By Courtney Howard
Buffalo, NY – "What can you do best for us?" I stood in the Lacor IDP camp in northern Uganda, unable to answer. Not because I couldn't understand his halting, accented English, but because I couldn't imagine anything I could do that could begin to address the appalling scene that surrounded me. As I looked at the overwhelming suffering, the emaciated bodies, crowded huts, and ragged clothes seemingly omnipresent around me my first heartbreaking thought was that there was nothing that I could do. I began to stumble over some ill crafted response about how I promised to tell his story when I returned to the States when I was saved by another man who moved me along and told my inquisitor not to bother me. Even though I was shielded from having to answer his piercing question directly, it stayed with me all through the night. I found relief only when the sunlight broke through the window of my room, giving me respite from a night of staring into the darkness, turning the question over and over in my mind and finding no answer.
The Lacor IDP, or Internally Displaced Persons, camp is home to over 12,000 people crowded into thatched huts that are so close to one another that you have to turn sideways to walk between them. On the Thursday before we arrived a woman cleaned the ash out of her cooking stove and started a fire that consumed 176 homes - leaving approximately 1500 people subject to the elements with the rainy season just beginning. Because it is the end of the dry season there is not enough grass to provide thatch to repair their roofs. The United Nations provided some of them with tarps but, sadly there weren't enough of those either. David, one of my traveling companions, says over and over "it's terrible" and though I know he means this in the most sincere way possible "terrible" doesn't begin to describe the sorrow through which we are walking.
The people living in Lacor and the many other IDP camps in northern Uganda have been forced into these horrendous conditions by a conflict that has been raging in the region for 19 years. They are caught in the crossfire between the rebel Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government and both sides are responsible for gross human rights violations. Worse still this conflict has gone largely unrecognized by the international community, even though the LRA rebellion has spread to the neighboring countries of Sudan and Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The primary victims of this war are children. To date, the LRA has abducted over 25,000 children between the ages of seven and seventeen to fill their ranks. The children are forced to kill family members, neighbors, and fellow abductees as initiation into the LRA. This ritualized killing is a psychological attack on the children, convincing them that the people in their home communities will never accept them again and become a deterrent to attempted escape. Girls become sex slaves as well as child soldiers and are subject to rape, unwanted pregnancy, and the threat of HIV/AIDS. Faced with the horrifying prospect of abduction and child soldiering, 40,000 children in northern Uganda have become 'night commuters'. Knowing the military offers little protection from the LRA in the countryside, they walk 6-10 miles from rural IDP camps to the nearest town center each night to sleep in hospitals, district offices, or any vacant shelter they believe will provide them with a safe place to sleep. Some are forced to sleep on the streets, where though they avoid abduction they are still subject to exploitation and abuse.
"What can you do best for us?" The question has repeated itself to me everyday since I returned from Uganda. I met those children and I listened as they told me the stories of their lost family members and of the daily hardships they face merely to survive. Having been covered by the red dust of the roads they travel each day in search of safety, I know I cannot ignore that question. So I tell their story and I ask you to join me and other Western New Yorkers for the WNY GuluWalk and benefit concert on April 8th in Delaware Park. We will be walking in solidarity with the night commuters so that their story might be known to the larger international community and action might be taken to end this war. Funds from the event will go to help end the war in northern Uganda as well as provide hope for rehabilitation for child soldiers. If you would like to join us, click here for more information and registration forms. It sometimes seems that symbolic gestures and money donations are never going to be enough to stop the evil effects of war on this planet. More and more, war-ravaged people are asking without much hope of a reply, "What can you do best for us?" But when the poverty is overwhelming, when the task seems crushing, when the eyes of the questioners are most haunting, I try to think as Gandhi did when he stated "when I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."
Listener-commentator Courtney Howard is a global studies teacher in the Cuba-Rushford Central School District.