Last summer I visited Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp outside Munich, Germany. Over winter break, I visited Gulu, an outpost in war-torn northern Uganda, with two other university students. Gulu is home to the Lukodi Night Commuter Center. Thousands of children from Gulu’s terrorized countryside walk nightly to this bizarre place to find a place to sleep. They fear sleeping at home because of the threat of being abducted, forced to carry arms and to become sex slaves of the twisted Lord’s Resistance Army.
Aesthetically, the camp in Germany and the camp in Gulu were hauntingly similar. Both had barbed wire fences with sentinels guarding locked doors and small, cramped quarters exposed to rain and wind, packed with more people than they can hold. Of course, the comparison only goes so far, but to see a place like this, filled beyond capacity with small, scared and tired children, produces a similar gut feeling of wrongness and inhumanity.
We traveled to Gulu as part of a delegation from Project Namuwongo, an organization made up of student groups from five universities across the United States. Project Namuwongo is a new kind of development and relief organization, representing the pulse of interdependence, where American students directly support Ugandan students and volunteers who work to end cycles of violence and repression their society has faced for generations. For this generation, the violence manifests itself in the LRA, a rebel group led by psychopaths who want Uganda to be ruled by leader Joseph Kony’s version of the Ten Commandments. The LRA destroys villages, abducts children and creates child soldiers. The United Nations estimates the human costs of this 18-year conflict rival those of the Sudanese conflict, with only a tiny portion of the media coverage.
In a sense, the Lukodi camp we visited our first night in Gulu represented the hopelessness and exhaustion of this seemingly endless civil war. The children who sleep there range from 4 to 19 years old and they walk as many as 8 kilometers to sleep safely away from the feckless LRA, who under cover of darkness rape, maim, kill and steal from war-exhausted towns. As our leader said to us, “To stay in the towns is suicide.”
The trip to Gulu was a strange contradiction. The noxious combination of widespread, severe malnourishment and incredible hopelessness was a brutal one-two punch to our human sensibility and consciousness. Yet the contradiction lies in the fact that I left Gulu with more hope than when I arrived. How is this possible after seeing so much suffering? It lies in the knowledge we gained: The insanity of the conflict is a confusing, yet comprehensible amalgam of interest and fear on the side of the rebels and the government. The actors are human, even though their actions are not.
In Lukodi, we were guided by a 25-year-old Acholi (the most populous northern Ugandan ethnicity) from Kampala, the capital, who felt the need to return home to volunteer in the camps. Witnessing such selfless acts only reinforces my conviction that we, as young Americans, have an undeniable obligation to understand and perhaps play a supporting role in a peace process to end one of the world’s most prolonged, tragic and underreported conflicts. A feeling of hope also lies in the face of people like another young Acholi, who strives to find new solutions to the longstanding conflict in his homeland. Learning more about the solvable reality of the conflict and realizing intelligent and dedicated young people work to find new solutions left me with a glimmer of hope.
This part of the world has largely been forgotten by the rest of the world. The only westerners in Gulu are from mammoth relief nongovernmental organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders, War Child and World Food Programme. All do great work, but often provide nominal comfort to people whose lives are daily misery. Most Americans, even the globetrotting, educated students at the best universities, have almost no understanding that Africa is both a jewel of humanity and a continent being incinerated by the flames of relentless problems. Once we learn about these tragedies, our silence is wrong. When we learn the names, faces and personalities of the victims, our silence is appalling.
Josh Goldstein is director of campus outreach for Project Namuwongo. He can be reached at josh@relievezoneb.org
