uganda

The flight was almost two hours late and no one seemed to notice. I stood in the hot, baking sun of a northern Ugandan afternoon, behind my sunglasses my eyes rested closed while my arms and face soaked up the surprisingly comforting rays. The fatigue of almost three weeks of travel was catching up with me and I honestly couldn’t get out of there soon enough. But at the local airstrip (not an airport), I had no more control over my life and destiny than the people I had just spent the past few days visiting with in the refugee camps. My only choice was to stand beside that dirt runway and wait for whenever the tiny plane decided to show up… to wait for my own sort of deliverance.

Uganda was (and is) a complex place. Not that I’m an authority on any kind of history, but I am an observer of people, and cultures, and whatever evirons Life seems to find me in, and since I’m always more of a “documentarian” than an “intervener,” I try to at least learn from what I see (the sights, sounds, smells, conversations) and share it and grow from it.

So, this is what I saw = Kampala, the capital, was immensely accessible (aside from the hellacious traffic that haunts any capital city) and is renowned as one of Africa’s safest major cities. It was big, but not too big like Dar es Salaam or Nairobi, and people were quite friendly. English is the country’s official language so it was spoken everywhere, which makes everything just a heck of a lot easier. I stayed at a normal hotel, had lots of meetings with people in their normal offices, talked about normal work issues and what not. I might as well have been in Milwaukee.

Throughout those conversations, though, I learned that most organizations were doing work “in the north” which didn’t mean very much to me until later, when I was actually there, and experienced the radically different environment for myself. I didn’t know much about Ugandan history (and am far from a scholar now), but I did know a little about Idi Amin’s reign of terror in the 1970’s (as depicted in the movie The Last King of Scotland). What I wasn’t aware of was that other terrifying leaders followed, along with fierce clashes among people groups that continued into the late 1990’s, primarily “in the north.”

Even though the “peace process” has brought calmer times here in the 21^st century, an estimated one million Ugandans are still living as refugees from decades of civil conflict. They’re known to relief agencies as IDP's, or internally displaced persons, and are clustered together in “camps” by the thousands, many within only a few miles of their original homes. But even now, because of continuing “security restrictions,” they are stuck – forbidden to venture outside the camp perimeters to farm or have their own livelihoods. They depend largely on UN rations for food, international organizations for medicine and supplies, and their own government for not much at all. After living like this more well over a decade, many people I talked to have accepted these camps as their fate, saying these cramped communities are now their homes, and especially their children’s homes, since it’s all that the younger generations have ever known.

The living conditions in these camps were truly some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Nothing certainly compares to the aftermath of the tsunami, or even Hurricane Katrina, but as you take in your surroundings in this kind of situation, Something Inside you knows that man’s neglect is an equal or perhaps even greater tragedy than nature’s wrath. As always, though, I moved around an incomprehensible environment as unflinchingly as possible, taking a few photos here and there and asking easy questions about mosquitoes, when I really just wanted to scream “OH MY GOD WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP YOU GET OUT OF HERE?”

The mud-brick huts were built so closely together that the edges of their straw-thatched rooftops often touched, creating shady places for relief from the heat and, in the rainy season, perpetual puddles that were breeding havens for mosquitoes and disease. The people I interviewed were ultra-polite, often shy, but others stared stone-faced, especially the women (the hardest working yet most depreciated group in rural African society), and no English was spoken. There was little grass inside the camps, only dust and dirt or mud, making for dark-skinned children whose hours of outdoor play made them appear gray, even ghostly, the shade of ground. Some giggled when I passed, others shrieked in horror, but everyone, of all ages, turned and watched me closely.

Back in the main town, where the airstrip was, I had seen sign after sign pointing the way to aid agency offices, most of them familiar names of organizations I knew from Indonesia or before. Yet, when I was actually in the refugee camps, I saw little evidence of their presence – children looked extremely unhealthy, their clothes were ragged (if not nonexistent); families had few possessions, except an occasional mosquito net, a cooking pot and a sleeping mat. I just didn’t understand where any real help for these people was…

And then the tiny plane landed on the dirt runway and carried me away from that place that I still can’t believe exists on the same planet that America does, or even the capital city in its own country for that matter. It wasn’t until I was safely home, relishing in the comfort of eating popcorn on my overstuffed red chaise lounge watching The Office season premier, that I physically shuttered at the contrasting worlds I had just experienced. Less than 48 hours before I had been standing amid a manmade catastrophe of poverty and civil war and neglect...

So what was it about me that I was the one that deserved to get on a plane and leave it all behind and return to a life of ease and comfort, of excess and options?

In the quiet hours since then, I have realized that the Ugandan refugees did get on the plane with me, and followed me home, hidden away in my subconscious like stow-aways in the cargo hold. They are here with now as I type, along with my cup of freshly-brewed coffee and air conditioner and closet full of clothes. For years, I think my eyes have taken in more than my heart has ever begun to process. But that’s ok… in a few days, I’ll be back at work, back in the routine, back caring about all the little things that really don’t matter. Breathing deeply again. But for now, while jetlag awakens me into night’s dark hours, I will remember… the people, the sounds, the smells, the conversations in the radically different world that exists just a flight away.


walking into one of the camps - kids everywhere, laundry drying on rooftops, mom's working, a local food like low-quality potatoes lying out on mats waiting to be pounded in mush for porridge

a family portrait - eight of the nine children belonging to this unusually happy mother appeared for a photo

local kids clamored around me at this camp - both boys and girls were usually bald, most likely because of malnutrition

i was amazed with this little boy's toy car because i've so rarely seen children playing with anything like this

To learn more about what's going on in northern Uganda, here is a link to a recent speech on the situation. Or visit the UNHCR or Doctors Without Borders websites to understand the plight of the 33 million refugees in the world. I will eventually write about the good things about Uganda, because there were indeed many unforgettable moments, but these were the impressions I needed to share first, hoping we can all grow and learn a little bit from getting a glimpse of what goes on in parts of our world that really aren't that far away...