That was then...

So I’m up in the north again, and I realise that, at some stage, I need to give a potted history of the conflict in the north so people can understand the context of what I am discussing. Sad to say – it won’t be today. I am too hot and tired!! I’ve been up here for over a week and still have a while to go, and have just discovered I have to come up again next week as a donor is visiting. *heaves big sigh*

On this trip, I have come to Pader, as on previous trips, but also to Kitgum and Gulu, for the first time since I moved to Uganda two and a half months ago. Those of you who have been reading my missives since 2002 may remember that I visited Kitgum and Gulu that trip, and it was the impression those towns left upon me that made me want to return to work here. It was certainly interesting to see the changes that five years, and more importantly, a ceasefire, have wrought. First of all – we can drive to the towns, and between them, with no problem. Five years ago we had to fly, due to the danger of ambushes. Indeed, last time we came, one of our drivers had just been shot (we saw his vehicle and met him then – and he still works for us – in my department actually) and we met others in the hospital in Gulu who’s car had been ambushed – they were covered in the most terrible burns. This morning, as we drove along the road from Kitgum to Pader, we had no military escort and wore no flak jackets (which were both mandatory a year ago) and the road was filled with children going to school, men riding bicycles and women carrying water or wood on their heads. People were tilling their fields and going about their everyday life, but a year ago that road would have been completely deserted – the only sights to see the frequent crosses marking sites of ambushes (“this is where the priest and two nuns were killed”, “this is where fifteen people from that camp were killed”). The joy of seeing children freely walking the road without the fear of abduction is pretty huge.
Similarly, in Gulu, we went one evening to visit the wife of a colleague who is seriously ill in the hospital with meningitis. This hospital is a very large complex and set in a big compound. For many years, it housed the ‘night commuters’, who were children, or whole families, who walked in to town every night to sleep in the relative safety of proximity to army barracks. They would walk up to five hours each way and needless to say, this dominated their lives. However, the fear of remaining in their villages, with a fairly high guarantee of eventually being attacked by the rebels, meant that the trip was a no-brainer. If the rebels came to your village, chances were all the children would be abducted and taken to Sudan for service in the rebel army, most women would be raped and then perhaps killed, and most men killed. This is the fear that the inhabitants of northern Uganda have lived with for twenty years, as 20,000 children have vanished into the rebel army. We visited this hospital in 2002 and met several thousand people sleeping there through the night – in the rain or the heat, battling mosquitoes and cockroaches, they made their nightly shelter there. Now, however, although the hospital was certainly filled with a large number of miserable people this visit, there were no frightened children huddled under trees or on verandahs, or even out in the open, trying to sleep.

I also went to the office of the Children Of War. This is a reception/rehabilitation center we run for children who have escaped from the rebels, or been captured by the Ugandan army during battles. These children had been brainwashed into soldiers, some of them living with the rebels for years, and received care and counselling at the center before going home to their families (who often also required counselling to understand the trauma their children had gone through and how to support them). I remember meeting children there and hearing their terrifying stories of gun-battles and lost friends – from a 12 year old! They had scars on their wrists and ankles from being bound and many of the girls had children, as they are given as concubines to army commanders. The center now stands empty – all of the rebels are either holed up in Congo or Sudan, or have gone to the reception center in Sudan, where they are meant to wait out peace negotiations under the care of the Ugandan Army. Candice – I was thinking of you so much as I wandered around there again, wondering where you had sat and worked! I remembered having the child sit on my lap and wee all over me – it was so hot I think I dried off in about 20 minutes!!

Altogether, the north is a much more hopeful place now. I become fiercely protective and hopeful as I see these children moving around freely, attending schools that have stood empty for 20 years, moving back to their villages, but perhaps missing siblings, cousins, friends who vanished one night and have never returned. I pray that not a single other child vanishes in the night, winding up with a gun in their hands and a glazed look in their eyes, returning from Sudan to wreak havoc upon their homeland. I desperately hope that the fear fades from the hearts of these children, and they become like most other children in rural Uganda – desperately poor, malnourished and trying to survive, but at least feeling secure. It will be a start – then we can begin working on the rest…