staying in Koro-Abili IDP camp in northern Uganda for three days. I will endeavor to live as much like the displaced residents as their hospitality will allow. When I asked them what I should bring with me they said, “Bring nothing.” While there I will be writing about and photographing my experience to share with you what displacement looks, smells, feels like. I don’t know quite what will come of it, but I hope that you will join me.

World Food Program News

The World Food Program announced yesterday that lack of funding has forced a cut in food rations to those in northern Uganda's IDP camps. The UN food agency said that it had reduced rations to northern Uganda from 60% of the minimum daily energy requirement down to 40% of the 1,200 calorie standard.

It expects more funding by June, but until then will be forced to maintain this truncated distribution. Read more here.

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.

Easter Weekend, or Why I Love Travel

The trail was so steep that I could not touch my heels to the ground without falling backwards down the mountain. Loose dirt covered some sections. I had to focus on each step as my legs fatigued, my breathing accelerated, sweat leaked from my forehead and soaked my shirt. I was elated.

I followed my guide Tophil, a sub-20-year-old local I had just met while walking through southwestern Uganda. He was soft spoken and desperate, but too proud and strong to be a beggar. Occasionally as I walked behind him I caught a breath of a strange and perilous odor, like bubble gum but sweeter, and turned like milk turns. I kept a friendly distance and tried to lead the way up his mountain.

This was the first time in months that I had traveled for the sake of travel. When I learned that I would have a long weekend for Easter I knew that I didn’t want to sit by a lake or stand under a waterfall; I wanted to wander. My friend Tom(sky) once told me about a conversation with an old boss of ours, a silly wise Jewish woman. After listening to him tell about his journeys and aspirations she looked at him with obvious sentimentality and said, “You’ve got the wanderlust kid.” This weekend I had the wanderlust.

I showed up at the bus park in Kampala not knowing which direction I wanted to go. Could be east or west to find mountains according to a guidebook I had just skimmed in a local bookstore. I chose west on a whim and settled in for the “six” (read: eight) hour ride to Kabale, which some call the Switzerland of Uganda.

As I rode I consumed pages and pages of Dave Eggers’s What is the What. It’s the fictionalized autobiography of a Sudanese “Lost Boy.” If you have some time and a spare stock of patience, I suggest you read it. The journey of this man from his devastated village through deserts and over rivers and into and out of various refugee camps and finally to Atlanta holds an amazing amount of perspective on this world.

The bus traveled faster than was wise. The tires screamed at the road and pedestrians stared in disbelief, their heads making quick pivots to watch us pass. Then we stopped in the middle of nowhere. Just stopped by the side of the road and waited. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, or not to care a bit. I asked the man who sat placidly next to me what was happening. “I don’t know,” he stated in a tone that held zero anxiety or curiosity.

Soon the bus completed a long three point turn, headed a hundred years back up the road and turned onto a dirt path that was just wide enough to hold us, though not without our windows stripping leaves from the roadside trees. We went far too fast on this road as well, the dust from the white soil flying like chalky jetwash behind us. The villagers whose homes we roared past pointed and laughed and gawked as if a bus had never passed this way. Then we came a skidding halt.

The bus employees, who number surprisingly high on any given bus, jumped out to inspected something in front of the bus. It was a small gulley that a trickle of water had dug across the road. It must have been close to three feet deep and the four across. The local villagers were laughing, their hands spinning in the air to indicate that we were going to have to turn around and leave. The employees got back on the bus and the huge vehicle lurched forward. I grabbed the luggage rack above my head, bracing. But we cleared the ditch smoothly, without even a bump. Looking back I saw the remnant of some logs spanning the gap. I would have hesitated to ride a bike on them.

We were off again, our dust sailing into the air on the mountainside road. Villagers were bewildered. Suddenly we were stopped again. Some words passed through the driver’s window and a local man gestured behind us. When the bus was jammed back into gear the rear tires spun. We were stuck. The entire bus offloaded and the men took their place behind the mechanical beast. We pushed like Samson might have and slowly the back right tire emerged from it’s shallow sandy grave and the bus shot forward. Now it would have to turn around, for the road to Kabale was a narrower track branching behind us.

The driver pulled forward and positioned the bus for an impossible maneuver. He gunned the monster and it lurched, backwards, onto the soft side of the mountain. It looked like it might work. But then it was stuck again. The men once again shouldered the bus’s steel frame and liberated her. The driver quickly reversed his maneuver back onto the road and sped off down the path to find a place to turn, leaving us passengers standing in the silence of rural Uganda.

I looked down the side of the mountain, down a terraced valley that swelled to round mountains on the horizon. The sun was setting through brushstrokes of cloud. I sat on the grassy roadside and smelled the air and watched a local woman watch me sit. We smiled.

The bus roared back and recoiled to a halt. We regained our seats and were moving. Windows had to be closed because branches were now slapping and gripping at the inside of the bus. When the bus encountered oncoming cars both sides would stop and sit facing each other for some seconds before the drivers of the smaller vehicles found the wisdom to creep off the road and let the bus pass.

Finally we found the main road again, seemingly only a mile from where we left it. The sky was almost dark so the curves were surprise forces pushing me against the window, then the man next to me, then the window. I worked to harness my wandering thoughts on the dark bus and realized that my mind has been undisciplined these last months. Working so many hours leaves little time for focused personal thought. My mind, spoiled like a child left to himself, rebelled at my attempt to rally it. I have some work to do.

We stopped in Kabale without an announcement and I barely made it off the bus before it roared off to its next destination. I walked to a little hotel that I had called that morning from the buspark. They had given my room away, though I had booked it only 8 hours before. They pointed across the street to a place whose façade was peeling, lights flickering. I entered. They led me to a room with two beds, a sitting room, a dirty concrete bathroom. It was amazing. I had not had my own room in months. I wrote until I couldn’t see then slept a happy night.

The next day I began walking, following the wanderlust. Down the road to Lake Bunyoni, undisputedly the most beautiful lake in Uganda, but I didn’t intend to get there. On the way I met Tophil, who offered to lead me up the mountainside to his village.

When we finally reached the top a patchwork of terraced mountains rolled across the earth, gently nuzzling the clouds.

My heart inhaled. My mind stopped and looked out the window. I wanted to sleep wrapped in that soil and sprint along the ridge. But since I couldn’t do both I followed Tophil as he pointed out various crops, his elementary school, his church, his home. He taught me how to greet old women passing in their most formal dresses for Easter. They smiled with a girl’s glee and what remained of their teeth.

We passed through the village, greetings and smiles surrounding us like the terraced hillsides and friendly clouds. Soon we reached a dirt road and followed it around the side of the mountain until we could see the lake, indisputably the most beautiful lake in Uganda.

[PS – I won’t be the last that Tophil guides. That night I connected him to the local tourist hostel, who agreed to refer guests to him for “To the Lake” tours. Only 10,000 Shillings “with a boda and a soda.”]

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.