Apwoyo,
I again write from Gulu and about Gulu. In Rwanda we were never in the same place form more than a week. We traveled to different towns for a number of days and we never once had class for five days in a row, each week had some excursion planned. Gulu is a different story so far. For the past few days we have had three lectures a day, as sad as it sounds, its kind of overwhelming and draining. We have our first excursion this weekend when we visit the Atiak Massacre site, and on Monday we head up to Kitgum for a few days. Kitgum is a town about two or three hours farther north that was hit very hard by the LRA and its tactics of abduction and killing. At some point we visit the border with Sudan, which I eagerly await. Apparently when the last group was there the border guards offered one of the guys in the group, Jason, a couple of hundred dollars (or a few head of cattle) for Zuri, one of the girls in the group. Seeing as there are nine girls in our crew, us guys stand to make at least a few thousand dollars each or seriously increase our livestock holdings. But I jest…
Good news! Telenovlas (Mexican Soap Operas) exist in Uganda too. Just like in Rwanda, I get to spend most of my evenings watching the high drama lives of these wonderful, wholesome people with their concubines, illegitimate children, and lover’s spats. Good clean fun.
Speaking of good clean fun, Uganda has the highest consumption of alcohol per capita in the entire world. As I mentioned before, women do a lot of work and there are a lot of men who lounge around during the day and just drink and play cards. Gulu itself is an impoverished town so that also lends itself to increased consumption of alcohol and alcoholism. The cheapest booze here is sold in plastic packets of about 200-ml. Empty packets cover the ground of almost every street. Every time I return home I pass by circle of men playing cards (surprise!) and sipping out of these packets. Even when I leave in the morning the same men are there, still drinking. It’s a troubling situation that I only hope will begin to change once the effects of the LRA conflict fade into the past and the local government realizes the detriment that the overconsumption of alcohol has on the community.
Before I get much further in my blogging here I wanted to give you a quick (I promise) background to Uganda and why it is in the shape it is today. So in five sentences or less… here goes nothing. 1. Britain claimed Uganda as one of their colonies in Africa and used “divide and rule” tactics to control the colony by pitting different ethnic groups against each other, most importantly the Northern Acholi vs. the Southern/ Central Buganda. 2. Uganda gained independence in 1962 from Britain and came under the rule of Milton Obote, a politician from the North, who ruled for about nine years until he was overthrown by Idi Amin (Last King of Scotland, anyone?). 3. Idi Amin ruled Uganda with an iron fist and killed many Ugandans in an often senseless manner, therefore he was over thrown by Milton Obote in 1979 (same guy from before) who had been gathering his forces in the bush; unfortunately for Obote in 1985 he lost power to one of his generals, Tito, who then lost power to another general, Bagaisa. 4. In 1986, Yoweri Museveni, with an army chock full of Rwanda Tutsi, toppled Bagaisa and claimed power establishing a regime that he still leads as president today. 5. After his victory a number of members of his army broke off and formed resistance movements, the most important being the LRA by Joseph Kony, a movement that intended to bring Uganda under the rule of the “New Ten Commandments” and which led to almost twenty years of guerilla warfare in the Northern part of the country. Basically, in the past 27 years Uganda hasn't had a peaceful handing over of power. Phewwwww, that was rough and incredibly basic, but it’s something.
But as the war ended only in Uganda three years ago and the man behind most of the violence is still at large and abducting and killing in the DRC and Sudan, the affects are still very real. The atrocities committed by the LRA under Kony’s rule were and are almost unbelievable. His army goes into villages, abducts children, and brings them to the bush to train them and brainwash them with their ideologies. The male children are trained as killing machine and the girls are taken as wives. In one Homestay family in our group the mother had nine children abducted, and eight returned. After a few weeks or months in the bush, the LRA would have the children lead attacks on their own villages and in many instances force them to kill members of their own family in order to completely sever the ties with their home. Can you imagine? One of our lecturers told us that he was talking to one returnee child soldier while he was reading a magazine. The boy was six. When the man turned a page in the magazine to a picture of an old man, the boy pointed and said, “We would kill him. He is worthless.” A six-year-old boys automatic reaction to an old man is thoughts of killing merely because he has been trained to eliminate the weak and those who can’t work for his cause. Simply terrifying.
Alright, my last serious and troubling point, and here it is: Although Uganda is making strides (hopefully) towards a real democracy and a somewhat united nation, there are still some incredibly troubling things going on in the country when it comes to social issues. The country is about 85% Christian and with this comes a large number of evangelical Christians. They are heavily influenced by evangelicals from abroad. Many major evangelicals from the United States have come to Uganda to preach some incredibly hateful sermons about homosexuals and homosexuality. When these sermons are combined with a preexisting cultural mistrust and dislike of homosexual activities it creates an intense, almost rabid, crusade against certain individuals. Legislation was proposed last year to give the death penalty to anyone caught participating in homosexual acts and it was only shelved when the outcry from the international community threatened to affect Uganda on the world stage.
I mention all this because yesterday our group discovered a news story that I am sure has made the rounds in the U.S. but really shocked us. A publication, I hesitate to call it a newspaper, in Uganda, Rolling Stone, published a list of 100 suspected homosexuals in Uganda, complete with pictures and contact information, with large white words on a black background shouting “Hang Them!” Literally calling for their murders. As of yesterday, four of those pictured had been physically harmed in someway. This hate speech is encroaching on the lives and wellbeing of actual people. It is the continuation of an incredibly troublesome trend here when it comes to acceptance of other ways of life.
-Muzungu currently in Gulu, Uganda feeling troubled by the past and present of Uganda.
My friend Whitney Loraine Skippings Dupree is currently posting a series of descriptions about the individuals in our group. She is uncannily accurate in all of her descriptions thus far. She is posting them at a rate of two a day. Check em out! (As well as the rest of her blog, it’s awesome.)
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