Thoughts on Gulu

I do not know how to rightly put into words yet all that I saw with my two eyes, the things that I heard with my ears, the things I've learned with my mind, and the things I've felt in my heart on Thursday.  I'm so overwhelmed by all of it.  I was asked that night at dinner what stuck out to me the most from that day.  I said the pictures of the art therapy because they really tell the story of what those 14,000 kids experienced.  It is unfathomable.  I just about lost it while I looked through the drawings and tried taking pictures of a lot of them.  This one pictured below is one that is forever etched into my heart and mind.  At the top of it the child wrote "Remember you are not alone."  If I were any one of those kids I would have needed to recite that to myself hourly.  I can't imagine the extreme feeling of loneliness those kids must have felt.  The things these kids were made to do and the things they saw are things I have only seen in movies, if that.  Some of the things they have lived through are horrendous to even think about.  Though there is so much despair all around me and though at times it felt so surreal to be there I was glad to be able to see firsthand what NGO's like World Vision are doing up there.  They are truly being Jesus' hands and feet to these kids.  At the end of the day as I sat there and journaled about all this and just cried all I could think of was how ready I am for senseless violence like this to end and be no more – Heaven!

Art Therapy

(this is a before and after picture of the war)

At the top of this picture it says "Remember you are not alone." As I looked through about 20 of these pictures and read that I started to get really overwhelmed. If I were one of those kids I think I would have to recite that out loud to myself every single day. I can't imagine how alone they must have felt!

Two place night commuters stayed

After we drove back down the horrible pothole dirt road and stopped off at St. Mary's. This is a rather large hospital in which many of the night commuters would come to during the way. (During certain times of the war, particularly in 2003 the LRA was abducting many children from their homes during the night. So in order to be protected from being abducted the children would walk to this hospital every night and sleep there and leave the next morning to go back to school.)

(picture taken by Risa)

(picture taken by Risa)

We then went to another place in town where night commuters would come. He told us that for one whole year he would take his kids to this facility every single night and sleep there with them to ensure their safety!

(picture taken by Risa)

Invisible Children

Next we headed over to the Invisible Children headquarters. Risa worked for IC right after college and one of her coworkers and former classmates is still working for IC and so we went into this office and got to hear from him all that IC is doing now. It was incredible to hear! They are doing school to school which pairs up a school in Northern Uganda with a school somewhere else in the world. The school discusses what its needs are and then they invest 5% of their money into the project. They sponsor about 600 kids in secondary school and about 100 kids at the university level. They have also started going into the communities to find women who are skilled at tailoring. Before the war Uganda's big cash crop was cotton (40%)! So they bring these women into a production facility and give them the materials, design, and training to make bags. The women are taught how to have a loan, savings, and interests. These bags are selling lot hot cakes in the US right now with high school and college kids. The newest program they have done is the teacher program. Teachers from the US have come over for about 6 months at a time and have team taught in a classroom here. And for the first time they just had a handful of Ugandans who were selected to go over to a US school and team teach in a classroom there. (They started this because they heard that Uganda's top schools used to be up in the north before the war. So in order to really build up these schools to the standard they used to be at they started these programs.)

IDP Camp

Next James took us a little farther down an extremely bumpy dirt road to an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) Camp. Up until a year ago there were 3,000 people living at this camp. There were 14 IDP Camps created in Gulu District alone. The largest one in Gulu had 10,000 people living in it! There's a very small percentage of people still living at the IDP camps. Typically you'll find the elderly, disable, or those who have nowhere else to go still living there. These camps were started about 20 years ago so some of the kids have known this place as their home all of their lives! He told us the poeple were forced to come and live at these camps because it meant that they would be protected by the UPDF (Ugandan Army). The World Food Program would bring food to all of these people since they had no land to harvest.

This was a sign out front of the IDP camp. James told us it was a reminder to those who were returning home to be careful because there could be land mines on their property.

Keyo Secondary School

Next we went with James to the school that he teaches at. The school had just relocated the kids back to this location about a year ago after having moved them into town many years back due to the war and wanting to protect the kids from being abducted. This is one of the schools that Invisible Children is partnering with. We saw two new classrooms that had just finished being built. The next step is to hopefully build another dormitory on the school grounds as the girls are squeezed into two rooms and then the boys have to walk over to a neighboring polytechnic institute in order to sleep there. If these girls in particular do not board they have a much lower chance of actually staying in school. So the headmaster really wants them to board at the school as he is very concerned about the girls. He also told us that some of the kids at the school are sponsored by IC and if they do not perform well enough they are dropped from sponsorship so they are very motivated to do well in school.

Two new classrooms that Invisible Children built in their school program.

Their current classroom.

Inside the new classroom! WOW!

The headmaster gave us all sodas so we toasted to the good time we had touring his school.

World Vision Rehabilitation Center

Inside the facility.

Paintings some of the kids did on the building.

We stayed at the Acholi Inn which was really nice. Thursday morning we got up and left the hotel around 9am. Brenda called a friend, James, who came and met us in town and took us around all day long. He was a wealth of information and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to ask him a million questions about Gulu and the war.

This is the first place we ventured to go to-the World Vision Rehabilitation Center. As we pulled up I though there is NO WAY we are getting into this place unless God gets us in there. (I've heard that typically they require visitors to go through a couple of months procedure before they are able to go in and see the facility.) James goes into talk to the staff on the inside of the big gate and comes out a couple of minutes later to tell us they don't normally let people who just show up like this in but the are going to bend the rules for us (Thank you Lord!).

We are all sat down in a conference room while Fulkas, the program director, shared with us what center has done in the past many year sand what they are currently doing. He told us that in 15 years they have seen 14,000 kids go through the program! It takes about 1-3 months in order for a child soldier to be rehabilitated. After they are sometimes physically cared for because of wounds they are counseled using art therapy, play therapy, and they are taught skills like carpentry, bricking and bicycle repairs. The World Vision staff does family counseling, follow up counseling with the children, and there are also community counselors. They have about 2 % relapse rate, which is extremely good! Currently the children that are still in the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) were brought to the Congo so they are not able to escape because they do not speak the local language. If they escaped in the Congo the communities there would most likely kill them. So it was a lot safer for them to escape when the LRA was in Uganda. There are supposedly UPDF (Ugandan Army) stationed in the Congo. So in order to escape they would have to surrender to the UPDF, be taken to immigration, and then to the Ugandan government, and then to World Vision. They told us that the youngest children they've had here were 2 weeks old because they come with their mothers who are young children themselves who escaped from the LRA. They used to have 40 staff members when they had a huge influx of children. But now that the numbers have gone down there are about 15 staff. He told us the perception in the community is not bad for the children who return to their families and there are only isolated cases of abuse that happen. We asked if some of the kids had a lot of anger with their parents for allowing them to be taken. He said that happens but most of the time the kids and parents are just so overjoyed to be reunited. He told us WV will continue to do what they are doing until the last child has come home! Currently they are trying to gather records of children to figure out how many are still missing. We were then able to go out and tour the facility (pictures). We met the four former abducted children who were about to be going home soon. We then go to look through many of the art therapy that the children had done.

My trip to Gulu

How does one begin to put into words all that you experience as you walk through a war torn area?

I have always wanted to go and see for myself and learn more about the war that went on in northern Uganda for 23 years. I have watched the videos that Invisible Children created over the past 6 or so years. I read the book called Girl Soldier that was all about one girl's experience of being abducted into the LRA and then her escape. It is with this tiny piece of knowledge that I have always wanted to go up there. Well, last week God gave me that opportunity.

Wednesday I traveled by car up to Gulu with Risa, Brenda, who is a psychologist and counsels some of the kids who were former child soldiers, and Steve, a volunteer from California who helped with various things for Children of Grace over the past two weeks. I know God's hand of protection was on us when we safely arrived in Gulu around 5:30 pm that night. The road going up there is quite dangerous because of the coach buses. These buses go incredibly fast down a road that barely two cars can fit by at once. They barrel down the middle of the road expecting everyone who comes into their path to move out of their way. It's all about making more money so they want to reach their next destination as fast as they possibly can. On top of that Brenda told us a lot of the drivers are high on marijuana! We had two close encounters with these buses as Risa was driving the car. One came within centimeters of running into the back of our car as it passed us. Another one was flying down the road straight at us and its two axles were completely not aligned and it barely swerved around us as it passed by! I'm glad I was sitting in the back of the car just praying and wasn't able to see some of this!

The closer we go to Gulu, the more kids we would see just walking on the road. They were rushing home from school to be able to have time before dark to do all their work around the house and do some of their homework. We saw some kids running. Brenda told us some of them walk a good 2 hours to school so they have to rush to get home at night.
Here's one baboon that we got to see as we drove home. He was just crossing the street as we were coming up on the bridge ahead.

Here's a statue that is in the middle of town. You may not be able to see it but there's a gun on the ground as apart of the statue. James told us they put this up in town to signify the end of the war that children are going back to school and putting down their guns!

Prayer

God has taught me alot about prayer in the past 7.5 years that I've been in a relationship with Him but I still have many questions and wonder about how it really works at times.  For the past couple of months I have been reading Philip Yancey's book called Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?  There are so many great things I am learning from this book but I wanted to share two of them.  This chapter talked all about the partnership that we have with God.

"God chose a different style of governing the world, a partnership which relies on human agency and choice.  C.S. Lewis suggests that we best imagine the world not as a state governed by a potentate but as a work of art, something like a play, in the process of being created."

Another chapter goes on to talk about John 17.  In it Jesus is reminiscing about life before planet Earth, eternity before time.  "He gives the ultimate answer to the "Why" questions: why creation? Why free will? Why human history and the onslaught of time? From the beginning, before the beginning, God willed to share with other creatures the love and fellowship-the life-enjoyed in the godhead before creation, now, and forever."

Why am I sharing all of this?  Because last week God answered one of my prayers, I'm reading this book on prayer, and on top of that the sermon today was on prayer.  For the whole past month I have been missing the interactions I have had with students since they have been back in school.   I told God that I really missed the students and then this past Thursday He brought me one!  I first met Phiona when she was in my group at the first camp I came to in January 2008.  She is one of about 6 girls that I really connected with and kept in touch with after the camp and saw on my multiple trips back here.

Phiona came by the office on Thursday last week just to say goodbye to me.  She is going back to spend time in her village with her grandmother and wasn't sure if she would be able to come back to Jinja before I leave in May.  How precious is that!  She told me she needed to get going because she was going to walk an extremely far distance in order to get to where she was going since she didn't have any money for transport.  So I remedied that problem and asked her if I could spend some time with her and take her to lunch.  She gratefully accepted my offer and into town we went.  We went to Park Villa Restaurant and I had the opportunity to just sit and talk with her for about an hour.  She lost both of her parents right after her youngest sibling was born and has stayed with her grandmother ever since.  She plans to go to vocational school next year to be a nurse.  I told her how glad I was that she wanted to do that because I know that she will be different from the nurses that I've heard about here who could care less about their patients.   It was such a blessing to be there with her!  After we finished we went outside to see that it was pouring buckets.  And of course I had forgotten my umbrella at the office, so I was like well we'd better just walk fast.  So I started walking after the rain had lessened a little bit and then I didn't get very far before it started pouring again so I went under an overhang.  Well Phiona had apparently watched me do all of this even though we both went into two different directions.  So she came down to where I was and kept me company for another 15 minutes before it slowed down again. 

Sunday we went to a different church.  We typically go to Victory Family Center but today we went to one of their church plants which is pastored by Godfrey, who we have hired many times to be our driver to go to the airport or Kampala.  In all of our hours spent in the car we have had many great conversations with him and have learned a lot about Christianity here in Uganda.  He is a really great man and you can really tell that he really loves Jesus.  Today he spoke about praying by faith by using James 5:15-18.  In these verses Elijah is mentioned as" a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months.  Then he prayed again and the sky poured rain and the earth produced fruit."  When Elijah was a prophet in the Old Testament, Israel was involved in a lot of sinful things but he knew God's will for Israel and he knew his God.  Godfrey said that we are so easily prone to being deceived into thinking that the things of this world are better for us than God's will.  We turn from God just like the Israelites did.  Elijah was an ordinary person but he believed in what God said in His Word and he believed in the One he was praying to.   He encouraged us to memorize God's Word and pray God's Word over things because it is so powerful.  He said we need to know God's Word here in Uganda because we are so easily deceived. He told us about a woman who went to a pastor who was staying at a hotel in town and said I will pray for your problems for 50,000 shillings.   The woman said she only had 30,000 and the pastor said that's ok I will pray for you and your problem will be partly solved.  (WOW!)  The pastor had told Mary Ann the previous day about a young boy that came to him and wanted prayer from him because a witchdoctor had put a stone into his body.  The witchdoctor took a stone in his hand and did a (what we call in America-a magic trick) and made it disappear leaving the boy to believe that the stone was now in his body!  (WOW!)  There is a lot of deception here.  My prayer is that God would continue to build up my faith in Him and that His truth would reign here.