Displace Me Koro, Day 3

I'm sitting in the Brussels airport, reflecting foggily back upon Koro and Uganda, waiting for a connecting flight to JFK, then San Diego. My laptop bears the rust red markings of Ugandan soil nested in scratches from hard use. My shoes also hold the red soil, and the nose pieces of my glasses.

The morning of our third and final day at Koro was far better than the previous morning. I had been too tired to worry about rats and mosquitoes that second night and had slept deeply to the rhythm of Martin's snoring. This morning being Sunday there would be no digging. I woke with the family and immediately knew something was planned. Martin was delaying in the room and looking outside anxiously. There's always something planned.

Within 30 minutes several more bracelet makers arrived in Martin's little home and sat in the small wooden chairs. Martin's wife Susan brought in tea and began preparing it - three heaping tablespoons of sugar to each small cup. She stirred thoroughly. With tea she brought deep fried mundazi. Sugar and oil - everyone's favorite beginning to a day. After downing the sweet crystal dregs of the tea, Martin brought out his surprise - soda and cookies. I was given a Marinda Fruity, an ostensibly fruit flavored soda that tastes consistently like carbonated sugar syrup. And Martin, with a wide grin, handed me a small package of cookies, which I immediately offered around the room for fear of having to finish them myself.

Once my blood glucose was sufficiently elevated, like a jet elevates, we walked through the camp to David's place. His family immediately ushered me into his hut where I was served, wait for it, sweet tea and mundazi. We left for church directly afterwards, my hands shaking around my Bible.

The short Anglican service was held in an elementary school across the street, in one of the dim, worn classrooms with a scarred chalkboard hanging behind the priest. It culminated in an offering, the men competing against the women to see who would give the most. Pauline, David's wife, handed me, Tiffany and Kerri each a 100 shilling coin to deposit in the waiting baskets. In this moment she had more than us, and she wouldn't let us miss the opportunity to give.

After church we had planned to visit Abole, a resettlement camp about 2 miles from Koro. Resettlement camps are small areas where people from the larger IDP camps can move to be closer to their homes. The government and some NGOs have encouraged people in the large camps to find these smaller sites and move there, though in practice it hasn't been as simple as it sounds. These resettlement sites aren't served by the World Food Program, which IDPs rely heavily on, and often times they don't have clean water or provisions for sanitation. And when stats count people who have 'resettled' they often include these people who have simply moved to a smaller camp.

David had requisitioned about 7 bicycles for our ride to Abole. I rode on the back of one of them, with one of the bracelet makers peddling. As we traversed the dirt road to Abole David pointed out large swathes of land on each side of the road - this one belongs to Jimmy, that one to Issac, etc. In all he pointed out the farms of eight bracelet makers, neglected farms with falling homes.

This is where they should live. On they way back from Abole I borrowed one of the bikes and raced with them back over the rough roads, past their bright green land, past their weed filled farms, past their crumbling homes, and finally back into the crowded, impoverished camp. They smiled and laughed the whole way, enjoying the fact that a white man can ride a bike, just like them.

Just as we were preparing to leave the camp, Martin invited us to his home. I told him that we didn't have time to stay there, and he said we wouldn't stay, but he wanted us to say goodbye to his family. I knew he was lying and I told him. He assured me he was not. I knew that he was still lying.

But we walked there nonetheless and found his wife Susan with a freshly prepared chicken and some rice. A last, desperate meal. We laughed as I nicknamed Martin The Deceiver, and his wife The Delayer. As we neared the end of the chicken, all of us late for something in town and ready to leave, Martin handed me some part of the chicken, specially reserved for the guest of honor. At first he said it was the gullet, but it didn't look like a gullet, and one of the other Ugandans said that it was near the liver. I tried to politely decline, and when that didn't work I tried to rudely decline. Still they insisted. I split it with the girls, after much coaxing.

It's so strange to me that he would lie in order to be hospitable, and that he would force people to eat what they don't want in order to show respect.

When we finished I offered to take a photo of Martin and his family. They posed in front of a heavy metal gate, painted green, guarding the building they live in. A gate that is afforded them by the money from my bracelet program. A gate that they need because that money makes them richer than everyone else in the camp. It's a gate that protects them from their neighbors, blocks their friends from view, gives them a sense of security and prestige. It's the same gate that lines our border with Mexico, that confines our news programs, that relegates stories about the poor to page 10 or midnight infomercials. It's a gate in the mind and the heart. It's the same gate I walked through when I first entered Koro two days before.


Martin and his family have no choice but to walk out of it every day and experience the world around them as it is. We have that choice. We can stay inside, guarded in our little compound, or we can choose any one of 100 ways out. The choice is always yours.

We began walking back to Gulu town under a torn sunset. Like my thoughts at the time it was disorderly, improvised, bright, fading.

Displace Me Koro, Night 1

So, this wasn't a planned part of the 3-part series, but I just had to tell you...

“Oh! You overslept this morning,” I hear as the African sun bludgeons my squinting eyes. I look at my watch; it’s 7:00am my first morning in the camp. I’ve been asleep for less than four hours. Martin is laughing with his wife outside of their small room-home. “You overslept seriously!” he laughs. To him I said, “Yeah, I guess I did.” To you, I’ll tell the real story.

After Martin showed me the bed, the small mattress on the ground that I would be sharing with him, he went to bathe. As I lay against the concrete wall, trying to claim for my body as thin a swathe of mattress as possible, I thought to myself, “I have to become friends with this wall. I have to love the wall.”

While Martin was out I fell asleep. I woke up and it was pitch black, Martin was snoring in my face, mosquitoes were dive-bombing my ear, and there was a rattling sound in the corner of the small room. I had seen a rat earlier. I tried to adjust my position on the small strip of mattress but there was only one that was comfortable. Unfortunately a comfortable position remains comfortable for only so long.

As I listened to the rat digging through Martin’s possessions and Martin’s snoring and felt my limited positional options I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much more that night. “Luckily,” I thought, “I’ve already slept for a while.” I guessed it was 4am. I pressed the button on my watch and stared into the blue light: 10:40pm. Approximately 30 minutes after I had dozed off. This was not good.

The rest of the night is dizzy blackness filled with unsuccessful twists and turns in search of comfort, set to a chorus of snores and hungry mosquitoes, and punctuated by the clamor of rats in metal bowls. Twice the rats ran over my legs. By 1:00am they had moved to a position about six inches away from my feet, where they commenced chewing and clawing their way through some piece of Martin’s meager belongings. If you’ve never tried to sleep with rats hungrily chewing just inches from your feet, I’ll assure you now, it’s difficult.

I kept checking my watch, hoping that I had dozed, that time had passed. It hadn’t. 11:30, 1:00, 1:45, 2:40, 3:20… And then I woke. 7:00am. Martin laughing. I was not amused.

Displace Me Koro, Day 1

On the weekend of April 28, 2007, two friends and I stayed in Koro-Abili IDP camp in northern Uganda, where a group of residents who benefit from Invisible Children’s Bracelet Campaign welcomed us. This is my response.

It was in the ironies that we lived for three days at Koro IDP camp. Each step and turn found us overlooking new vistas of the paradoxes of displacement in northern Uganda, of the upended lives of its residents. And it is of the ironies that I write.

The first irony is apparent in any description of the displacement. The government, ostensibly in order to protect the population of peasant farmers, forced them from their farms into displacement camps and did not provide food, water, latrines, waste removal, healthcare, or any other basic service that governments are typically responsible for. The people being protected began to die at rates that shame words like “emergency.” The population was not pruned, it was uprooted and left to compost. The people were killed for their own safety.

Further into the ironies, the rebels from which the people were being protected were from the same peasant farming communities, and were supposedly fighting the government that now had their families trapped. And further still, their methods of liberating their people involved kidnapping them and committing heinous crimes against them, even as their government enemies did the same.

It was to one of these camps that my American friends Tiffany, Kerri and I walked last Friday morning. My backpack held only my camera, an extra memory card, a notebook, a pen, and enough money to buy clean water. My pockets were similarly empty – only a cell phone and my knife, which I use primarily to open bottles. The sun was already high when we set out and gave us a good burn before we reached Koro. When we were nearly there my phone rang. The people there expected us, and my friends Lanyero Benna and Opiro Martin came on a bicycle to escort us the rest of the way.


The families that hosted us are beneficiaries of Invisible Children’s Bracelet Campaign, which means that they are among the few in the camps who are making a living wage. Their position at the top of Koro’s socioeconomic pyramid, and my position as their boss, promised a strange dynamic, especially since I asked them to teach us how to live as the destitute displaced. “Bring nothing, completely,” they had told us.

When we arrived we sat down to make some bracelets with these friends, and were immediately served Cokes in glass bottles. “Do all camp residents get this treatment?” I asked accusingly. “Yes, you drink,” they lied. So we drank the warm soda, grateful for the sugar and caffeine.

Making bracelets is difficult, and soon into it I became aware of what would be one of the blindingly clear themes of our stay – our weakness and their strength. After tying only one of the two knots that make the bracelet, and tying it badly, my fingers were cramped and shaking. The bracelet makers tie over twenty knots per day, and they do it smiling, hardly watching their quick hands. After a round of laughter at my attempt, my fledgling bracelet was grabbed by a nearby man who quickly untied my knot and replaced it with two of his own, both far superior to mine.

As I watched I began shifting my weight. We sat on papyrus mats on the ground. The mats are hard, and for someone used to sitting in chairs, sitting on the floor for any length of time can be difficult. My Ugandan friends sat comfortably, joking with each other and tying bracelets.

Soon our hosts invited us into one of the thousands of mud huts at the camp and laid before us a meal of favorite local foods. Calo, a sticky bread made from millet, with a spinachesque green called boo (pronounced bow) scrambled with eggs. We tore pieces from the calo and used it to scoop the boo into our mouths. It is delicious. When I first came to Uganda I avoided calo. It is bland, sticky and often grainy. But now, a little over a year in, I prefer it.

After lunch it was time to fetch water, however in Acholi culture only women go to the wells. I walked with Tiffany and Kerri to the borehole, but instead of a plastic jug for water I brought my camera. The jugs, or jerry cans, hold 20 liters of water, which weighs in at about 50 pounds. Most women in the camps can carry two at a time, one on their head and one in their hands. Tiffany and Kerri were given one 10-liter jug each. It would prove to be enough.

The nearest well is about a quarter of a mile away, outside of the congested living area of the camp. As we walked through the camp we found children playing, women braiding each other’s hair, an old woman cooking, men sitting under a shade tree drinking.

After pumping the water from deep within the earth the girls hefted the jugs to their heads, where they had placed colorful rolled cloths to cushion and balance them. As we began to walk back they learned to balance the jugs, using their hands to make sure the water didn’t fall. Their necks were flexed, their postures stiff and responsive, their steps tentative. Behind them walked Harriet, an Acholi friend. She carried one of the large jerry cans on her head and walked as if down a city street for coffee.

When we returned our Ugandan hosts prepared for us to bathe. This meant pouring well water into a basin and placing it into a bathing “room.” The bathing rooms have no roof and four walls, some of which are made from papyrus, some wood, but the bracelet makers have a concrete bathing room that I built for them last summer, the nicest one I’ve seen. Some of the rooms’ walls only come to the shoulders, the bracelet makers’ to the top of my head.

Bathing in the camp was the experience that was perhaps most different from what I knew. The bathing rooms are not secluded. They are scattered at random in the dense camp. They are surrounded at all times but huts and people. Even in the relatively private bathing room of the bracelet makers the lack of privacy was startling. Voices would pass by closely, the tops of heads bobbing in and out of view. The nearest home was so close I could almost touch the thatched roof. But the camp residents don’t mind about it. And once I became used to it, bathing under the sun, in a drizzle, in the wind, under the stars, was very refreshing.

The bathing room was also unique in its solitude. Other than the latrines, whose smell is loud enough to sully the quiet, the bathing rooms are the only place in the camps where you are alone. Otherwise there is not enough space. People are everywhere.


After bathing the girls went into the nearest cooking hut, where the thatch ceiling is stained black, to begin preparing dinner. They picked greens from stems and ground sesame into a paste.

As a man I was free to spend my time in leisure. I sat with them, then with the bracelet makers, then began to understand the boredom of a displaced life, the utter lack of opportunity. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do. There is no money for books or a hobby. There are only the voices of the same people and the sigh of time as it passes.

After dinner I was invited to play football (read: soccer) with the local club team. But they we far too good and I in my khakis decided to head back to camp. I met the girls there and with some Acholi friends we strolled around the local elementary school. A short rain fell and we watched local children practice traditional dances. When we returned it was almost dark.

Martin, who had offered to let me sleep in his home, invited the three of us to come and see where he lived. I brought my backpack and we walked to the far end of the camp. After his family’s huts had burned down a couple months ago, Martin began renting a small room in a brick building.

We sat in the low chairs stuffed into the space and Martin’s wife Susan brought in a second dinner. She kneeled before us, poured water over our hands and passed around the utensils. This is the standard practice for a woman at any meal. We thanked her and Martin and ate until we were quite full. Then we returned to the other side of the camp, where the bracelet making center lies.

There they were preparing for a nightly ritual. A radio was produced and chairs set in a rough circle around it. Each night they come together at 9:00 to listen to a summary of the day’s newspapers. In front of our dinners was placed a table, and on that table dinner number three. We politely crammed what little we could stomach into our mouths and I gave clear instructions that “tomorrow, we should not eat so much.”

After the news I followed Martin back to his place. There his wife had prepared warm water for me to bathe, again. It was set inside of the common urinal/bathing area of the building. I’ll spare you the details. Once back in his room Martin pulled aside a curtain that divides most of the one room homes or huts between sitting and sleeping area. Behind it was a mattress, his mattress that he usually shares with his wife, though it’s only made for one.

“You will sleep here,” he said. I was going to protest. Not a chance would I allow my presence to displace his family further. I was going to fight it. He continued: “With me, we will sleep together.” He was beaming. I still wanted to fight. Looking in his eyes I felt that this was a great compliment, a gesture or true trust and friendship. I could not say no. That night I slept on a one-foot strip of mattress between a concrete wall and a 180-pound Acholi man.

And so here we come to our last ironies of day one – a hospitality so generous it is imposing, from a people so poor they are dying.

To be continued.

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.

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.