Letter from Northern Uganda
Jennifer Mayer
(Kampala, April 8, 2004)
I arrived in Uganda on September 15, 2003 to
begin my first year as a Mickey Leland
International Hunger Fellow, placed with the
United States Agency for International
Development's Uganda mission. A few months
before I arrived I was told that I would be
acting as the Humanitarian Response Coordinator
for the mission, working on emergency projects
in response to the conflict in northern Uganda.
I am ashamed to admit that at the time I had
almost no idea that this war even existed. Like
a lot of the world, when I thought about Uganda
at all it was as an African success story, the
country that had lowered its HIV/AIDS rate from
over 30% to 6% in ten years, the Pearl of
Africa. The story of its 18-year war was a
revelation to me in more ways than one.
Photo: Jennifer Mayer
Women divide a sack
of beans among their households during a
distribution in Opit IDP camp in northern
Uganda. Food aid provides roughly 50% of the
daily food needs of internally displaced persons
(IDPs).
For almost two decades
now, the Lord's Resistance Army has waged a
campaign of terror on the Acholi people. Rebels
murder, maim and abduct thousands of men, women
and children each year, forcing hundreds of
thousands of people to flee their homes for the
relative safety of congested displacement
camps. I had been in Uganda for a week when I
saw a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs)
for the first time. As a typical child of the
American suburbs, my imaginings of what a
"refugee camp" looked like owed a lot to
television news and media pleas from
international relief organizations depicting
abject, helpless Africans.
What I saw was
heartbreaking, but different from what I'd
pictured. I walked around the camp with a
column of children tailing me at a safe
distance, stepping over the open sewage ditches
that crisscrossed the camp and watching
moonfaced malnourished children play in rubbish
heaps. Women and children stood in endless
queues waiting for a single jerrican of water,
which my companions explained was better than
risking abduction and illness to collect water
from the muddy ponds outside the camp. Men,
unable to leave the camp to work in their
fields, sat in despondent clusters, staring and
drinking waragi. But what I felt most strongly
was the settled, inured mood of the place and
people. The Acholi have been living in
displaced isolation for more than a decade, cut
off from the outside world and even the most
basic services. In the face of chronic fear and
deprivation, they have exercised that most human
of traits: they have adapted to their
conditions, appalling as they are.
I had come to the camp
with a World Food Program convoy bringing food
aid to its residents. Cut off from their land,
the IDPs are almost wholly dependent on their
rations of beans, maize, vegetable oil and corn-soya
blend (CSB) donated by the US and other
industrialized nations. The general food
distribution sent a thrill through the camp as
(I was to realize later) does any visit the IDPs
receive from the outside world. Women
materialized from the huts around the clearing
with basins and sacks on their heads, children
ran laughing through the crowd, scooping
handfuls of spilt CSB into their mouths, and old
men shook my hand and thanked me for "the food
from America." I felt deeply ashamed. I was
aware of myself as the walking embodiment of
overfed western carelessness, but as I moved
through the crowd I was greeted with grateful
smiles and blessings from all sides as if I were
some magnanimous, selfless benefactor. As if I
personally was responsible for the IDPs' good
fortune that day. Just weeks before, I had had
no conception of these people and their lives;
they had not existed to me and now I was being
thanked for acknowledging their presence and
their plight. It struck me that the sacks of
grain being unloaded from the trucks represented
millions of Americans just like me, well
intentioned and yet mostly ignorant of the
consequences of our actions.
During the seven months
I have lived in Uganda, the number of people
displaced by the war has risen from 800,000 to
more than 1.5 million and has spread to cover
eight districts. Every week there is news of
more deaths and abductions, every few days
another bloody scene is splashed across the
front pages of the national newspapers. But in
my time here I've realized that the victims of
this war are not the helpless Africans of
American televised lore, and that while our aid
may be of assistance in the short term, we need
to avoid confusing people who need help with
helpless people. These are people, families,
who are trading away part of their households,
their culture and themselves in order to survive
in a world they had no part in making. This is
life's reality for more than 35 million refugees
and IDPs around the world.
Photo:
Jennifer Mayer
Due to lack of
classrooms and teachers in the camps, many IDP
children cannot attend school, especially girls.
When I think about the
world in these terms, I can't help but feel
overwhelmed by responsibility, and the knowledge
that as an American I am complicit in the
suffering of so many people. But being
complicit means I have a hand, a choice in the
way the future plays out. My time in Uganda so
far has showed me that the first step in that
choice is to keep my eyes open and next, not to
let the things I see make me feel I am helpless
to act for change. This is how Uganda's
forgotten war has helped me to remember my place
in the world.
This year Hunger
Notes will publish articles and letters from the
Congressional Hunger Center's Mickey Leland
International Hunger Fellows to give our readers
a real-life sense of what hunger looks like
around the world. This program, named after
former U.S. Representative Mickey Leland, sends
fellows to work with the world's leading
anti-hunger organizations so they may know what
hungry people experience, and so they may then
have better tools to craft policies and
practices that serve these individuals. Because
Leland Fellows live and work in places like
northern Uganda, southern Sudan, Bolivia, and
Indonesia, they have first-hand knowledge of
issues that can cause food insecurity - issues
like HIV/AIDS, conflict, poor governance, and
drought. More importantly, they know real
children, real mothers, and real grandparents
who shoulder the real problem of global hunger.
What is to be done about hunger? The Leland
Fellows will share their stories and struggles
in responding to this question here in Hunger
Notes. For more information about the
Congressional Hunger Center and the
International Hunger Fellows program visit the
CHC website.
For additional
information on the war in northern Uganda see
Northern Uganda Conflict is Worse than Iraq
BBC November 10, 2003 and
IRIN Web Special on Northern Uganda: "When the
sun sets, we start to worry" IRIN
January 2004
Photo: Jennifer Mayer
A young man
transports his family’s ration from the
distribution site to his hut at Opit IDP camp in
northern Uganda.
Photo: Jennifer Mayer
A severely malnourished girl receives some fortified
porridge at a therapeutic feeding center at Gulu Hospital in
northern Uganda. It is estimated that only 20% of children
in need of supplementary feeding in northern Uganda actually
receive it.
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