This week I traveled up to a small dusty,
hot town in Northern Uganda called Adjumani with Helen and our girls. Both of
us had work we needed to do up there, but not enough time to take separate
trips, hence the decision to take Hope and Eva. It was a decision that I quickly
regretted. Eva winged through the short flight and the moment we landed we all
began to sweat profusely. The temperature was somewhere in the late thirties
and our hotel turned off the generator at midnight, so off also went the fan.
The girls simply couldn’t sleep, not having been in heat like this before, so
of course Helen and I didn’t sleep either. I lay there feeling frustrated about
all manner of things until morning. Then I had to go to work. Interestingly, by
the end of the week I was glad we’d taken our girls with us. I think in a very
small way it helped me to relate to what we saw.
On our first day I spoke to a young boy of
perhaps 11 who said he and his siblings and mother had walked for 3 weeks to
escape from South Sudan. That’s fairly typical. Many of the oldest and youngest
are dying on the way from a lack of water, shelter and food. Internally, I
feebly related that to my arduous hour-long flight. Self constructed,
tarp-covered stick shelters are the accommodation option out there in the
settlements. Blazingly hot in the day, less than rain-proof and small. As we
walked through them I considered that their occupants were not camping, these
were their homes for the foreseeable future. The war in South Sudan is showing
no sign of letting up.
These refugees don’t have jobs to go to
when they wake up in the morning. Helen pointed out to me a man lining up for
food in one of the reception centers who would have been about the same age as
my dad. As I tried to imagine what this would be like for him my mind balked. Most
of these refugees were poor back in South Sudan but now they’re poorer. They
have walked away from their land and houses and have had to leave behind the
possessions they couldn’t carry. No prospect of self-sufficiency for a long time
ahead for the man in the queue. Instead he has to put out his bowl and accept
what is given.
A mum that we interviewed had lost one of
her children in the fighting. As she said it, I let the weight of that sentence
sink in for a moment. What mother should have to lose a young child in some
senseless war? What would my response be if one of my daughters
were shot? No time to grieve for this lady, until she was an alien in a foreign country.
cross the border each day. My way of relating to that number is to think of my high school, Macleans College, daily walking into Uganda. This has been happening now for 9 months.
As we left, I understood more fully what an
immense privilege that is. We can leave. These people are in Adjumani right now
because they have, in the words of Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond- 'no choice'. They cannot go home after a few days, and they
have nowhere else to go. They have no idea if they’ll ever be able to go home. Home
may well have been altered irreparably.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a beautiful
house in Kampala with my family intact and safely with me. I have a job. I have
choices. What stark inequality. I’ve worked in this space for a few years now,
but this week I was hit anew by the gulf between the life of a refugee and
mine.
Tim
Tim
