The First Night in Gulu...

FROM JOSH...

We just returned to Kampala from Gulu Town in Northern Uganda. This is a part of the world where twisted, irrational and inhumane things cause incredible amounts of human suffering. This is a part of the world that has largely been forgotten, except for the giant humanitarian NGO's like Medicins Sans Frontiers, War Child, and World Food Program, which do great work, but often provide nominal comfort to people whose lives are daily misery. Strangely enough, in the eye of the storm, Gulu Town is charming, safe, well organized and simple.

In the next few days we will tell some of the work we did as students to try and understand this place and the scar it is leaving on the face of Uganda...

This summer I visited Dachau, a concentration camp outside of Munich. This Sunday night, when we arrived in Gulu, we visited a Lukodi 'Night Commuter Center'. This bizarre place is where thousands of children from Gulu's terrorized countryside walk nightly to find a place to sleep. They fear sleeping at home because of the nightly threat of being abducted, forced to carry arms and become slaves to the twisted LRA.

Aesthetically, the camp in Germany and the camp in Gulu were hauntingly similar. Barbed wire fences with sentinals gaurding locked doors. 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 to capacity with small, scared and tired children, produces a similar gut feeling of wrongness and inhumanity.

The children who sleep here range from age 4-19, and they walk as many as 8KM to sleep safely, away from the feckless LRA, who under cover of darkness, rape, mame, kill and steal from their already war exhausted towns. As our leader Dennis said to us, "to stay in the towns is suicide." The camp was created a few years ago by UNICEF, as more and more children were sleeping on Gulu Town streets.

These children face every hardship of the kids in ZONE B, but they have the added inhumanity of walking to sleep in a place that lacks the amneties of most jail cells found in the United States. When the children leave the camps at 8 in the morning, they return to their villages to spend the day sleepily at school or helping with family chores.

We were led by Stephen, a 25 year old Kampalan Gulu, 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 undeniabl 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.