Faith

I am not a religious person. God has never been a big part of my life; I never attended church as I was growing up, and now that I’m living on my own, I find I’m perfectly content with my life. I have never had any inclination to seek a higher power, and being in Africa hasn’t done anything to change that. Yet, because of God, this past week has been my hardest in Uganda yet.

On Tuesday, my class met with Archbishop Odama. For those of you unfamiliar with this conflict, the Archbishop has been one of the loudest and most influential voices during the conflict and peace talk process. He would bed down with the night commuters, children who walked to Gulu Town from their rural homes, hoping to avoid abduction. He went into the bush, and has met Kony numerous times. He’s been so active in this conflict he has drawn fire from President Museveni and his administration, and has withstood it all with grace, preaching for peace in northern Uganda.

Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, this man’s beacon has flickered and dimmed. Recent documents released by WikiLeaks have alleged the Archbishop to be an LRA collaborator, supplying the rebels with food, water, medicine, and airtime, among other supplies. The government has seized on this news, and while that may be reason enough to doubt the significance of the documents, the suspicion remains, leaving me once again doubtful and disenchanted with the Catholic Church.

Then, this past Wednesday, my classmates and I packed into our minibus to make the two-hour drive to Lalogi, to visit the remnants of the IDP camp there. Remnants, because technically, there are no IDP camps left in Uganda – at least, according to Museveni’s administration. All have been dismantled, and all the Acholi who have been packed into them have gone home.

If only that were the case. IDP camps are still a very harsh reality in Uganda, and hundreds, if not thousands, of Acholi still reside in the same huts they were forced into some twenty years ago for the very simple fact that there is no home for them to return to. Whole villages were raised to the ground during the insurgency that took place in the northern half of the country. Fields were decimated, livestock slaughtered, families destroyed, and the forced migration and encampment of these people has deprived them of any and all means of income.

That’s not to mention the people who had their lands taken from them to form the camps in the first place. They lost just as much, for the camps have destroyed any value the land once had; it is impossible to grow crops in the soil, as the ground is full of human waste and corpses (it is customary for the Acholi to bury their dead on family property, and in the camps, there was little else to do with the dead). There is also no want to try and return to normalcy on camp land – who would want to try and build up a family and livelihood on a land steeped in torment and violence?

Lalogi, for the most part, has been fairly well dismantled. On driving by, one might not even recognize it for what it originally was. Only a few dozen huts remain, and huts are not uncommon in the countryside. Upon closer inspection, though, the picture becomes much clearer. One the side of each hut is painted one of four letter-number sequences, from A1 to A4. During camp life, these were a means of food distribution. In the post-camp era, though, the sequences mean something else entirely. While A1 still correlates to a family with many children (for food distribution purposes), the rest are as follows:

A2 – Slated for demolition

A3 – Partial habitation

A4 – Inhabited

The huts marked A4 far outnumbered the other three.

We met a man living in the camp who shared his story: he had two wives, and between them twelve children, as well as an elderly mother to care for. His mother would live in the camp until she died. In addition to these mouths to feed, as he was the sole provider, he had another nine children under his care: orphans, left to him by his sister and her husband, who had been killed in the conflict. Between all of these people, there were three huts for them to live in. The huts, all circular, are no more than ten feet wide in any direction, and some are significantly smaller.

The children looked as you might expect; none of them had any shoes, and their clothing was dirty and torn. They all are attending school, but solely because primary education in Uganda is free. None of them had books, uniforms, or supplies. I truly believe that once they complete primary school, none of them will be able to carry on with their education. Scholarships are basically nonexistent in Uganda, and those that exist are overwhelmingly awarded to students from the south, the result of long-lasting political marginalization of the north. Without this education, this cycle of poverty will undoubtedly continue with each and every one of these children, along with countless others.

If going to the camp had been all we had done that day, maybe it would have been easier to process. But we left the camp soon after to travel on to Odek – Joseph Kony’s hometown. That would have been enough in and of itself, but just outside of Odek is a huge rock formation, probably tall enough to be a small mountain. What makes it special is that supposedly, Kony climbed this rock, and lived on top of it for 40 days and 40 nights, until spirits came into him that strengthened him, inspired him, and drove him to come down and begin his rebellion in the north. Since the insurgency, witch doctors and faith healers alike have been coming to the mountain, trying to harness that same spirit (although, if you ask any citizen of Uganda, it is an evil spirit which must be avoided at all costs).

We climbed the mountain. I had to take off my shoes to do it, but I was the first to the top, and what I saw was absolutely breathtaking.

We had climbed high above any tree, and were rewarded for our struggles with an unprecedented and unobstructed view of Uganda, for miles and miles from this mountain. Everything was green – the trees, the uneven rows of maize, the tall bush grasses. The color scheme was only broken by smudges of brown huts and drops of turquoise and fuchsia and yellow, as women worked in the fields below in the failing light.

We remained at the top of the mountain for a while. Some of my classmates are devout, and took the opportunity to pray in the beauty of this country. Others had taken out their journals, and were writing, and others still were taking pictures that would never be able to truly capture how it felt to be standing at the top of that mountain.

I walked to the very edge, and sat with my legs dangling down the side. I wondered for a minute, what it’d be like to pray. Thinking about that, my thoughts invariably wandered to Joseph Kony, and what 40 days of this must have been like.  He had come down from this mountain with his head and heart full of God and full of the belief that starting this war was the answer. It doesn’t even matter than in the process of fighting, his methods got convoluted, and warped, and even more terrible. The point of it all is, faith in God gave him the power to start fighting in the first place.

The entire experience was exhausting. I was drained, physically, emotionally, and mentally. How could Joseph Kony go up on that mountain, see all of that beauty before him, and come down again ready for war? How can someone make those connections? How can one man be the cause of so much grief for so many people? I couldn’t stop thinking of those 21 children in Lalogi. Their faces will weigh on my mind until the day I die. I spent most of the drive back to Gulu crying in the back of the minibus, unable to stop and only thankful for the darkness so that my classmates couldn’t see.

I know that this man is an exception. He is the perfect example of someone who takes a religion, and twists it to suit his needs. One could even argue Joseph Kony is insane, regardless of faith. But the man I have to compare him to, the Archbishop, is possibly just as guilty of crimes against humanity as Kony. Where does that leave me? I also know that this situation is even more complicated than I make it out to be here. But really, at the end of the day, these are the basics. And as I climbed back down in the mountain in the setting sun, the only thing that seemed certain to me was how confident I felt in my lack of faith. I was at a loss for everything else.

These people and this country have captured my heart - but really, what the hell am I doing here? What can I possibly do to make any of this better?