July 12th: Elizabeth's View - Gulu

Posted by Elizabeth

On Monday we arrived at the Gulu area in Acholiland, so named for the Acholi tribe that lives there. Gulu is about six hours from Kampala and the drive is so bumpy that, at the end of the day, I left the car with bruised knees. We were in the north, where the war has been for the last twenty years. It’s only been in the last year that one can travel there without a military convoy.

As we moved farther and farther north, the landscape changed from lush green hills to flatter, arid yellows. Traveling anywhere in Uganda, you inevitable pass through towns—essentially a row of beat-up stores along each side of the highway. After a few hundred yards, they end abruptly. (Consider them a sort of commercial oasis.) As we drove north, we still passed such towns, but more and more of them began to remind me of a “wild west” movie. Boarded-up shops. Fewer people out and about. Several towns looked as though they had been abandoned.

For those towns still functioning, it was all too clear that the poverty worsened in the north. More people were barefoot. Kids in school uniforms ran along the highways as always. The existing towns looked even more run-down than usual.

As we neared Gulu, the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps began to appear. We stopped at one of the first ones we saw and our guide, Betty, got out of the car to try and find someone who could show us around, or at least answer some questions. She returned with Mr. Onyik, who had served as the elected camp leader for the last six years. He spoke with us for a few minutes and we arranged to return the next day to interview several former child soldiers. For now, he said, he would give us a tour.

The Minakulu IDP Camp houses about 5,013 people at the moment. It began in 1996. Most of the camps around here seem like they were “self-started.” For example, Minakulu began when a group of people felt unsafe in their homes due to the war. They approached several landowners, who generously donated their land to house the IDPs. We met one of the landowners, a kind man who lives in the same type of hut as everybody else there.

The camp is an expanse of round huts made from brick and mud with thatched roofs. To give you a better picture, each hut is about the size of two queen beds pushed together and holds one family. Sometimes there will be as many as ten people living in one hut. People do their laundry and dishes in small plastic pots outside of their huts. There is a small secondary school built especially for the camp, and when not in class, several teenagers lounged about in the grass in their navy and white uniforms. Throughout the camps, here and there, there are scraps of attempted beauty: patterns painted on the outside of a hut in mud and chalk, colorful lace hung across a door made of flattened USA cooking oil cans.

The camp’s latrine is made from mud with a corrugated steel door that looks as though it’s on its last hinge. In several places throughout the camp, straw mats are stood up to make an enclosed area for bathing. The same kind of mat serves as a mattress and drying area for plants grown in the camp gardens. On these mats, people spread out beans or raw cassava to dry. Fresh-picked beans are dumped on them as well, and children dutifully thrash the pods with sticks to shake the beans loose. We meet one man—about twenty years old—who serves as the camp’s butcher. There are several animal skins drying on the ground outside his hut. He tells my dad that people used to go the market for meat. Now, because of lack of money, they raise all of their own goats and chickens.

Digging is the main source of income around here. People dig in their own gardens for food (this food is literally their only income), or are paid to dig in others’ gardens. Sometimes this payment is monetary, other times, people are paid with the very vegetables they dig up. All around us, people are coming back from the garden just beyond the camp limits with baskets or bowls or bundles of produce on their heads. Corn is grown in any available space here, sometimes even only a few stalks at a time.

I must admit—and I am somewhat ashamed to say this—but the people in the camp surprised me. I had imagined everyone sitting around, sullen, unable to return to their homes. I hardly thought that we would be given a warm welcome. But I was quite wrong. From the moment we entered the camp, everyone came up to greet us and tell us that we were welcome there. Most people spoke very limited English, conversing instead in the local languages of Acholi or Luo. “Afoyo,” I kept repeating, the one Acholi word I know. “Thank you.” “Afoyo, afoyo.” I was thanking everybody left and right.

Everyone wanted us to take their picture, and we had an entourage of about fifteen kids following us the whole time. And cuter, filthier kids you have never seen. They ran behind us, giggling and dancing and trying to get into the picture whenever they could. But their smiles didn’t hide their dirt-streaked, half-dressed bodies, their bellies swollen from malnutrition and worms, or the small bald patches on their heads from ringworm. One boy, about six years old, was wearing torn surf shorts that were so big for him he had to constantly pull them up with one hand. His other hand was supporting a naked baby, propped against his body. This is hardly an uncommon sight here.

In the camps, I got the sense that everyone there was just waiting. They no longer have the same jobs or gardens or farms that they used to work. There is little for anybody to do. As a result, alcoholism has become a severe problem. Aside from the household chores—which are traditionally completed by the women—people don’t have much else to do besides wait. Although some began to move back home when the peace talks started, others are still waiting for the day when they no longer feel afraid of living in their own homes, when the LRA is no longer a threat, when their children may return home safely.

But even when this happens, the country will bear the scars of this war for some time to come. Many kids were born in the camps. For those from the north and under the age of twenty, war is all they have known.