Christmas in Gulu

It is December 24th and it is 9am and we are chugging down the choked highways of Kampala toward the bus park. We are determined to get to Gulu. We have been communicating with the organization, “Invisible Children”, for some months, ever since our friend introduced the documentary of the same name to us. The film tells the story of the children who have been displaced by the civil war in northern Uganda…

A bit of history: Alice Lukwena was a woman who in the 1980s decided that she was on a holy mission. Lukwena mixed some African tribal superstition with some questionable Christian scripture to convince some of the people that a crusade was needed to make northern Uganda a Christian state. Eventually she died and a man came along, Joseph Kony, claiming to be Alice’s nephew. He took up the cause in a new and brutal way. Kony formed the LRA, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla rebel group. This group kept their troupe numbers high by abducting children from their village homes and forcing them, many times, to kill their parents before stealing them away to fight in the rebel army. This went on for 15-20 years. Thousands of children between the ages of five and twelve were abducted. Needless to say, when a five-year-old child is forced to kill (with machete, in most cases) their family and friends (when those friends tried to escape from the rebels), that child is severely traumatized. We will be happy to let any of you have or borrow our videotape of “Invisible Children” if you have an interest – it is too much to get into here. Basically, we were both moved when we saw the film and saw the thousands of children who were displaced and orphaned as a result of the war between Kony’s rebels and the Ugandan government army. The army was hampered by the fact that Kony’s rebels moved in numbers of five or six. One former government army man told us that they were no match for the bandits, who were getting financial and arms support from the government of Sudan (who were angry with Uganda for supporting a Sudanese rebel group, the SPLA … Africa is complex, and has many of these kinds of inter-tribal wars going on).

Anyway, our initial movement toward Uganda came as a result of the film. Last Spring we started planning. Kevin has a friend at NYU who works for Invisible Children, now an NGO (non-government organization), and over the course of the last several months we have been speaking with her and also e-mailing the Ugandan staff. Aimee, who has been working as a doula for over two years, hoped to assist in some way. Kevin, who has been working in educational theater, was curious to see if there was a place for him to work with children or prisoners. Our plan was to arrive in Kampala, settle for a day, then meet up with a group from Invisible Children and take a bus with them to Gulu – 360 kilometers (1 k = 2/3 mile) to the North; just 80 kilometers from the Sudanese border.

In many ways we are so glad that our luggage never arrived. Kevin has been wearing the same jeans for eight days. Aimee has managed, somehow, to find the perfect African style. She has her African dress (see: mu-mu) and a wrap, which she manages to finagle into several strikingly different looking outfits. She’s getting a lot of compliments from Ugandan and muzungu alike.

Now: It is December 24th and it is 9am and we are chugging down the choked highways of Kampala toward the bus park. We are determined to get to Gulu. James, our private hire taxi driver is more than helpful. He is not simply dropping us at the bus park; he is asking people on the street where we can find the next bus to Gulu. We get the information and easily find the bus through the swarming Christmas crowds. Apparently, Kampala – and the rest of Uganda – is a different place at Christmas. Like anywhere else, those who are from the country, come to the Big City; those from the City take off for their homes in the country. The scene at the bus park is wild. We get on the bus at 9:15. People are prodding us in every direction, each trying to draw us to their particular bus. Others try to take our bags so that they can get the tip we will be obligated to give if we allow them to tote for us. We are happy to get to the bus early. Aimee needs a window seat to stave off bus-sickness, and we are hopeful that, having a three seater, we’ll have room for our oversize (and very heavy) camera bag.

After sitting on the bus for two hours, we depart. In the meantime, both the bus and our bladders fill considerably. Leaving the bus is not an option. Outside the safe confines of the bus (which idles along with about fifty other black-smoke-spewing busses for the entire two hours) is a mad scene. We are not firghtened, but we don’t want to risk losing our seats. Literally hundreds of vendors, both men and women, pass our window to offer us everything from water to whole loaves of white bread to socks, shoes, belts, coca cola, frozen icees, cheap plastic toys, transistor radios, jewelry, to herbal remedies promising to cure both malaria and the common cold. In the midst of this, thousands of travelers search for their busses. They are carrying bags, suitcases, chickens, linoleum flooring, bicycles, and many, many small children. The ground is red dirt and no one at all seems to notice the thick clouds of diesel smoke that blow into their faces as they talk, laugh, fight, and yell to one another, shouting directions. Behind the busses sit dirtied men, barefoot, on small piles of refuse and mud. And now, the outside scene becomes the inside scene. The vendors pass up and down the aisles of the bus, sometimes two and three at a time, and often selling the same thing. Amazingly, some would-be passengers who passed on the first woman’s loaf of bread, decided thirty seconds later, to buy the next man’s.

Finally, the bus lurches out of the bus park and we snail our way through the clogged arteries of the city. It takes nearly an hour to get out of the center of town (sound familiar, New Yorkers?) and soon enough, the tin roofs and ramshackle structures that serve as joints, shops, barbershops, furniture makers’ stands, and countless other businesses fall away. The landscape becomes increasingly greener. We start to see another side of Africa! In the not-too-far distance, beyond the trees and shrubs, we see hundreds of small thatched huts. These are the villages that dot the Ugandan landscape from Tanzania to the Sudan. The huts are made of red mud and clay. They are round and topped with conical thatches. Women may sit before the black hole of a doorway, doing some chore that is impossible to know from the confines of the speeding bus. Sometimes, children run around the yard. If and when they see us, they stare, scream, wave, yell, “muzungu! muzungu!”

Sometimes, when we reach a local town, the bus stops and vendors rush at the window. They thrust bottles of water, skewered pieces of cooked goat meat, and whole, live chickens up to the passengers. Chickens are everywhere, including what sound like five or six toward the front of the bus. They have ridden with us since Kampala, clucking all the way, unaware that their final destination is Christmas dinner in Gulu.

We start again and soon we hear a strange hissing from the window. “Are we getting a flat?” Aimee looks out the window. “I think so. It doesn’t look good.” The bus motors on. We stop again after two or three miles and the driver gets out and looks at the tire. After some time, we roll on again. Five more miles and the bus is keening noticeably to the right. On good tires, driving in Uganda has been an adventure. First of all, as a former colony of the British Empire, everyone drives on the left. This is disconcerting if one is unused to it. As pedestrians, we have both looked carefully to our right before crossing the street, only to be startled back to the sidewalk by the blaring horn of a bodha or matatu. On the road, the drivers careen down the broken and potholed corridors like race car drivers. They pass four and five other vehicles in one clip. They avoid broken stretches of road by veering all the way to the right hand side of the road, into the sandy strip separating the road from the bush, and tilt the bus so far that we are sure that we will tip. The Ugandans see our fear and laugh – but only after the bus has tilted safely back to center.

Now we are in the middle of nowhere. A long stretch of highway with no towns to be seen in either direction. Indeed, we have a flat. The bus stops. We all exit into the baking sun. It is 3 pm. We make a bet on whether they have a spare and/or the means to change the tire. We cross the road as the driver and his assistant (the man who collects the money from each passenger, and who also deals with the army officers at the various checkpoints) climb under the bus and pull out a perfectly good-looking spare tire. They proceed to unlock the bolts on the flat and we stand and bake in the road as a multitude of bicyclists and pedestrians pass the broken bus. After half an hour we are all aboard and on our way.

The rest of the trip is only eventful in the best sense. We cross the Nile at Kumba falls. The rapids rush under us as we cross into the North. On the other side, a team of clever, red-assed baboons waits by the side of the road for travelers to throw them some fruit. Everyone points and laughs to see the beautiful animals.

GULU!!! We finally arrive in Gulu on Christmas Eve at 5pm. What a day! But there is no time to rest. We are on alert because we are in a new place and expect that there will be a horde of bodha drivers waiting to bombard us with offers to drive us wherever we want to go. All we want, when we exit the bus, is to be able to look around, get our bearings, secure our backpacks, and find where we need to go. We are also dying of thirst. Though water was often offered to us on the bus, we had been warned to check the bottoms of the bottles we buy very closely; street vendors can stick a pin in the bottom of a bottle, drain the good water for themselves and refill the bottle with tap. They then melt the plastic closed. If one isn’t careful, it could be diarrhea city! We were desperate on the bus and we spent 500 shillings for a bottle. Sure enough, when we turned the bottle over, we saw the mark of a phony. But the seller was long gone. We spent the next three hours parched, feeling the cool touch of the bad water bottle on our legs…

We find a phone stand. We need to call our Invisible Children (henceforth, IC) contact and let her know we’ve arrived. Phone stands are little wooden booths behind which sit operators and atop which sit standard home telephones. They are pretty much pay phones with live assistants. We ask to make a local call and the man dials our number. We pay 200 shillings, look in vain for a bottle of water in one of the shops for a few minutes, then grab the first bodha drivers we see to take us to the IC house.

The IC house is where the volunteers stay when they come to Gulu. The house is gated and protected by a high, brick fence and barbed wire. There is a guard on duty each night whom we’ve befriended named Francis. The first night we meet him, he tells us that his 12-year-old daughter has just died of cancer. We are shocked. When? Just yesterday. We can’t understand how or why he is working. Do the others know? Does IC? We don’t know… We ask if he needs anything? Water? A blanket? He tells us he needs food. We heat up leftovers from our dinner and bring him a plate.

Each room in the house has two triple-decker bunk beds covered in mosquito netting. We’re thrown back into a dorm setting. It’s a mix between a beaten up fraternity house and an army compound, although in Gulu this house is considered high end. Strangely, the walls and the wire and the guard give us both the feeling that, rather than being protected, we are trapped. Kevin says he feels like he is in a prison. After the freedom of Kampala & Jinja, we suddenly feel that perhaps there is reason to fear.

We meet the group that will be here with us for the duration. They are a group of 10 from Illinois. They all go to the same Christian University. IC also has a strong Christian foundation. This all comes as a surprise to us, and at first is a challenge. We have been reading a lot about the missionary movement in Africa since the mid-1850s. The Christians have done wonderful work here; they have built many schools, hospitals, and of course, churches. But there is a large amount of criticism, too. Not just about the Christian aid, but the whole aid movement in general. The locals we’ve spoken to talk quite a bit about the corruption they see in many of the aid organizations, including the Christian groups. Again, too much to go into here, but suffice to say that we felt challenged. It wasn’t until the second night that we were able to break the ice and dialogue about religion, spirituality, and philosophical perspectives – a dialogue that eased the tension for all of us. Since then we have been becoming friends, many of the students expressing their gratitude for the different perspectives that we’ve brought to the group. And we must say that we, too, are grateful to have been able to see where they are coming from. Aside from our philosophical differences, we’ve discovered that we are here in Northern Uganda for essentially the same reason: to gain understanding of and to serve the people that have suffered so greatly as a result of this war.


Christmas Morning
An I.D.P. camp is an “internally displaced persons” camp. Hundreds of thousands of people from Gulu and the surrounding villages are living in these places since the war. Some, we find out, have been living in camps for almost twenty years. The IC group invites us to join them for the Christmas Mass at Koche Goma, the largest of the local camps. We are at once curious and nervous to see what we imagine will be rough conditions. We load up a matatu driven by a boy of about nineteen or twenty. His name is Steven. The IC volunteer coordinator, Valerie, found him in the bus park. Steven undercut his competitors by some thirty thousand shillings and Valerie hired him. Apparently, the older matatu drivers were not happy with him. They yelled at him as he drove away… His matatu is old and rickety. The two passenger doors are barely hanging on. They rattle and shake as we take the long drive (15k?) down the bumpy dirt road toward Koche Goma. After what seems like a very long drive, we start to pass a couple of the smaller camps. They look like the villages that we passed on the way to Gulu, but are much more densely concentrated. Thatched huts jammed together. Many people stand near the road and watch as the muzungu-filled bus passes. Finally we reach the main camp. As we reach the top of a small crest in the road, we find ourselves looking down on a canopy of the brown grass, which covers each small hut. Driving through the camp, hundreds of children, some half-naked, many dressed in surprisingly clean and new-looking church clothes, come to stare or smile as we pass. We park in front of a makeshift veranda, what we find out later is the Protestant church. As we exit the minivan, the children laugh and point. Many rush to us, touch us, shake our hands, and say “Hello. How are you?” Many only speak the local language, Acholi, but nearly every schoolchild we've met in Uganda can say, “Hello. How are you?” We say, “Fine. How are you?” They always say the same thing: “I am fine.” Soon we ask them first, because we know they will be eager to respond… “How are you?” “I am fine”.

The story of the service is a small novel in itself. In the heart of great sadness, poverty, and sorrow, what a celebration! One of the bishops from Northern Uganda comes to give the service and there are several deacons and archdeacons in attendance. The children sit in front on a small, white tarp. The adults sit under a veranda, protected by the sun. The children will come to us, but we see that the adults look at us warily. We decide to approach them, as a sign of respect. They smile warmly once contact is made. We wonder what they think of us, how many muzungus they have seen, how many people have walked into their village to help. How many have come and gone? We shake hands with them and they thank us for coming. “Afoyo. Afoyo.” Thank you. Thank you. We try to express how grateful we are to be with them on this day. We are so thankful and feel that it is a great honor. What perspective it gives us to see these barefoot people dancing and clapping with enormous smiles stretching their faces even as mucous and blood comes from the children’s noses, even as they tell us of the fact that the U.N. only provides seven days worth of food every two to three weeks. They are hungry. They are bored. There is no work, even for the strongest and healthiest of the young men. They sit around, play cards, watch the sky, wash their few articles of clothing. Kevin steals away from the service. Steven, the driver, had gone off to visit his grandmother, who lives within the camp. I (Kevin) see him return and I walk over to him. I ask how his grandmother is and he says, “fine” before casually mentioning that she’s just contracted malaria. I tell him how sorry I am. He looks at the ground. We stand for a while before he tells me that he has no parents. I look at him and he points to a large tree way off in the distance. “That is where our house was. When I was five years old, the LRA came out of the bush and tied my father to this tree. I cried and asked them to please not kill my father, but they take the machete and they cut, cut him and they kill him. I run home to tell my mother but she thinks that I am only joking. But I am crying and then she follows me and sees that my father is in many pieces.” I don’t know what to say. There is nothing to say. I tell him, again, that I am so sorry. He shows no emotion that I can discern. If I begin to see some wetness in his eye, he looks at the ground too quickly for me to be sure. He continues, “My mother screams at the LRA and they beat her very badly and she does not wake up even for one week. Then my grandmother takes care of me and my brothers.” I find out later that Steven’s mother died three years back of a heart attack. I ask if he will walk me through the camp. He agrees and we walk together and I ask him about different things we are seeing – the latrines, the fire pits, the animals, the older men and women who come to shake my hand and speak to me quickly in Acholi language.

The celebration goes on for over three hours. We dance and clap with the children. We are laughing and, yes, being laughed at. We are curiosities to them at first but soon a genuine warmth grows between us. Without the hindrance of language, we communicate heart to heart, human to human. At one point, the bishop calls up all of the muzungus to the front of the congregation. Kevin is talking to Steven, but he watches Aimee and the rest as they are thanked and applauded by the whole group. The people seem so grateful for our presence. Perhaps they see us as a sign that the rest of the world has not completely forgotten them. We are not so sure. How can this ever get fixed? Is it naïve to ask how this modern world can allow such degradation?

Communion is broken pieces of sweet biscuits dipped in red wine. The Ugandan musicians play one more wonderful, jubilant song, and then we thank everyone we see. They think that it is special that we have come to visit them, but they can’t know how much it means to us to be with them on this Christmas morning. They have nothing but they make every attempt to give us everything they have. We in the West have everything and make only pitiful attempts to give anything to anyone. How much we’ve learned today… Every child of the village comes to touch us. Out of respect, they kneel to the ground when they shake our hands. And not only to the muzungus, but also to their own elders. We ask how long they will continue to do this and we are told that it will never end. Even a grown man or woman will kneel before an elder.

We pile back into the matatu and drive away. As we drive toward the main road we see one teenage boy make a violent gesture toward the van as we pass. This young man sees us and feigns throwing a punch. A joke or a genuine, if crude, attempt to express some rage or anger he feels toward us or about his situation? We drive. Did anyone else notice? No one says so if they do. We ride back to the IC house. The day has been long. We arrived at the camp at 11am. It is now nearly 5pm. Oddly, no one speaks about the day. We (a. & k.) do, with each other. Perhaps the others do, too, without us. But it is strange that there is no debrief of the day.

We are both filled with so many ideas, so many questions. What can we do to help, really? What can we do to make some meaningful contribution to try to alleviate this suffering? And what of the suffering in our own backyards? In Brooklyn and New York? We are faced with so many… what? contradictions? realities? All of it… All of it…

Today (12/27) Aimee meets with Sister Florence, the head midwife at the Gulu Regional Hospital. Kevin has been invited to assist with a nascent theater program where one of the students is struggling to organize a performance. We are excited... And they tell us that our luggage has arrived in Entebbe and that British Air is sending it to us here. We'll believe it when we see it!

Until next time…
Sending love to all.
a & k