Kitgum with NUGEN

(IDP camp in Pader on drive to Kitgum)

On Wednesday afternoon, Winnie Lawoko picked us up from Kope Café in Gulu Town, and we headed to Kitgum, about 2 hours away. It’s officially rainy season in the North, so we hit storms along the way, making the drive more difficult than usual.

We stayed at a lousy hotel called the Diplomat, where Sarah Lanyero’s (Vice-Chair for NUGEN) brother Moses got us a great deal. Holly, Erin, and I shared a room for 25,000 shillings a night. That’s less than $5 each. So the loud noises and sweltering heat were worth it in the end.

On Thursday morning we started our day with very hefty goals- we would visit three schools in the district and do the preliminary needs assessment with the students. On this specific round of the Northern districts, NUGEN is making the initial contacts with the schools and meeting with the students to find out why the school performs so poorly on national exams and what could be done to help them perform better.

Unfortunately, the rain forced us to delay by about 2 hours because Sarah didn’t want to drive in such heavy downpours. This threw off our schedule for the whole day.

Around 10AM we drove to Lokung IDP near the Sudanese border. I was ecstatic when I heard that was where we were going there because I had been told my Notre Dame professor, Todd Whitmore, last weekend that Lokung has some of the best lukemhe (thumb piano) players in the whole of Uganda. He had given us instructions on how to get to Lokung by produce trucks, but I was uncertain if we would be able to do that. Winnie’s car was a much better alternative.



At Lokung Secondary School, I observed as Sarah and Winnie interacted with the kids. They came prepared with a questionnaire to pass out and asked that the students work in groups of 3 or 4 to save paper. The sheet asked the students to state obstacles to their education. Answers include (to name but a few):
-being an orphan
-alcoholism
-lack of textbooks
-rude teachers
-lack of time to read (due mostly to housework expected of the girls)
-bad peer groups
-lack of school fees
-noise in the camp
-adolescence

Sarah and Winnie took turns addressing these different concerns, offering suggestions where they could. They were honest in instances when NUGEN couldn’t help, but they still tried to give advice on who else to go to. The biggies- like being an orphan, adolescence, and alcoholism- they will tackle on their next round of visits in June when they have all day and can work in smaller groups of students.

We all couldn’t help but notice the small numbers of girls present. As one moves from primary school to secondary school and then through the ladder of Senior 1 to Senior 6, the number of girls almost exponentially decreases. There are many causes for this. Sometimes, the parents can’t pay school fees for all the children, so they keep their girls home to help with the house. Other times the girls become pregnant or married and thus have to drop out of school. In this group of 100 or so students, I couldn’t help but notice the meekness of most of the few female students. In the group activity of filling out the paper, if a girl was with a group of 2 or 3 boys, she usually remained quiet. At one point, I gave an extra sheet to two girls sitting idly by, so they could work to together. NUGEN readily agrees with me on the fact that next time they visit Lokung, they must get the girls together and talk to them separately from the boys. Maybe through that they can be empowered to speak up and voice concerns.

After discussing the obstacles to education, NUGEN passed around pieces of paper so that the students could write out their questions. Later, Sarah was explaining to me that the war has created a culture of anonymity and secrecy. If you ask the students to vocalize their questions, no hands will raise. But if you ask them to write something, you get flooded with questions.

At the end of the session, we were excited to learn that some of the school staff had mobilized a group to perform traditional music for us… including lukemhe playing! I had left my notebook with Holly (she was with the Paco Ber Music, Dance, and Drama Club), so I didn’t have the names given to me by Todd Whitmore. I was so encouraged to see how everyone danced and danced and how much joy music brought to the environment. The primary and secondary school students gathered around us, and we all watched. When their teachers joined the dancing, the students erupted into laughter. The music itself was quite good, and they played songs on development and HIV/AIDS. I need to get moving on learning Lwo, so I can understand the lyrics.




(woman playing instrument made out of US donated tin food cans)



At the time the music was finishing, the Norwegian Refugee Council rolled up, and we discovered it was food distribution day. This had negative repercussions on the rest of our day. The World Food Program does all of its distributing of a region in one day, so they other two schools (also in camps) were unable to meet with us because everyone was busy collecting their monthly rations. We had especially wanted to visit Padibe Girls Secondary School where most of the students are child mothers.

Instead, we headed back for Kitgum Town. We took the rest of the night easy. On Friday, we tried to visit more schools, but all were sitting for their midterm exams and couldn’t meet with us. We left for Gulu early afternoon.

Now we have the weekend to rest and really settle into our new house. We learned yesterday that our housegirl Julie has been fired, and we sad to see her go. She was our in for making friends with girls, since so many of our Ugandan friends are guys.

I’ve started reading a new book, although I haven’t yet finished Museveni’s “Sowing the Mustard Seed.”

The comprehensive peace agreement is slated to be signed in Juba on Saturday, April 5th, so I’ve decided to read my copy of Tim Allen’s “Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army” to brush up on the ICC component. The indictments by the controversial ICC is interfering with the peace signing, and I am trying to learn more about their jurisdiction so I can form an opinion. So far there has only been background info on the conflict, much of which I already know. I’m anxious to get into the meat of the debate in the next chapter. I have already heard from some Acholis dismissing Allen’s argument for the ICC. This doesn’t surprise me though, since so much of the community here is for traditional justice mechanisms like mato oput. The ICC is also disliked because people believe that the court’s involvement has hindered peace agreements. Kony and his top-commanders who otherwise may have negotiated peacefully have refused to come out of the bush for fear that they would be handed over to the ICC and tried in Western courts not keen on impunity or amnesty.