The never-ending stories of injustice

A couple days ago, someone came looking for me at Gulu NGO Forum. She walked into the office and I recognized her immediately: Grace, one of the most famous of the Aboke girls, a group of 30 girls who were abducted by the LRA from their school (in Aboke, south-east of Gulu) in 1996. (The Aboke story is quite famous – if you want to find out more about it, I highly recommend the book “Stolen Angels” by Kathy Cook, who is a Canadian journalist.) For those of you who came to the Peace Girl event at the Liu in April, you may remember Grace from the video interviews we featured on the laptops – the interview she gave within days of escaping from the bush during a firefight (she is also featured in the Peace Girl book Erin and I made).

Grace is one of thousands of girls who have been kidnapped in northern Uganda over the last 20 years, given as ‘wives’ to rebel commanders in the bush (usually because either the ‘Holy Spirit’ dictated that they should be given, or as a reward to brave commanders who have risen the ranks by virtue of their ruthlessness). Lots of these young women have escaped and returned to their communities with their children (born of rape), only to face the harsh realities of abject poverty and stigma. Still, many, many others are still held captive with the LRA, and now there is even an entire generation of children who have grown up in the bush, knowing nothing but a completely militarized society.

We stared at each other nervously for a few minutes (oh, what to say?), but very soon we were talking and getting to know each other. She told me about a group she and a few fellow former-abductees have formed; a group designed to advocate on behalf of and address the problems that formerly-abducted young mothers face in particular: poverty, stigma, lack of access to basic medical care or shelter, inability to pay school fees for themselves or their children, and the psychological and spiritual trauma caused by their horrendous experiences.

I am consistently amazed by the courage and resiliency that Grace and her peers are showing (I was also introduced to Janet and Victoria, also Aboke girls). They each have at least one child to take care of, but are trying desperately to finish their high school educations. All dream of going to university. Yet they have spent their spring holiday visiting local IDP camps to collect the names of young mothers, recording their dates of abduction and return, the names of their commander ‘husbands,’ and the names of their children.

It’s groups like this that Peace Girl aims to help, providing financial and moral support and connecting them to others with experience and skills to share. So, I promised them some money and we are getting a bank account set up for them so that they can at least start with some basic income-generation, school fees, etc. We also agreed to meet the next day so that I could meet some of the young mothers she had met at Laroo Forest, one of the camps near Gulu.

So today I waited in the office for these mummas to show up, not knowing what I was really getting myself into and not knowing how many were coming. Around 10:30 I started to see lots and lots of young women and some babies gathering under the big fig tree in front of NGO Forum. There were so many of them that I thought “that can’t possibly be them,” but sure enough, they were all waiting for me. Evelyn, a student translator who works at NGO Forum, came out with me and I introduced myself to the about-20 girls under the tree. We all shook hands and many girls curtsied low. We decided to walk to the Acholi Inn (local hotel) and find a big mango tree to meet under.

We talked for about an hour and a half, and I asked them to tell me about their problems. I was so terribly nervous, not wanting to say the wrong thing or make promises I can’t keep, so I kept it simple. I’ve been trying to remember that just simple kindness can go a long way in these situations, especially for people like these girls who are so beaten down and rejected by society. So the first thing I said to them was that I had heard many of their stories and that I felt very bad for them, and I said that people in Canada want to help them; that people care about them. Then I told them about Peace Girl and congratulated them on all coming together to find strength in one another. They said apfoyo (thank you) and even clapped!

Someone said that they are tired of white people coming and writing down their names and details and they don't get any benefit from it, and that lots of people come and are interested, but they go home and the girls have no one to get help from. I said that I hoped that Peace Girl wouldn't be like that, that we could try to hopefully always have someone, an Acholi, to be there when the whiteys are at home. We really need to hire someone like Grace! I told them that we didn't want them to feel abandoned. I really hope I can live up to that. I worry about this a lot – how do we keep this project sustainable? It’s not acceptable to come over for a summer and then go back to my life in Canada and never think of them again. If I do that, I might as well have never come at all. So I really hope that we can secure enough funding to ensure that this stays as grassroots as possible, and by that I mean run by the girls who know - better than any Canadian university graduate ever could - what they need to improve their lives and those of their children.

After that, they all took turns telling about stigma, lack of funds for education for them and their kids, trouble finding shelter, paying for medical bills, and the struggle of caring for their kids while being themselves orphans and often having brothers and sisters to take care of. One girl also talked about the problem of land access - how most of their husbands in the bush are dead, and when they take up with a new man it usually turns sour and they are forced to move around a lot - but they have no land rights of their own. In Acholi, land passes only through the male line, and children are considered to belong to their fathers’ clans. So these children are mostly rejected by their mothers’ families and communities, called ‘rebels,’ ‘killers,’ ‘bush children,’ etc. People are afraid to have their children associate with these ‘rebels’ because they are also thought to suffer from highly-contagious cen (spiritual haunting), a result of experiences in captivity. Cen is known to cause madness, misfortune, and even death.

One young woman named Mary told us that she was wary of telling anyone about herself, because some people have big mouths - it backfired on her when she confided in a neighbour. She and her mother were kidnapped by the LRA when she was 2 years old, and they killed her mother. The UPDF found her and managed to trace her uncle, and she stayed with him until she was 8 and was abducted again. This time she told us that a young boy tried to escape but was caught, and he was pierced repeatedly with a spear and decapitated. All the new abductees, herself included, were made to line up in a row and pass his head from one to another, saying "if I ever try to escape this is what will happen to me." That story has branded her as a rebel killer in the community.

Mary’s is frighteningly typical. It’s hard to keep my head straight on in the face of such intense and unrelenting suffering. There was no joyous homecoming for these women, no parties or parades. Just fingers pointed and insults hurled. Most have returned to find their parents dead and their homes destroyed. It’s a grave injustice when many rebel commanders, the brains of the operations, have received amnesty and are living off the fatted calf in relatively luxurious surroundings in Gulu Town. But the difficult question here has always been how to convince people to come out of the bush without these concessions. After all, as many elders have argued, it is the lives of thousands of abductees that hang in the balance.

Erin and I have been joking for months that the song ‘Apologize’ by Timbaland/OneRepublic should be the theme for the Accountability and Reconciliation agenda of the Juba Peace Talks. Guess what song started playing on a nearby radio when we were wrapping up? It was the funniest part of the whole afternoon.