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Uganda October 8, 2006 11:24PM
One Night in Ogonyo
Roger Burks
Senior Writer
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Families displaced by Uganda's civil war are staying in transitional camps while they await circumstances safe enough for them to return home. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
For a night, I felt the chill of life in a displacement camp.
My colleagues and I just spent the night inside a traditional mud hut in the village of Ogonyo, Uganda. It was a rare opportunity; just a few of weeks ago, before the peace talks between the Ugandan government and Lord's Resistance Army began, it would have been impossible to stay here after sunset. The long-running civil war mandated that all humanitarian workers be back to their offices or lodgings by 4:30 p.m. at the latest.
Of course, these restrictions offered little solace or protection for Ugandan villagers. As darkness fell each night, uncertainty and fear replaced the industriousness and mirth of the daylight hours. No one was ever sure if - or when - violence would suddenly arrive at their doorstep.
For the last several years, hundreds of thousands of families traumatized by war have lived in sprawling displacement camps plagued by lack of educational or work opportunities, poor sanitation and scarce food supplies. They are miserable places where disease is rampant and hope dim. But they offer one thing that more traditional villages can't: strength in numbers. Government soldiers are constantly on guard against rebels along the perimeter of larger displacement camps.
Villages like Ogonyo are a relatively new phenomenon in this part of Northern Uganda, cropping up earlier this year as peace talks began. These villages - known as "return camps" - are much smaller than the "mother camps" in which families have lived for as long as the last decade. In the dozens of return camps like Ogonyo, houses are spaced farther apart and families have access to farming land to grow their own crops.
It is still an arrangement that is far from ideal. Traditionally, members of this area's Acholi ethnic group live in family compounds that are close to their fields and far from towns or even other families. The generation-long civil war here has completely reordered that culture, forcing families into camps where huts are sometimes situated less than five feet from each other.
Places like Ogonyo offer an alternative, one somewhere between the grim reality of the mother camps and hopeful thoughts of returning home. It's in these camps, in Northern Uganda's war-torn Pader District, that Mercy Corps is helping families re-establish farming practices and protecting them against food shortages. And it is in this camp where I felt fear in the middle of a moonless night.
Fifty children and a song
Our group - three Mercy Corps field officers from the area, our driver, a photographer and I - arrived in Ogonyo shortly before 5 p.m. A bountiful rain shower had just passed through the area, anointing the crops and infusing the landscape with rich colour. A rainbow unfurled across the sky in affirmation.
As we exited the car, a crowd of smiling faces quickly wrapped around us. Most of the faces belonged to children, eager and curious. My heart was warmed by the enthusiasm in their eyes, but I was also saddened at the thought of the horrors some of those little eyes have seen.
At first, we walked around Ogonyo greeting villagers. The entourage of children following us grew from a dozen to almost 50 in no time flat. They stayed near to us, occasionally reaching up to hold our hands as we made the rounds.
About two hours later, after we'd shaken hands with most of the village, the children were still faithfully following us. Their faces hinted at innocent expectation. Not wanting to let them down, I tried to think of a game that would translate well without the benefit of words. That idea failed me.
Just then, thoughts of my two-year-old son popped into my head - and with those thoughts, a song. I stopped in my tracks, faced the crowd and launched into "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes," complete with actions. The smiles grew. By the 12th rendition of the song, the Acholi children were singing along with me and having a great time performing the actions in unison.
It was a moment I'll never forget. Just then, one of my colleagues tapped me on the shoulder to let me know it was time to go eat.
I asked the children to give themselves a round of applause and a cheer, and the result was thunderously joyous. I walked to the hut that would be our home tonight with the song still in my head.
Darkness and uncertainty
As the sun set, my five colleagues and I sat down inside the hut and enjoyed spicy stewed chicken, lovingly prepared by one of our field officers, Christine. We swapped tales and laughter.
We talked about the uneasiness of staying in a village overnight, with the brutality of civil war a not-so-distant memory - and one I've heard echoed by dozens of Acholis we've spoken with. The night grew darker.
Soon, after a mug of hot tea each, it was time to go to bed. I didn't look at the time, but it was probably only about 9 p.m.
Three of us - our photographer Thatcher, field officer Lawrence and I - squeezed onto two tiny mattresses on the dirt floor of the hut, while the other three slept in the car. Sleep came quickly after a long day of field visits.
An indeterminate time later - minutes or hours, I don't know - I woke up and couldn't keep the thoughts from my head. I imagined rebels lurking in the fields outside the village. I second-guessed whether it was a smart idea to stay here. What if the peace was suddenly broken? What if something happened here, to us and the families we'd just met?
It was then that I grasped some idea of what every night must be like for children and families in Northern Uganda. After everything they've gone through, every sound in the night must be a threat. I wondered how they could ever sleep again.
And what would we do if rebels did burst into the village? Darkness enveloped us. Where would we run?
There were no easy answers - just dark, uneasy thoughts in the night.
It was one of the longest nights of my life. I kept wishing for morning to come, but the night persisted.
At some point, I mercifully nodded off and, in what seemed like an instant later, awoke to jubilant sunlight. Sounds of village life were everywhere, and the pungent smell of cookfires began.
I emerged from the hut into the soft morning light, bleary-eyed but happy, and I smiled and waved to a woman sweeping the ground outside her hut. She laughed, waved back and returned to her work. Then, out of nowhere, a dozen children emerged and surrounded me.
Daylight - and joy - had finally returned to Ogonyo.
Uganda November 9, 2006 12:25AM
Cecilia: A Harvest of Hope
Roger Burks
Senior Writer
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Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Ogonyo Camp, Uganda - Cecilia Lamunu remembers life before the war. As she sits inside her tiny mud hut and lights a kerosene lamp against the coming darkness, you can see the past flickering in her eyes.
Twenty years ago, she was a 28-year-old mother of six children - four boys and two girls - living with her husband near the village of Apuu Kampala. Like others from northern Uganda's Acholi ethnic group, Lamunu's family lived close to the land. They drew their sustenance and livelihood from their small family farm, just like generations before them.
It wasn't an easy life, she recalls, raising a family while tending crops like cassava and groundnuts. But it was an honest, hardworking life that she knew - and loved. There were sometimes bad harvests that made things more challenging, but Cecilia Lamunu always knew things would eventually get better.
All of that changed one night.
A mother's pain
As Lamunu, her husband and children slept inside their family home, rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - a marauding group that's been terrorizing northern Uganda since 1986 - attacked the nearby village of Apuu Kampala.
Lamunu awoke to the horrifying noise of gunfire and screaming, and immediately knew what was happening - and what she had to do.
"I told all my children that they had to run - as fast as they could - away from the racket and into the bush," she recollects. "As they ran away, I didn't know if I'd ever see them again."
Soon afterward, a group of LRA rebels found their way to the Lamunu household. They broke down the door and dragged both Lamunu and her husband out into the shadowy darkness.
"They demanded to know where our children were," she says. "We refused to tell them, so they beat us and kicked us until we were unconscious."
When she finally awoke, bloodied and bruised with broken bones, her worst nightmare was realized: two of her sons, aged 11 and 13, had been abducted. They had become two of the newest forced recruits of the LRA, two of more than 20,000 children abducted during the 20-year conflict.
She spent the days to come in a frenzy of fear, will to protect her family and, of course, searching for her lost sons. And then, when things didn't seem like they could grow any more bleak for Cecilia Lamunu, her husband died from the injuries he sustained during the rebel raid on their home.
So, with heaviness of heart and uncertainty of what the future held, she left the home and life she'd made in Apuu Kampala. With her remaining children at her side and carrying a few scant belongings, Lamunu set off on a long, painful walk to a place where she'd have to trade the life she knew for safety from the LRA.
Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
The "mother camp"
The Puranga displacement camp, situated several miles from Apuu Kampala, is the antithesis of the traditional Acholi way of life: rather than the rural tranquility of a family farm, there are hundreds of tiny huts crammed within five feet of each other. Instead of verdant crop fields and grasslands, there is bare mud gashed by open sewers.
And, with thousands of families crowded onto just a few acres of land, there is no land to farm.
Camps like Puranga, established by the Ugandan government, were meant to be temporary solutions to provide strength in numbers and protect Acholi families from random, brutal LRA attacks like the one Lamunu suffered. Instead, these camps - and the families within them - have now languished for nearly two decades. The camps are plagued with problems - poor sanitation, lack of jobs and no schools, to name just a few.
Perhaps the biggest indignity to the Acholi people, though, is being forced to subsist on donated food rations. Farmers like Cecilia Lamunu, once proud of their self-sufficiency, must now to accept handouts to feed their families.
Lamunu's time in the Puranga camp - called the "mother camp" by local families - was plagued by lingering health problems from the injuries she suffered in the LRA attack. She thought constantly of her sons.
"Not a moment went by that I didn't wonder where they were," she says, "or if they were even still alive."
Two years after that terrible night in Apuu Kampala, however, one of her sons came to find her in the camp. He'd somehow escaped the LRA's clutches. A year after that, her other son returned, too.
Both of them had been forced to serve as porters for the LRA troops. Every day - and often in driving rain or scorching heat - they had to carry more than 100 pounds of supplies on their backs as they marched across northern Uganda and South Sudan.
"They talked about horrible things they'd seen," Lamunu explains. "Fellow children being beaten and killed, villagers mutilated. Things no one should have to see."
The memories of those atrocities, and fear of being caught and punished by the LRA, were too much for the two boys to take. As a result, they soon left the Puranga camp - and their mother - to go live in southern Uganda, far from the conflict.
They have both vowed to never return to northern Uganda. You can see the hurt that has caused Lamunu, as she bows her head when bringing it up.
Lamunu lived in the Puranga camp for five years after seeing her sons return and then depart once again. Over that time, the rest of her children grew older and, in time, also left.
The wounds from her injuries never quite healed.
But then, a few months ago, Lamunu saw a way to go back to part of the life she'd once known.
Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Closer to home
The beginning of peace talks between the Ugandan government and the LRA in July 2006 - followed by a ceasefire in September - has given almost two million displaced people in northern Uganda renewed hope. That optimism - although tempered with the reality that the negotiations are fragile - has led to an exodus of families from "mother camps" like Puranga.
Since the possibility exists that war may still reignite, however, families are not yet returning to their original villages. Instead, they are seeking refuge in places known as "return camps" - smaller displacement camps that are less crowded and offer more opportunity for farming and other traditional activities.
And that's how Cecilia Lamunu came to live at the Ogonyo camp - just over a mile from where she once made her home in Apuu Kampala.
"I needed the land," she says earnestly. "I needed the land to heal me."
Today, Mercy Corps is helping her and thousands of other Acholi people by collaborating to re-establish agricultural systems in return camps like Ogonyo. The centerpiece of Mercy Corps' programme is the establishment of community seed banks, which are managed by committees formed by local villagers like Lamunu.
These seed banks offer families who have moved from larger camps like Puranga the opportunity to borrow seeds to plant staple crops like cassava, millet and sesame. Then, come harvest, families pay back the seed "loan" with seeds from their newly-collected crops.
It's a sustainable, simple programme with a far-reaching goal: to return a generation of displaced Acholis to farming.
There is a surprising grace to Cecilia Lamunu's movement, given her injuries and personal tragedies. There is certainly still a sadness in her eyes.
When you mention the upcoming harvest, though, she comes to life. As she considers reaping the crop she's sown, she smiles. For a moment at least, she's one step closer to home.
You can help Cecilia and other displaced northern Ugandans begin their journey home by donating to our Emergency Response Fund. Thank you.
Uganda March 5, 2007 12:27AM
First Day of School, At 14
Roger Burks
Senior Writer
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Young Bosco Odongo in the village classroom. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Ogonyo IDP Camp, Uganda - It might look like any other day for 14-year-old Bosco Odongo. Dressed in a pink shirt and brown shorts like his classmates, he carries a crisp new notebook and walks the dirt path leading to the village school.
The truth is, however, he's never been to school before today - it's his first day ever to sit in a classroom with other students and be taught by a teacher.
For most of the last twenty years, many village schools in northern Uganda have been closed because of a brutal war between government forces and a rebel faction called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Schools were a particular target for the LRA, whose strategy was to abduct children and press them into military service. The LRA has abducted at least 20,000 children during the war.
Bosco escaped abduction on at least one occasion - he remembers with fear the day that LRA rebels broke into his home and threatened his family at knifepoint to give them food and other supplies.
He's lived most of his life in cramped, squalid displacement camps where food and clean water were in short supply - and time in the classroom was non-existent.
Last September, he moved with his family from the huge displacement camp where he'd been living to a smaller "return camp" that's closer to the village where he was born. This "return camp" - called Ogonyo after the village that once existed here - has more land to farm, space to play and, best of all, a school for Bosco and his siblings.
In the light of recent peace talks aimed at ending the long-running war, Mercy Corps is helping families like Bosco's as they begin their journey home. We're supporting agriculture in the "return camps" while planning activities to help children like Bosco heal from war.
As Bosco enters the cement classroom - bare except for a chalkboard - I ask him what he wants to be when he's older.
"A doctor," he says without hesitation. "I want to heal people and save lives."
Uganda February 12, 2007 12:27AM
Christine: Someone to Count On
Roger Burks
Senior Writer
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Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Opeyelo, Uganda - If all had gone according to plan, Christine Adong would be sitting behind a desk right now, crunching numbers. Instead, she's standing in the midst of a few dozen displaced families, listening to their stories and offering whatever help she can.
Fate has an odd and wonderful way of placing people where they're needed most. As an ethnic Acholi who'd survived years of danger and turmoil, Christine Adong wasn't especially eager to return to the war-scarred villages of her childhood - but she did anyway. Here in northern Uganda, destiny gave Christine Adong the chance to change the lives of her people.
Answering the call
In August 2006, Mercy Corps hired Adong as its first employee in Uganda. The organisation had just arrived to mount an emergency response to the worsening situation in northern Uganda - a place tormented by years of conflict between government forces and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army.
Adong had been working for a European Union-funded organisation as an accountant when she heard that Mercy Corps was looking for a field coordinator to help establish relief programmes among northern Uganda's 1.6 million displaced people.
There was something about the opportunity - and the timing - that just seemed right.
Adong's skills certainly stacked up to the challenge, especially her mastery of English and four local languages: Acholi, Lango, Alur and Kumam. Her easygoing manner and straightforwardness quickly won her the job.
For the next few months, she helped the Mercy Corps emergency response team gain access to government officials and local organisations in Kampala, as well as in the northern cities of Gulu and Kitgum.
"We soon found out that food was the most pressing need for families," Adong remembered. "People were isolated in remote villages, cut off from supplies. They were starving. They were also without basic household items and tools."
Adong was instrumental in getting the relief programme started: from helping find drivers, procuring critical supplies, arranging deliveries and liaising with local villages, she took on enormous challenges.
Nothing could have prepared her for what Mercy Corps needed her to do - except her own wartime experiences.
Christine Adong (centre, in red) stands with her extended family in the village of Kwonkic. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
The uncertain years
Christine Adong was born in 1977 in Uganda's capital, Kampala. Her father worked in government. When she was four years old, she moved with her mother and older sister to their ancestral home, the tiny village of Kwonkic in northern Uganda's Pader District. There, Adong began primary school; her father visited from Kampala when he could.
During one such visit on Christmas 1985, a bloody coup brought a new government to power. Officials of the ousted regime feared for their lives. Even living hundreds of miles from the capital, Adong's family still felt it necessary to flee their village and hide from government troops. For nearly two years they were constantly moving, secretly staying with family and friends.
At some point during those years, her father was poisoned, possibly by a political enemy. His health grew progressively worse until he died in 1987. Adong moved back to Kwonkic with her mother, sister and two stepbrothers.
There was no time for life to return to normal. Soon after their return, war broke out in northern Uganda. Government troops were fighting local insurgents, which included a rebel group headed by a self-proclaimed spirit medium named Alice Lakwena. Lakwena's group, the Holy Spirit Movement, was eventually subdued and defeated by government troops, but another rebel force soon took their place: the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), headed by an alleged cousin of Lakwena named Joseph Kony.
Adong's family was again driven from their village by violence that raged between various combatants and which seemed to come from all directions. In their fight against the government, the LRA lashed out against nearly everyone, maiming innocent civilians and burning entire villages. There was one LRA tactic that terrorized the Acholi people more than anything else: the abduction of children to serve as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.
Christine Adong is a survivor of two such abduction attempts.
Avoiding the unthinkable
The first attempt occurred in February 1990. It was about 10 a.m. and Adong was studying in the classroom like any other school day. All of a sudden, uniformed men came into the school. Adong and her fellow students didn't know they were LRA rebels at first, but then they started apprehending girls. Amid the panic, Adong escaped out a window and ran from the school grounds. Several of her classmates were not as fortunate; many were never heard from again.
Christine didn't return to Kwonkic that morning, but instead traveled to Kitgum, the northernmost major city in Uganda. There she found and moved in with an aunt. Adong enrolled in a local school, where a beloved teacher first introduced her to accounting. She was a natural, receiving high marks. It was then she decided to become an accountant.
Later that year, LRA rebels attacked her new school and abducted female students. Fortunately, Adong escaped once again. When she talks about that experience, however, you can see in her eyes that she hasn't forgotten a single, panic-stricken second.
Dreaming of spreadsheets
You get the idea that, indeed, those horrifying moments are the reason that Christine Adong is today telling her story standing next to a mud hut instead of sitting behind a desk in Kampala.
Even though she's thoroughly committed to the work at hand - and to the people Mercy Corps is serving - Adong hasn't given up on that first career track. She's currently enrolled in a course to become a Certified Public Accountant, working toward the license that will validate her studies.
She'd eventually like to combine her accounting skills with project planning, to better help war-torn communities find long-term solutions to their challenges.
She's not sure when those career aspirations will be fulfilled.
"You know, it's quite difficult to predict the future," Adong says, a charming yet effortless smile on her face. "We must always remain flexible. For now, there are people to help."
You can support the work of caring humanitarians like Christine Adong by making a generous donation to our Emergency Response Fund.
Uganda September 30, 2006 11:24PM
The Residue of Conflict
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Senior Policy Advisor Brian Grzelkowski writes his findings at a small hotel in Pader District, Uganda. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps
Kitgum, Uganda - The people of Koch Ama Resettlement Camp, in the Gulu District of Northern Uganda, stood up in succession, each restating the same basic premise.
"We want to go home, now. Having peace and an end to the war are the most important things right now. Even if it means that the LRA and people who have committed crimes against us go unpunished. We simply want to go home."
One hears a similar refrain throughout the three districts of Northern Uganda - Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader - that I have visited over the last two weeks trying to understand the root causes of this decades-long conflict and understand how Uganda can find a way out of this seemingly interminable cycle of conflict and violence.
It's hard to ignore such convictions. Or to disregard the strength it must take for the Acholi of northern Uganda to be willing to simply forgive and forget the atrocities done to them.
Of course, things are more complicated than this. Human nature and the quest for justice are powerful forces likely to hover over this troubled region for a long time. But the dominant sentiment, the visceral feeling one gets, is that these people just want to return to a normal life. After almost twenty years of continual war between the government and Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) where tens of thousands have been killed and over 1.6 million more forced into squalid camps, who can really blame them?
Yet the hope among the people of northern Uganda is now almost palpable. The changes taking place here, even over the last few weeks, have been striking. The recent cessation of hostilities between the LRA and the Ugandan government, together with a gradual improvement in the security situation, has led to a sudden rebirth in the countryside. Smaller resettlement or "decongestion" camps have begun to spring up, some set up by the government and others spontaneously created by people seeking to move to areas closer to their original villages and land.
Once no one moved except during peak daytime hours and with a military escort. Now the daytime roads are clogged with people heading to and from their fields, improbable loads of charcoal, firewood, cassava, bananas and other goods precariously balanced on their heads, bikes or motorcycles. The energy and bustle one now sees in these northern districts is remarkable. Few are yet willing to call it optimism, but it is most certainly hope.
Caution, even skepticism, is understandable in a situation such as this. The people of northern Uganda have experienced ceasefires and peace talks before, only to have their hopes dashed in a return to violence and atrocity. The dominant feeling now, however, is that this is the best chance for peace in the past twenty years. In their minds, it has to succeed; there is no other option.
This explains the near universal desire to see the peace talks currently taking place in Juba, South Sudan, succeed whatever it takes. This includes a willingness to let the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments against Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti, and three other top commanders dropped.
Even if peace breaks out tomorrow, Uganda and its people will face substantial obstacles and challenges. For instance, how are they going to peacefully reintegrate thousands of LRA warriors and supporters into the very communities that have suffered atrocities at their hands? Rebuild necessary social services and basic economic infrastructure - schools, health clinics, and roads - as people rush to return to their homes? Begin the processes of reconciliation and economic development, especially between the government and the northern and eastern parts of the country after decades of conflict and neglect? Or, most fundamentally, end decades of mutual aggression, suspicion and distrust?
Ultimately, the answers to these questions will be found with Ugandans, and despite the large-scale suffering and major challenges that still lie ahead, there is more hope here now than there has been at any point in the last twenty years.
You can support Mercy Corps' efforts in northern Uganda by making a generous donation today.
Uganda October 30, 2007 11:32PM
After Twenty Years, Almost Home
Jeremy Barnicle
Chief Development and Communications Officer
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John Bosco and his son. Photo: Jeremy Barnicle/Mercy Corps
Oyere, Uganda - John Bosco Akello is an important leader in this village — deputy chief, pastor, model farmer — at a time when leadership is vitally important.
Displaced from their ancestral land for almost 20 years by fighting between the Ugandan military and the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), John Bosco and his people are finally heading home.
In the hardest years of the conflict, people like John Bosco fled to cities or massive displacement camps. The camps and cities offered relative security from the LRA, but they were overcrowded and chaotic and led to a whole new set of problems.
Close quarters and bad sanitation meant communicable diseases spread from home to home like hot gossip. Lifelong farmers found themselves trying to find work fixing cars or hawking goods on the side of the road. Schools were overflowing with kids — in fact, I never met a family in northern Uganda with fewer than four children — so students struggled to learn in packed-tight classrooms or they stopped going to school altogether.
"The kids couldn't concentrate on anything," John Bosco says. "The camp school was very hard on them."
Progress
Negotiations between the government and the LRA haven't yet yielded a peace agreement, but the LRA withdrew from northern Uganda in late 2006 and people finally feel safe moving closer to home.
And that's how the village of Oyere was born. All over northern Uganda, families are leaving the huge "mother camps" of the war years and moving to transitional villages like Oyere, whose 1068 residents all originally come from within a mile or so of here.
"Just about all the families here are actually working on their own land, even if they haven't moved back to their original homes," John Bosco says. "That's my family's land over there," he notes, pointing toward the south.
To help these long-displaced families move home, Mercy Corps is investing heavily in Ugandan transit villages like Oyere.
The agency trains five female hygiene promotion officers per village, who teach mothers how to keep their families healthy, and then funds the construction of permanent latrines and water bore holes to maintain sanitary conditions.
Roads for tomorrow - and cash for today
The 50 or so most vulnerable households nominate a family member to participate in "cash-for-work" programmes in which Mercy Corps pays workers a day-wage to complete basic infrastructure projects — roads, embankments — that the community sees as a priority.
"We are building two roads: one that gets us better access to the market so we can sell our crops and one that makes it safe for our kids to walk to school," John Bosco says. "This will make the situation here much better."
The returning farmers — who have nothing, after years in the city or the camps — are equipped with seeds and shared tools, so they can make productive the land that has lain fallow for almost two decades.
"We've got hope now — I am 100 percent that the situation will be better for my kids than it is right now," John Bosco says, surrounded by his four children, and he turns around and heads back to his fields.