Intro to Horror: Gulu

View from the Land Cruiser - Headed to the field

The Land Cruiser rambled over the rutted dirt road, dozens of deep potholes shimmering with what was left of last night’s rain.  An especially strong jolt sent a gulp of bottled water spilling down my chin and onto my skirt.  The road was the only one leading back to Gulu town from a rural school, where I was accompanying a Ugandan research team to check up on a program meant to help children in Northern Uganda recover from their wartime experiences.

 “Ah!  Kony’s sitting room,” Monica says, breaking the tired silence of the drive home.  We’ve approached a narrow metal-railed bridge, just wide enough for our vehicle to cross. 

A pause.  “Mmmm.”  Somber acknowledgement.  The significance escapes me. 

“The grass – it’s so tall here.  The rebels used to wait by the water and stop any car that passed.  Sometimes they would send a boy ahead.”  She means a soldier, a boy soldier, one of the tens of thousands that rebel leader Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, most former boy soldiers themselves, kidnapped and brought up on glue and guns in the wilds of Northern Uganda. 

“The LRA would come upon a village, one so peaceful out in the bush, and attack, take the young boys mostly.  That’s how they kept their army going.”

“Didn’t he recruit the young men, the strongest ones?”  I asked.  “That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“Just the children.  If they were too old?  He just killed them.  Threw them out.  Too old to brainwash.”  

I thought about the boys we had seen during the day’s school visit, gnawing on sugar cane, hiding from and then grabbing at my camera, clutching UNICEF book bags with notebooks full of multiplication tables and grammar rules.  Playing soccer during a break between classes, drifting off to sleep as the evening air cleared the last hints of smoke from village cooking fires – little boys were most vulnerable during these timeless childhood moments.  

In Uganda’s countryside, children don’t always march off to school in September of their 6^th year; childhood’s timeline is a bit more nebulous.  Helping their parents, who are usually subsistence farmers, carry produce to roadside markets and plant the next harvest takes precedence over pursuits that don’t fill the stomach.  A child may start first grade, or Primary One, as late as age 9.   Some Primary Four girls’ full breasts push out the straps of their uniform jumpers.

Bracing herself against another bump in the road, Grace glanced at me.  “The schools we are visiting, you know that was the worst place for a child to go.  Kony had his pick.”  She went on to tell me that children and young teenagers were abducted straight from their classrooms, “both boys and girls.  School was the most dangerous place a child could be.  So dangerous.  Especially for the girls.  The rebels took them as bush wives.”   

Strike that. 

“Sex slaves,” a female voice piped up from the back of the vehicle. 

No romantic love or sense of familial obligation passed between the girls and the just-past-teenage rebel soldiers among whom they were shared.  Within months, these young girls turned into women with pregnant bellies, leaning over pots of stew.  Sex and cooking does not create a wife, and life on the run through harsh grasslands could not approximate a home. 

Grace’s mouth and eyes widened in the kind of incredulous smile reserved for the most unbelievable of all absurdities.  “They come to us now for help and some have no hair on the tops of their heads, just bare scalp open to the sky.  Do you know why?  When the government soldiers were coming after them, found their camp, and they were cooking, they had to run.  It didn’t matter if the food was still boiling. Didn’t matter at all.  And ooh!  They carried it!  They did.  On their heads they carried pots, really they were charcoal stoves, you know the ones, with the food still cooking as they ran.  And hell to pay if the food spilled!” 

Out the window, a teenage girl walking home along the roadside stepped down into the rocky ditch and stopped to stare at the car and as we sped past.  I imagine her tripping on her skirt as she stumbles to her feet at the sound of footfalls in the tall grass and voices speaking KiSwahili, the language of the Ugandan People’s Defense Force.  With barely a moment to notice the searing pain on her head as she balances the pot, she smothers the fire and is already breaking into a panicked half-run.  A whiff of singed flesh, and tears from – is it the smoke? — blur what she’s running towards and what she’s running from. 

She would most likely not be running towards what she had known of her home, her village.  Kony made certain that many children he kidnapped had no one left to miss.    

“Do you know what that man did?  He made his soldiers round up all the people in a village, find the eldest person, and he what?  He boiled them!  And made the people eat the flesh of their elder.”  Grace punctuated this fact by banging her fist on the dashboard. 

What in most places would be the tallest of urban legends is corroborated in Northern Uganda by reams of interviews conducted by human rights organizations, not to mention by the firsthand accounts overheard in casual conversation at the corner store.

Nelson spoke up, “And their parents – sometimes the rebels would make the young boys – ten, eleven years old — shoot their own mother and father if they wanted to live.  To be sure they could not go back to their communities – no reason to escape.  No one would take them back after that.” 

The vehicle fell into a pensive silence until a Kanye West song came on the radio (Mega FM, The Voice of Northern Uganda) and the conversation turned to hip-hop and weekend parties.   Twenty-five years of life during twenty-two years of war meant that my coworkers had learned this vocabulary of atrocity along with the names of animals and things around the house.  

I could not shake off these images as casually as the Ugandans.  They had become used to the reality of it, the recent history of their tribe, the Acholi.  Kony had started out claiming to fight for Acholi freedom against the Ugandan government, scattered with a mishmash of principles from a variety of religions, but madness, time and power-hunger had emptied his ambitions of any political ideals. 

For the past two years, though without an official peace agreement, the LRA had retreated to Congolese forests, and northern Ugandans were peeking out from behind a long-drawn curtain of fear as their country transitioned from “war-torn” to “post-conflict.” 

Clouds had darkened the sky into an eerie gray-green, and men along the roadside abandoned their bicycles to huddle under shared tarps and wait out the coming storm. 

Looking for a change of mood, I turned to Patrick, our driver.  “Patrick, what are you up to this weekend?” 

“Heading home, to Lira.”  It was two hours south, towards Kampala.    

“Visiting your parents?” 

“No, my brothers and sisters.  I’m supporting them.  Five of them.  So many!”

Patrick was only a few years older than me.

“Five? Wow.”

“Yeah, sure.  Five.  My father’s children with his second wife.  My mother was kidnapped from our village when I was a little boy.  My father married again and had this second family, but he and his wife were killed in Pader District in 2002.  Their bus was ambushed by the LRA.  Couldn’t even identify the bodies.  All of them just laid out, burned so badly.” 

He shook his head and switched on the headlights. 

“Anyway, they need new school uniforms coming up soon, and besides, there’s a football party in Lira this weekend.  Manchester United – Man U.   Are you a fan?”

“Mmm.”  I tried to answer, but my breath caught, only managing a nod and a closed-mouth smile. 

The air was heavy with the scent of rain.

Greetings from Gulu!

Hello!  I am finally making good on my promise to keep a record of my time in Gulu, Northern Uganda.  I am working with the Uganda office of an international NGO to evaluate a psychosocial project that they have put into place in primary schools.  The goal is to help war-affected children become more resilient and deal with the stress of their experiences.  I’ll try to post here at least two or three times a week.   Feel free to leave comments – I appreciate all the contact from home I can get!