Spring Break '08 Northern Uganda Pt 3: The Final Installment

As promised, here is the thrilling conclusion to my three part saga documenting my spring break in war-torn Northern Uganda. We packed our bags and headed north out of the dusty strip of road called Soroti. We left at the crack of dawn since Muna had told us that the road to Lira took a while. What we did not know is that the extra time allotted for the drive had nothing to do with the distance. I remember sitting in the van, engaged in a fairly interesting conversation (though I don’t remember what it was about), when we hit a bumpy patch in the road. These are fairly common in Uganda so I thought little of it, but the bumps made the van rattle too loudly to continue a conversation, so we paused. I remember thinking we would pick it up where we left off just as soon as the road got better. After passing over the bumps the road turned into unkempt dirt. After about a half hour of this, any attempt at conversation had been abandoned and any hope of resuming it was dwindling. For four hours we rode at a grueling 20 mph on this same dirt road. This was a true “now your in Africa” experience, although I have to admit I would have been satisfied, and would have felt I had something to write home about, had this particular cultural growth experience lasted only 20 minutes. The only road between two of the largest cities in Northern Uganda isn’t paved. To say it is not paved, however, is a great understatement, as it is really little more than a dirt trail just wide enough for two cars to pass each other when they meet en route. Once again, however, the beauty of the landscape, and the feeling of being right in the middle of it instead of merely observing it from the safely civilized protection of a paved road, made up for the four hours of noise, bumps, hitting of head on the ceiling of van, and moments when the terrain was so uneven I feared that it would flip sideways.
Along the way we passed tall, majestic forest of pines. Yes, evergreen pines only a couple parallels off the equator. The scene would have been awe inspiring in southern Jersey, or Northern California, but in Northern Uganda it just looked strange. The pines are not native to the region, and were introduced (along with the eucalyptus tree) as a source of lumber. While having a cheap, local source of lumber is great for the economy, it is terrible for the environment. In pine forest the covering is so thick that there is not enough sun below to support the local underbrush. This is disastrous for the ecosystem, and in the long run subsistence farmers will likely have a hard time cultivating enough food to feed themselves if these trees take off. Controlling the spread of these trees would be a hard job for a fully functional government in a developed nation. Imagine the odds they’re up against here in Uganda. Of course the allure of a quick buck (err... shilling) is too great of an incentive to consider these long term consequences. Even in the village in which we stayed in western Uganda, local farmers were proud to show off their newly planted pine and eucalyptus, as the trees would be sure to be great sources of income some day.
After four or so hours, about three miles outside of Lira, paved road resumed. Upon first glance it became obvious that Lira was by far the least developed town we have traveled to so far. The boda bodas so omnipresent in other towns (if you are wondering what a boda boda is, see next paragraph) are replaced by rusty bicycles with a seat on the back which slightly resemble those beach cruiser you see at the shore (except while they also look cheap and antiquated, it’s not because it looks cool). When I say the roads are paved, I mean the pavement only comes out from the center wide enough for one lane on either side. After that, it became choppy and fragmented where the dirt has begun to reclaim the path. One thing I noted, while there are no major university or college in the town, there are book stores everywhere. However, none of them have any books, just school supplies. I have no idea what this means, but I thought it was very curious.
So, I should devote a little bit of time to discuss boda bodas, since they are a pretty big part of Ugandan life. Boda Bodas are hired motorcycles/trained Muzungu killers always seeming to steer directly across the path of where your trying to walk. They are literally everywhere, and on every corner you’re guaranteed to find a small pack gathered around looking bored. One will inevitably look at you, and ask in simple English “we go?” to which the answer is always negative (I wonder how often people actually stop whatever they were doing before and say “well I wasn’t looking for a ride a minute ago, but since you ask why not”). I believe the enormous number of boda bodas is a) evident that there are too many young men in this country who can’t find a better job than waiting around most of the day for someone to want a ride, and b) because of the high traffic density and total lack of traffic rules, which makes them the fastest way around most major cities. We are actually forbidden by our program to use them. However, this is strictly for insurance purposes. Literally everyone on our program has used one at one point or another. At most times we students willingly adhere to SIT’s regulation, traffic here makes riding these guys (who fearlessly weave in and out of jams) pretty dangerous. There are, however, instances when taking a boda boda is simply unavoidable. For example, one of my friends home stay families insist that if she get home before dark, she must take a boda boda from the taxi stage to her home. This is because the road is apparently full of roadside thieves (that’s right they actually still have highway robbery here, so much so that we will not travel in between cities at night) waiting in the bushes so it is simply be too dangerous to walk home. Personally I will only consent to using one of these in extremely extenuating circumstances, and even then only at night, outside of downtown where there is considerably less traffic and for very short distances. Apparently boda boda drivers are generally looked down upon by the greater Ugandan community. In one of the primary schools we visited, among the signs on the wall warning about the dangers of unprotected sex, stay away from sugar daddies etc. was one that read “avoid boda boda life”. Now you may be wondering if boda boda is some strange sounding Luganda word for motorcycle (in truth the Swahili word “piki piki” isn’t that far off). However, the origins of boda boda apparently date back to the time of Idi Amin’s tyrannical reign. Men would get motorcycles and offer to smuggle people out of the country to safety. They would do so by yelling “We go to the boda, the boda!” In Bantu languages words normally end in a vowel, and so they have a pretty hard time with -er words like border. Anyway this mispronunciation (I’m assuming this is a mispronunciation although often Bantu languages will adapt English words but change the ending to better suit the language e.g. Komputa) stuck and while they no longer sneak people past the border, that’s what they are known for.
Anyway, back to Lira, after checking into our hotel, we headed over to the UN-OCHA organization Lira. OCHA is the UN association responsible for humanitarian and developmental initiatives. After a brief talk they took us to another IDP camp. As literally the entire town gathered around us in wonder and amazement, the LC1 (equivalent to the mayor of a very small community, maybe closer to the head of the home owners association or something like that) gave us a talk about the massacre which occurred here a couple years ago. They were very unwilling to talk about it but the official story is that the LRA (the Lord Resistance Army, or the rebel group in the North, I should at some point go into this history but it is exceedingly complicated) came to these peoples home, and told them to remain inside and they would be safe. Once inside fire was put to all the buildings burning many alive. This apparently caused a clash between the UPDF (the army of the government) and the LRA right in the center of this village. While this is the official story, it doesn’t really hold water. For one thing, these are people from the north, and so the LRA who is fighting primarily for equal recognition for these people seems to have little motivation to randomly kill a village of them. This must be taken with a grain of salt of course because the LRA has been terrorizing the people it claims to represent for years, abducting children from local schools and turning the boys into child soldiers and the girls into sex slaves. But in this instance they seem to have stood to gain very little by killing these people. Furthermore there were reports of UPDF soldiers dressing as LRA and telling the people to stay in their homes. Finally the UPDF was right there, and so their presence in the first place is very suspicious. Furthermore, for whatever reason the government clearly doctored the death count. One military spokesperson initially set the body count at 60 people. However, a record keeper working for the government visited the scene several days after (giving the government plenty of time to clean up the mess) and marked the total at no less than 120. Mysteriously, on the way back to Kampala, this spokesperson died in a car crash. The official death toll was left at 120, but folks around those parts, know that the numbers were upwards of three hundred, and are seriously suspicious about the governments roll in the killings.
At any rate in the wake of the massacre, amidst a wave of publicity, President Museveni promised to compensate for the communities loss by building a medical clinic, a school and various other basic amenities. However, once the publicity died down he failed to come through on virtually all of these promises. It is common knowledge that the north feels betrayed by Museveni, who for the past twenty years has failed to protect them from the LRA. Museveni acknowledges that he has no support in the north, and so will not get any votes from the region anyway, and has essentially abandoned them. This is a vicious cycle, I do not know exactly where it started, but for all intents and purposes, the government has no interest in helping the North, the section of Uganda which clearly needs the most help. Anyway, the LC1 ended his speech with a plea to tell his story, and to remind Museveni of their plight and his promise.
Very often, especially in the villages, people will think we must be very important, and have some political leverage, simply because we are white. They feel that even “big people” will listen to us, just because we come from a developed country. Sadly, this is to a large extent true, as I have said before many of the people we have been fortunate enough to rub elbows with here in Uganda (often on an extremely casual basis) are in positions that would make them completely inaccessible in the states. However, to think that we could call up Museveni and in the course of a casual conversation remind him about his promises to a small IDP camp/village in Lira is completely unreasonable. Feeling extremely disheartened and disempowered, we tried to communicate that we were only students and quite unfortunately had no real power to do anything. They seemed unconvinced. At the very least, they said go back and tell people in your country that there are places like this, and such injustices that occur unchecked. So that is exactly what I am doing now. Unfortunately I think it takes actually seeing places like this, where people have no place to go, not enough food to eat, no means of generating income, no government they can trust in to protect them, no security on a day to day basis, and no means of filing grievances, in order to fully understand the severity of the situation in which these people live.
As we left that day, the downtrodden locals all waved goodbye with big smiles, I believe still clinging to some hope that we would be able to enact some change on their behalf. As always the children ran after the van till it was almost out of sight, screaming and waving there hands, but this scene which normally fills us with enthusiasm and joy, didn’t quite fit our mood. We returned to the hotel disturbed and exhausted, but thankful, and perhaps a little ashamed, that these were our biggest causes for grief that day.
The next day, a good night’s sleep renewed our spirits as we set out for the day’s activities. First we stopped at the International Rescue Committee a group which focuses on the displaced people caused by the violence in the North. This was refreshing since it was the first place that we got anything resembling straight answers about the North. I’ve already mentioned the issue of No Information Transferred (NIT), which we have dealt with everywhere in Uganda. Compound this with a fear of talking about certain subjects and gathering any picture of what is really happening at all is next to impossible. Apparently, answering certain questions in the North is unsafe to do. Once we asked the name of a certain village that we had been discussing in the lecture, the lecturer, who had been friendly and amiable up to that point, drew his face tightly, and said very sternly that he was not at liberty to disclose such information. There is a lot of mistrust in the North, since people working for the LRA and people working for the government are considered the enemy, and people are very careful when discussing any issue involving either.
Our program director, Odoche (Donna’s husband), is an Achole, a tribe of Northern Uganda central to the conflict. He now lives in Kenya, but once told us an anecdote about the complexity of relations in the North, and just how uneasy people are about certain subjects. He was visiting relatives in his old village in Kitgum district, and he staying at his brother’s house. He was talking to someone whom he believed was in the LRA (in the north relations are very confusing, soldiers of an extremely brutal group are often intermixed within local communities). However, Odoche knew nothing of this at the time and, simply as a way to start a conversation, asked the man what he did for a living. The man became visibly enraged at this and refused to talk to Odoche for the rest of the night. Apparently because of the danger associated with discussing anything regarding the war, asking such questions in the north is considered extremely poor etiquette. Afterwards, Odoche’s brother approached him and said that he should leave the gathering, go to his room and go to bed. Odoche, having lived in Kenya for the past twenty years, did not know what he had done, and since it was still light out he began to protest. His brother stopped him, and told him that he must simply trust him, it would be much better if he just went to bed.
At any rate, at the International Rescue Center, though we still had to deal with the issue of NIT, we got the straightest answers regarding the extremely complicated matter of the war that we had received anywhere.
From here we visited a small NGO run by a Norwegian couple (the husband was actually a Ugandan who had applied for citizenship in Norway where he had found and married the love of his life). They had returned to Uganda to open a center for disabled children. The center, known as The Fritis Rehabilitation and Disable Center was open physically and mentally handicapped (most of these were physical disabilities caused by poor healthcare and malnutrition that given proper medical attention likely could have been prevented). They also accepted former child soldiers who needed to reintegrate into society.
For those of you who are like I was before coming to Uganda, and understand little about how armies enlist child soldiers, I will briefly explain what little I know about the extremely traumatic and detestable method. Children are first abducted by the LRA, normally from a school that is raided. Next they are told to kill someone very close to them, normally one of their family members. If they do not comply they will be killed themselves. Once they kill a family member they know that they cannot return to their home, since they will be social outcasts. Since they are young children, they have no where to turn but to the LRA. The army then takes them in, and trains them as their own. They are placed under the surveillance of their peers. Children remain there since any defector is to be killed by one of his age bracket. Since they are young and impressionable, the children quickly become desensitized to violence and are easily molded to do what is asked of them (addictive drugs are also often used, since people with an addiction are more easily made dependant and more willing to do what is asked of them in exchange for the drug). Life at war in the bush quickly becomes the only life they know and so they are completely un-acculturated to normal society. At the Fritis Center, they told us how they child soldiers were obviously the most psychologically unstable, but that they were also by far the best disciplined. They stayed amongst themselves, but among themselves naturally chose a leader who ensured that they all followed every command given to them by their therapist. They explained how it was eerie to see children as young as six behave so disciplined. Even eerier is the fact that these six year old have essentially been brainwashed to be killers. At the center they told us a story of a returned child soldier who had not been fully reintegrated into society. He was helping his father farm in the field, when the dad asked him a question about how life in the bush had changed him. The young boy calmly responded that for one thing, he could kill the father right now. Thinking the young boy kidding with him, he began to laugh and resumed work. Without even thinking about it, the boy grabbed a hoe and hacked his own father to death.
While these stories are incredibly gruesome they are important to hear in order to know just how awful this war that has lasted over twenty years, has been. Child soldiers are also help to understand the complexity of the issue, since the war is neighbors killing neighbors, and family killing family. Many people want to bring the LRA out of the bush and bring them to justice, but many people also have children in the LRA. In fact the issue of child soldiers has seriously complicated any attempt at peace talks. There is a strong desire to judge the atrocities committed by the soldiers as harshly as such atrocities deserve, but this war has been going on for so long that nearly all current LRA soldiers were at one time child abductees. So while they are the culprits committing the atrocities, they are also the victims of the atrocities. So how much can you really hold them accountable for their actions?
Anyway back to the center. We got the impression that the two Norwegians who ran the place saw an area in need and have incredibly big hearts. They both abandoned relatively comfortable lives with good jobs in a country with one of the highest standards of living to come help vulnerable people in the poorest, most unstable region of one of the UN’s Ten Least Developed Countries, and in doing so have barely been able to make ends meet. While their heart was absolutely in the right place, it seemed as though the place needed some organizational management. For one thing, I didn’t make a typo two paragraphs up when I said it was The Fritis Rehabilitation and Disable Center that is actually the name on the sign outside the gate, grammatical errors and all. Fortunately, one of my fellow program members is doing her independent research project helping the center to write grants. She figured that if their English skills were actually that limited, applying to English speaking aid organizations for money must be very difficult. This is likely one of the main reason they are having such problems finding funding.
We took a brief tour of the place, culminating in the physical therapy room, where the Norwegian wife, in broken English nervously tried to explain the absolutely state of the art therapy tool that could heal pretty much everything. Apparently is was invented in Sweden and is so new on the market that it hasn’t even made it America or most other of the developed nations yet, she was just fortunate enough to personally know the inventor. We had a hard time understanding what exactly it did, since when she turned it on, it looked like a series of small, extremely bright lights that were shined onto the disabled area. She said it was so effective that the staff would use it to cure back pains and it had fully rehabilitated several children. It pretty much sounded like this machine could do just about anything.
After the tour, we got to have lunch with the children staying at the center. This was incredible. Since the center provided us with a free lunch, we spend our per diem lunch money on buying toys for each of the children. We figured that since they had so little, (many were orphans) and that which they did have was used communally, that they would greatly appreciate some private possession. Bringing the toys out was fantastic, since most of the children spoke very little English. While we couldn’t communicate with words, everyone can speak play. I spent the greater part of the afternoon playing catch with a boy who looked to be about seven, but was actually around fourteen. He had some mental developmental issues, and could not walk so he would scoot around on his knees chasing after the ball with a huge smile on his face. He couldn’t catch for his life, but he could throw like a champ.
There were no former child soldiers staying at the center when we went to visit, so we never got the chance to interact with one, but they said that with the upcoming peace talks they expect to be receiving many in the near future. I sincerely hope my friend’s grant proposal writing helps the center, otherwise I fear they will be unable to accommodate the incoming flux of children.
After this we went to visit CARITAS, the Catholic aid organization. This talk was definitely not the highlight of the trip. We had already had a long day, and were very tired. On top of that the person who gave the talk was a fill-in for the regular and looked extremely nervous, apologizing several time (once when he noticed people were asleep) for not being the best speaker (people close to the front said they could see the poor guy shaking). Unfortunately, our group, though composed of a strangely large number of devoutly religious people, is also composed of extremely liberal people many of whom despise the catholic churches position on condom use, abortion, etc. They showed no mercy as they grilled into our ill prepared speaker on how the church viewed condom use as a preventative measure against HIV/AIDS and so on, asking questions they already knew the answer to so they could grimace disapprovingly when they heard him say it. Worse yet, the man was relatively uninformed and on several occasions gave answers which contradicted current church doctrine. At any rate, I was happy, largely for the speaker’s sake, when the talk was over.
The next day we road back to Kampala, where without our noticing (since we were up in the more arid regions of Uganda), the rainy season had begun. On the way home we saw some baboons along the side of the road and gave them some bananas. This was awesome. They came right up to the van and grabbed bananas out of people’s hands, scoffing them down in one bite. I’m upset that my camera was in the luggage rake because people got some great footage of these guys.
Anyway back in Kampala the rainy season started. Now if you are like me and got most of your info on Africa from the National Geographic channel, you would think the rainy season is that time of year when it pours nonstop for like three months to make up for the rest of the year when it never rains (come on that’s how they show it on NG). This is not true at all. In fact we have only had what you could call a rainy day once on this entire trip. While it does rain more during the rainy season, (which happens twice a year alternating between the two dry seasons) it only rains for about twenty minutes everyday. When it rains, however, it absolutely pours. Fortunately these torrential downpours normally happen at night, so while they wake you up if you have a tin roof like I do, they don’t disturb your day. The rainy season is actually very nice, since it makes the days much cooler. My home stay family will actually bundle up in sweaters before leaving the house in the morning. They are always amazed that I am not cold, but it never actually gets below seventy here. For a muzungu used to the freezing cold winters of the North-Eastern United States, this is perfect weather.
So there you have the conclusion of my first adventure into the Ugandan countryside. My next adventure will be a return to the west to conduct my independent research on the Bakonzo farmers I stayed with earlier and the Basongora pastoralist group. My access to internet (and electricity for that matter) will be ever more limited than it is now, but stay tuned as I will do my best to keep this blog updated. Till next time wish me luck!