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IDP Camp, Gulu, Uganda
Originally uploaded by ddboo

We decided to go to Gulu because last October we got involved with Guluwalk and learned all about it. Each night the children from the villages had to walk down to the town of Gulu to escape the chance of being kidnapped by the LRA and turned into child soldiers and / or sex slaves. The walk took hours and the kids had to walk back in the morning to go to school and tend to their daily chores on the farm. I blogged about this about exactly a year ago here: http://denisebuchanan.blogspot.com/2006/10/guluwalk-bad-coffee-and-overpriced.html. It so amazing that this year I actually got the chance to go to Gulu and see what is really going on. The LRA are in peace talks right now, but currently demanding alot of money to continue talks so things are pretty much at a standstill right now. Gulu is a small town that has now been completely taken over by military and non-government organizations. Our experience there was very shocking and real. We arrived on a bus from Kampala that was supposed to take 4 hours and actually took 6. Oh the pain. 3 of the hours were speed bumps. Luckily there was fantastic roadside cuisine to kill the time. BBQ'd beef on a stick, roasted corn on the cob, cassava, grilled bananas (yes it sounds weird but it is delicious. BBQ a banana - you wont regret it...If you do I will re-imburse you for the banana). OH - sorry to go totally off topic but i would like to talk about bananas for a moment. Bananas are a wonder food. You can do so many things with them and the East Africans have them all covered - except I am yet to see a banana split. I will just mention a few: roasted bananas, grilled bananas, banana soup, banana pizza, mashed and cooked bananas (matoke), plain old banana, banana yogurt, banana milk and banana pancakes. I think thats it. Talk about making the most of a resource. OK so enough about bananas.

We got to Gulu and instantly noticed its far less developed than the rest of the country. We had some friends who were up there a week before us and they gave us the low down on where to stay and who to contact for volunteer work. We stayed in the most roach infested dump yet (think Joe's apartment x 10), the Bora Bora. At night I would walk into the bathroom and cockroaches would scatter to clear a path for me on the concrete ground. This is probably to much information but I would sit on the toilet or while brushing my teeth and take a cup or a bucket and see how many I could trap. No joke. When one starts to play games like that, one has been in Africa for too long and should probably go home :/ The next day we contacted the head of the food drop program that the United Nations runs in Gulu. We arranged to meet in the morning and go out to the IDP camps the next day to volunteer. We left the office at 9:00am the following morning to go to our first refugee camp. This was a smaller camp, only about 5000 people. We were escorted by a military convoy (8 soldiers on the back of a truck carrying machine guns :/), three other UN trucks and followed by massive trucks carrying hundreds of bags of maize, yellow peas and cooking oil. The food was donated by the UN, and USA. After driving for about an hour we arrived to the camp. All the people in the camp used to live in villages that have been destroyed by the LRA. Many are traumatised and many have turned to alcoholism. Its heartbreaking to see people that once had farms, houses, communities, culture and families living in these conditions. Many people have been living in these camps for 20 years. Imagine a sea of identical round thatched roof huts with only about 10 metres in between them. The toilets are mud huts sporadically placed and the showers are also mud huts which people go into with a bucket of well water and wash. There is the odd goat or chicken running around but not really any farming, they are almost 100% reliant on the UN for food. One thing that really stands out is the amount of children running around, there must be 5 to each adult. Every woman from the age of 12 and up has an infant strapped to her back. Many older siblings (by older I mean ..6, maybe?) have younger siblings strapped to their backs. Babies carrying babies everywhere. The children look generally malnourished with distended bellies and snotty noses. Most of them have been born and raised in the camp and have never left in their entire lives. There are many staggering drunk men wandering around by noon every day talking nonsense. We saw people here who had there extremities chopped off by machetes, as this was one of the favourite torture practises of the LRA. The overload of children is a result of people having nothing to do but get drunk and make babies. Not to mention the HIV rates in these camps. Its hard to know for sure the number but the lack of education the the lack of caring about life in general has definitely impacted the HIV rates. One of the Ugandans who worked for the world food program took us on a tour through one of the camps and gave us allot of valuable information. One troubling fact is that many women choose prostitution, knowing they will probaby contract HIV, to be able to afford to eat and feed their families. This is actually a better option then having themselves or their children die of malnutrition. They will live longer eating well with HIV then not eating at all. Some people sell their portions of the UN food to get money for alcohol / prostitutes. That, more than anything paints an explicit picture of how grim life is here: A place where people choose HIV as a means of survival. People are slowly starting to return to their villages but many will never go back - they are scared / traumatised and have nothing to go back too. Dennis. who is now 27, was a young boy when the LRA started raiding villages and he told us a story of how he was once kidnapped. 1 of every 3 Acholi (sorry, Acholi is the name of the tribe) adults has been kidnapped in their lives. He was forced out of his home and had to walk 100 kilometers over night, completely exhausted, carrying a heavy sack of sugar at the age of 12. He was one of the lucky ones and got away within a week (he says with a laugh and a big heartfelt smile...). Every night his family worried about raids. When the sun set they would go into the forest and hide / sleep until 3am. In their home was the most dangerous place to be during these hours. At 3am they would go back to their house and sleep peacefully for the rest of the night. The LRA always raided before 3am so they could take their victims before daybreak.

So I think you probably get the idea. You have to go see these place to believe it. I just wouldn't know where to start solving the problems they have in these camps. I guess number one would be education and most of the camps do have primary school. Too bad the kids only go for the one meal per day the NGO's provide for them then go back home to take care of younger siblings or help around the house.

So here is the part where we actually volunteer. When the food trucks pull in (as they do once a month to each camp) the women walk down to he unloading area with their food cards and begin to unload the trucks. Each bag is about 110lbs. Many are grandmothers / mothers / very young mothers with babies strapped to their backs lifting the bags. The men are not really helping at all. They are in the camps sitting around drinking the local brew (marwa), getting drunk. We came there to help, so we jumped in and started pulling bags off the trucks and sweating it out with all the other women (minus the babies of course). It was so hard. 5 bags and my arms were screaming in the 38 degree heat. Yet these women seem to do it easily, women old enough to be my grandmother running circles around me with the bags, smiling and laughing. Apparently we looked pretty silly to them struggling to lift these bags with our silly clothes on and pasty skin. After the trucks are unloaded everyone starts the lengthy process of measuring out the food and distributing it. The amount of food they get depends on the number of people in the household. Once its all done the UN does random spot checks, checking food cards and weighing the it to make sure no one has too much. Then after about 5 hours of work we loaded into the truck and headed back into town, exhausted.

Each day we did this was the same but different. One day we went to a camp of over 15,000 people and there were huts as far as I could see. There are over 60 camps in the Gulu region all together. This camp had developed into a sort of village given the population. There was a market and a few bars. We had alot of fun playing tag and football with the kids in all the camps. We also sat with the soldiers one day around a bucket of local brew and chatted, I don't know how useful the soldiers are wasted but hey, TIA. We tasted the local brew and it was sick. Brewed right there at the camp it was like hot chunky, really bad beer. One day a man approached me and began speaking in Acholi, which I obviously don't understand. He had seen me taking pictures and wanted to show me a goat with a human head. One of the guys from the UN was Acholi and translated for me. I was convinced that this man was crazy but he seemed genuinely concerned because someone had been defiling his goats and one has been born with a human head. So...ok. Lets humour this guy and go see his goat. We walked 30 mins to the other side of the camp. He went into his hut and came back out with a baby goat in a basket. It was dead and it was deformed. I guess if you were drunk enough or totally crazy one could see how the head looked like a hairy human head. He asked me what to do with it and if I think its 1/2 human. He was so sincere and concerned I didn't know what to say. In the end he was glad to hear that no one was having sex with his goats and that it was deformed and he should throw it away and not worry about it. He insisted I take a photo of it and he put it back in the hut. If anyone is interested in seeing the photo email me. Its really weird. An and i also got offered 200 shillings for sex in the camp! thats the equivalent to 10 cents. nice.

We did this for a week. At night we ate beans and rice or rolexes, which is egg wrapped in chapati, watching Al Jazzera TV or listening to Kenny G's Christmas (don't ask), playing scrabble and trivial pursuit jr. with our friend Tim who we met there. Every night there was a huge thunderstorm and the electricity cut out. Every night I though the whole town was going to flood and we would all be gone in the morning except for the cockroaches.

So that was our trip to Gulu. Upon arriving back to Kampala we stayed with some friends for a week and relaxed. By relaxing I mean going out partying and dancing, eating delicious food, having hot showers and going to see transformers. Quite opposite from Gulu. We were only planing to stay there for a couple of days but we got the flu or food poisoning or something. I wouldn't actually expect to go a month on this continent without some sort of funky disease or bug. We are not really sure if it was the roadside meat we ate on the way back from Gulu or the fact that the guy on the bus, about 3 hours into the 6 hour ride, began puking in the isle on my feet and backpack. Whatever it was laid us out for a few days anyway. It was not pretty.

Currently we are in Kigali, Rwanda. We spent four night detoxing, reading and hiking at a lake in Uganda called Lake Bunyonyi. It was beautiful. We stayed on a little island and went swimming and running each day. The island had these little villages we could hike through and it was so quiet and peaceful. We left there yesterday and arrived to Kigali last night. The ride here was some of the most beautiful county side I have ever seen - tea plantations, sugar cane fields, rice patties and mountains. Kigali appears far more civilized than anywhere else in East Africa, well anywhere we have been. There are cobblestone streets, stop lights (that people actually obey!), crosswalks, starbucks - esque coffee shops, landscaped round-a-bouts, modern malls and shops. There are actually lines separating the lanes on the roads! The taxi drivers actually work for taxi companies and have numbers and plates, I actually see police walking around not looking like I could pay them off with 10 shillings. Its funny the things I have started to notice as "nice". So having been here for 24 hours I can say that the people have been super helpful and friendly and crossing the road has become a regular task - not a brush with death. Tomorrow we are off to the genocide memorials and then somewhere else. Not sure where yet.

See you all soon!

xx