One Long Year

It was hard for it to really hit me amidst the chaos leading up to my departure. Rushed travels, hectic goodbyes, hurried logistical preparations, and a whirlwind of last-minute packing (couldn’t forget my collection of stuffed NH moose for the locals, of course). Even after I’d boarded the plane from Amsterdam to Kenya, I still wasn’t fully aware of my soon-to-be reality.

One year of my struggling to reconcile the sights of abject poverty I had been exposed to with the extravagant, overly decadent bubble that is the Harvard experience. One year of attempting to live out the values I had identified with and defined for myself this past summer amidst the fluster and clutter of college life. One year of vivid dreams: walking through the strikingly beautiful countryside with smiling locals… or caught in the nightmare of the disease-ridden Internal Displaced Persons camps. One year of trying to justify and rationalize my presence in a university classroom, knowing what raw truth lies beyond those theories and academic speculation. One year of waiting.

After one long year, I’m back.

“Euphoria” is the only word that comes to mind when trying to describe the feeling I had as the plane touched down upon the Ugandan runway. Outside, the warm African breeze hit my face and filled my lungs with a fresh sense of idealism. I soaked up the familiar smiles in the airport as I entered incoherently babbling what broken phrases of Luganda (local language) I could muster up. While riding along in my free car ride into town with the amazing local professor I had just befriended on the flight, I was struck by the lingering feeling that I was again entering the unknown, even with the knowledge I gathered last summer. It is not a menacing unknown; it is an exhilarating and promising one.

A quick (unofficial) background on the Ugandan conflict as I am aware of it: Northern Uganda has been involved in a war for over 20 years – since 1986. Tensions between various regions of Uganda have existed for years, largely stemming from arbitrary divisions and assigned regional specializations designed by the Brits during colonization. In 1986, an originally “legitimate” rebel force, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), sprung up in the North in order to fight back against what they saw to be the discriminatory Southern/Western-led government. There was a religious element to the movement, and its stated objectives initially included rebuilding the Ugandan constitution to directly parallel the 10 Commandments (a violent resistance movement – does this seem counterintuitive?). As time went on, the growing claim that the Northern locals were collaborating with the government in the south led the rebel army to more firmly associate the locals in the Northern communities (including Gulu, where I was last summer) with the opposing national government, and the LRA began to target the very people it was fighting for. Muddled objectives and wartime casualties led to a general attrition rate of LRA troops, and the movement began resorting to the mass-abduction of child soldiers in order to maintain its numbers.

Peace processes have been initiated on a few separate occasions between the LRA and the national government (the most recent one just having fallen through, though it made far more progress than has ever before been achieved). Early into the new millennium, the government initiated a coerced mass movement of citizens in Northern communities (nearing 90% of the entire population) into government-sponsored IDP camps under the pretense that it would be safer for them there. In reality, the poorly resourced – both in terms of security and food/health measures – IDP camps have served as little more than centers for disease, malnutrition, and (for a time) easy-access mass child abduction areas. While some families have begun to move back home or to smaller satellite camps nearer to their villages, there is still a huge percentage of people in these camps. What’s more, the widespread physical destruction and failing economy throughout the war have left much of the North with nothing to return to, even when the peoplebelieve it is safe enough to go back to their points of origin.

To sum up: the situation is dire.

All that said, I’m here again this summer to conduct independent research for my senior thesis on the post-reconciliation process in the North and the reintegration of rebels back into the communities once the war has officially ended. A few years back, the government issued a blanket amnesty to the rebels in order to coax them back into the communities without fear of reprisal, and traditional Acholi (people of the North in Gulu) ceremonies have been utilized to cleanse them and welcome them back into society. This sounds a little vague, huh? I’m basically going to be conducting a bunch of interviews with people who have undergone the traditional process of Mato Oput in order to see how sustainable the reconciliation is and how much weight the local communities really put in this process. If formally institutionalized across the North, will this process adequately reintegrate the former rebels into communities while ensuring sustained peace? I’ll tell you in 6 entries ;)

I’ll also be helping out on the side with the same NGOs (non-governmental organizations) I worked with last summer: The Child Is Innocent (www.thechildisinnocent.org ⇒ now updated with my pictures and video footage from last summer!) and uNight: For the Children of Uganda (www.unight.org). Check out the sites if you’re interested, these are really fantastic organizations.

This is a pretty dry first entry. I apologize for that; I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Unfortunately for you (not for me), I did NOT lose my luggage, get scammed/mugged by midget Kenyans, or pee my pants upon arrival at Entebbe International Airport, so I don’t really have much to report on that front. I can say that I returned to the same hostel of the final entry of last summer’s blog, and the pooping goat is still standing proudly in the exact same place on top of all his glory. Ah, home again.

I’m in Kampala now, the capital city, for a few days. Taking it easy, meeting some old friends (including the infamous Tatiana Wilson, no less), and hopefully interviewing a few Members of Parliament before the week’s out. I’ve also already gotten 2 phone numbers, and it’s only the first day. God, I’m a DOG. I’ll keep you posted re: marriage developments, round 2. Then up to Gulu and Kitgum, two rural northern districts, for two months. That’s when the fun begins. Ending with a quick two week trek to Rwanda to do some comparative work and work on my “bonjour” and “je suis le garcon.” What can I say? I have a linguistic gift.

Some contact details for the dreamers:

Skype contact (seriously, we can video chat! Google it and download. I’m serious.): Robert.jay.ross
Phone (if you’re feeling an especially zesty text coming on): (011) +256-0773-278-664 … something like that, anyway.
AIM (we’re getting sort of desperate here): chuckwood1318

Is that embarrassing? Should I be embarrassed of my screen name?

I think that’s all for now, my friends, more to come soon. Thanks for reading this thing, and hope you’re living the dream, too. =)

With optimism,
Rob