Previously, I had tried to summarise my reflections as far as the end of our first day in the town of Gulu, approximately half way through our visit to Uganda. In the eight posts prior to this one, I have written about my record of a single day - the visit to the Pagirinya Refugee Settlement, how I tried to capture something of the stories we heard in my notes and photographs. Those stories of the five people we spoke to and the wider discussions with the camp administration and Church leaders are still close to my heart.
The pictures I took that day were the first ones I worked on when back at my desk, and they have also been the ones I have spent most time looking at and showing to other people. The experience in the camp and that of meeting the individuals was not harrowing in itself, but as in those classic films, the emotion is best communicated by what is not seen or said. The expression in the eyes of the ladies we spoke to told us everything we needed to know. The exact details, therefore, were secondary. To have intruded uninvited further into their trauma, grief and imminent losing of hope would have been to desecrate the very stories we were wanting to record.
This day was by far the highlight of the visit; the hours spent in the camp came to be a rare and privileged time. The wonderful moments still to come on our tour would feel like they had been earned by the time spent being physically present and emotionally vulnerable in the settlement. My powerlessness to change the situation matched theirs, although I had the significant advantage of being able to go home afterwards.
One of the common complaints in the West is that of compassion fatigue. We have seen these types of images so many times they wash over us, but I am glad I am not a professional at dealing with the trauma of the refugees we spoke to because it allowed me to stay in that moment of being present long after I had left the camp and returned to my normality.
I want to ask myself where there can be any hope for Africa? Is there an inevitability of a cycle of violence as wave after wave of 'internal strangers' await their time to gain revenge, or capture power? As we were arriving back in the UK, news started to filter through of the arrival into Uganda of refugees from the DRC who had crossed Lake Albert. Even if the violence and refugee crises are solved then the incipient corruption would seem to leave the continent hamstrung.
For me, the hope for the future of Africa (at least in the recent history of Uganda and the current situations in South Sudan and the DRC) has to be its people. The age profile of these nations is hugely tilted towards the young. The pain in the eyes of the ladies we saw in Pagarinya was in sharp contrast to the light we could see in the faces of the boys who joined us in Opi Tiberius' small home.
This was true also in the determination and compassion we encountered in men like Francis, one of our drivers, and those who we had heard singing on our first full day from the AYF. Sadly we ran out of time to be able to go and see Francis' work in the slums of Kampala - maybe next time...
I had approached Pagirinya with a sense of bracing myself to record to the best of my ability whatever distress and suffering I found in that place. Yes, there was pain, but there was also a beauty - the servant-heartedness of the Church leaders, the dignity of the women and the resilience of the children.
In the month since my return my reading and the ongoing work of processing the photographs has forced me down different avenues of reflection and recollection, but the time in the camp is the memory that has stayed freshest; not because of the scale of the pain, but because of the simple humanity of the resilience we met face to face.
After talking with the group of women, we walked further into the block in the camp, and down to a brick built dwelling which had been put up for elderly or disabled refugees. Here we met Opi. We gathered in his main room and he had a bedroom behind a partition wall. As we talked to him, small children came and sat with us.
Opi had led a difficult life in South Sudan. He is blind, and so struggles to get by - his mother is now 92 and so couldn’t really help him. He was originally from the town of Loa, about 18 km north of Nimule on the main road to Juba.
He had very poor eyesight, so had been for medical treatment in Juba many times, but since 2000 he has been blind. Despite his blindness, he used hooks to catch fish. His community in Loa left together and so he couldn’t stay on his own. He was able to get to the border by car. He has four family members, including his mother and his sister, in the camp with him. As we spoke to Opi, he told us that his sister, now 61, was at a funeral service. Her daughter had died the day before in Juba during child-birth and a service was being held in the camp for her.
Opi arrived in the camp in July 2016, but no medical support was available for him. He had been taken to Kampala for a check up where they confirmed that the irises in his eyes are now dead, so he will not be able to see again. He has to rely on people to get water for him, so sometimes it can take 2-3 days for enough water to be collected for him to bathe properly. Opi learnt English when he was still able to read. He had been a Pastor, preaching the word of God in Loa. He sang to us a song in Ma’di, Arabic and English which said how Jesus never fails.
His sister Nora arrived and greeted us on her knees in the traditional manner. She is now Opi’s main carer. He is desperate for a solar powered MP3 audio-Bible in Ma’di, has native tongue, but they are prohibitively expensive.
As we left and made our way back to the vans, we passed his mother sitting on a rug in the minimal shade provided by the eaves of her hut. She clasped her hands together in greeting, but didn't speak. She looked tired beyond even her long years and yet despite her family's sufferings she showed no sign of self-pity, instead she wore a dignified resilience.
When we spoke to her daughter Jocelyn, Betty had been 7 km away cutting long grass for roofing and insulation. One bundle of the grass takes about an hour to cut, and it required 30 bundles to roof a round house. They also need to buy bamboo to make the roof supports for the grass to be attached to.
Betty has two boys and we had met Jocelyn her daughter. A second daughter is sponsored by an NGO called Far Reaching Ministries, and so is at boarding school in Kampala. Betty also has the care of a small child, the daughter of a relative who left the child when she remarried.
In Nimule, Betty had been a farmer. When they heard that soldiers were coming, her husband Simon Tako tried to return to Nimule from Juba but he was killed on the road, so Betty and the children left Nimule empty-handed.
After reaching the camp she had the problem of building a house, but now she is struggling to get money for school fees and buying clothes for herself and her children.
We took a photograph to show some of the bundles of reeds that Betty had been to collect. Behind the reeds is a tarpaulin shelter and behind that is a typical thatched roundhouse.
Mary came from the village of Opari in Pageri County. Initially, when asked about her life in South Sudan she replied that she was too traumatised to talk about her family.
She left Opari and headed to Pageri after all her property was taken by soldiers. She then set out from Pageri to the Ugandan border. As she walked, the children became very tired and it rained heavily. On the second day she reached a UN reception camp at Elegu on the border. The UN met her but she had to wait another five days there. There was no shelter, so they sat in the open in heavy rain.
The UN sent vehicles to collect them and she arrived at Pagirinya in July 2016, so she has witnessed the camp grow right from the beginning. Now she has no means of sending the children to school, so they stay at home.
In South Sudan, Mary’s husband had been a farmer and Mary would sell his produce in the local market. Her husband had been shot dead in their home, so she was left with her two sons; Samuel Ganyi, now 13, and Mangisto Glad, now 14.
She is also struggling with the problem of finding money to buy clothes, as the children’s clothing is now torn.
Mary showed us her hut which was made with the UN tarpaulin’s she was given and then insulated with the reeds from the surrounding area.
In the novel 'Miss Smilla's feeling for snow', Peter Høeg describes his heroine's sense of dislocated exile; a Greenlander living in Denmark...
to travel you have to have a home to leave and come back to. Otherwise you are a refugee.
In her history of the conflicts in Uganda through the 1980s, 'Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits', Heike Behrend describes how the Acholi (one of the major tribal groups in northern Uganda) felt oppressed and hard done by following the end of the Amin regime. Briefly, they had briefly held power in Uganda under the presidency of Tito Okello who had ousted Amin's successor, Obote, but they were soon defeated. They dispersed, returning to their homelands, burying their weapons and reverting to their previous peasant farmer lifestyles (one which as soldiers they had come to despise). They had become 'internal strangers'; at home and yet dislocated and unsettled and all too ready to return to violence.
Those we met as refugees from South Sudan were also predominantly Acholi (the northern border of Uganda did not respect people groups when it was first drawn on a map). History may well show a repeated pattern when the story of the conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan are written - of the violence of civil war subsiding, but then coming to the surface again because of this sense of being an internal stranger.
The Ugandan Prime Minister's Office gave a mandate to the Churches to help in the refugee camps. As the scale of the crisis became apparent, the Bishop went to the border to welcome the first refugees across. This work is now undertaken by the UNHCR who receive the refugees on the South Sudanese side of the border, register them and then transport them to organised settlement areas in northern Uganda.
The stories we heard suggested that whole communities made the decision to leave their homes together and the authorities appear to have broadly respected that sense of community in the placing of the people into the camps. Pagirinya is one of eighteen settlements in the local area and was opened in June 2016 following the nearby camps at Maaji reaching capacity. The flow of refugees has still not stopped.
The site itself is rudimentary in that this is land which has not been inhabited or farmed. It lacks the large trees which would provide good shade, the sorts we came across in other villages in the area. Work has been done to make the best of the situation. Deep bore holes have been put in place, and there is the typical congregating around them with yellow plastic jerry cans which is often the hub of these communities.
Another aspect which surprised me (thankfully) was that these people are not fenced in and are acting as equal partners in the running of the settlement. We were met at the camp by an employee of the OPM, a lady called Charity, but we also sat in her office with Revd Katto, the leader of the Churches in the camp and by a man called James, the chairperson of the camp. Revd Katto had been a Pastor in the African Inland Church prior to leaving South Sudan. James had been a businessman and so he had been brought to Pagirinya by the OPM specifically to lead the camp, a role he fulfils on his own. The camp has an official population of 35,000 but we had no way of checking this. The ongoing work by the Church of Uganda is highly valued - not just the regular visits by Revd Kenneth, but with vocal and practical support at the Diocesan level.
The spirit of the refugees was harder to gauge. There is a realism - they have been there for 18 months and the signs in South Sudan are that peace is not necessarily any closer. There are so many factions that a negotiated peace agreement would seem to be almost impossible to bring about. There is also the degree of trauma that many bear; loss of loved ones, property, means of survival as well as the loss of infrastructure if and when they return. There is also the concern about what things will be like if they are ever able to go back.
War changes people's attitudes
James told us. Those who have remained will probably feel that they are owed something by the returning refugees - after all, they stayed and fought. School was about to start again, but money is a real issue and often the only way to earn cash is to act as a boda-boda driver, but this is a dangerous profession. (Boda-bodas are the motorbike taxis which we saw on most street corners, but many of the drivers have backgrounds in the rebel groups and there is always the threat of crime and violence).
There are 27 ethnic groups in the camp, and in the region of 20 different languages spoken. The common tongue tends to be Arabic, stemming from Sudan's Muslim history. Some of our party would go on to look at the health provision, and they were impressed by the standard of the clinic. However, there is no eye specialists on site and gynaecology is difficult, particularly as there are pregnant women who have had to make a difficult journey and are themselves traumatised.
The food allocation has been reduced, which is causing problems, but this is added to by the fact that some of the camp's residents have been there for 18 months and therefore clothes, saucepans etc are starting to wear out and need replacing. Although we saw bore holes in operation, the number of them has to be limited so as not to lower the water table further and the holes themselves are low yield. Firewood is also need for cooking, but this can only ever be a finite supply. Open fires are a danger with so many thatched roofed round-houses in the vicinity.
On arrival the refugees are provided with UNHCR tarpaulins to construct a shelter and allocated 30m2 of land. We did see one or two shelters still at this rudimentary tarpaulin sheet stage. Most homes on block E were now self-built roundhouses. We saw evidence of the manufacture of bricks.
Insulation for the tarpaulin shelters is provided by bunched reeds, and these are also used to make the thatched roofs on round-houses. Long bamboo shoots are used to make the rafters for the thatch to sit on. The women were walking 7 km each way carrying bundles of the reeds to allow construction and repair to continue.
Crime has been a problem. Some of it is gender based - men having little to do other than sit around and play cards leads to drinking and then domestic violence or rape. The police are involved in those issues. There are also reports of teenagers putting valium into people's soup and then robbing them when they are unconscious. Women are tending to step forward and take the lead as the heads of the families, but there are also a lot of children in the camp either orphans or separated from families as they left their homes. Revd Katto spoke of how the trauma can lead people to become unresponsive or aggressive and the pressure on resources such as water can spark conflict along tribal lines. The Churches are working really hard to being unity in the camp and the Church leaders work together specifically to be seen as united
this is the only future for South Sudan,
Revd Katto said in conclusion.
James spoke of the difficulty caused by so few people understanding the full implications of what it means to be a leader. He commended the Pastors for their work demonstrating unity and bringing harmony to the camp.
The Republic of South Sudan came into being on the 9th July 2011. At the time, I was in the Diocese of Salisbury and there was much cause of celebration and optimism. We enjoyed a strong link with Sudanese Christians, and had been hugely aware therefore of the problems in the country with tensions between the predominantly Muslim north and the more Christian south.
It is not always very easy to start anything, says Ambassador Khoc, and so it is not going to be easy to start building a new nation and sustaining it...
Looking ahead over the next five years, a number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. All of the countries at significant risk have or are at high risk for experiencing internal conflicts or regime crises and exhibit one or more of the additional factors for mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan.
The women we spoke to in the camp at Pagirinya told us that there were no buildings still standing between Nimule, the nearest border town and the capital, Juba 200 kms to the north. That may be an exaggeration (I don't know) but it suggests wide-spread devastation. There was concern in the camp about the need to ensure that the elderly are kept alive because they will be the people who can remember boundaries and places should peace ever return.
Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury have been trying to raise awareness of the situation with a call to prayer during Lent.
Our visit was arranged by Revd Kenneth from the Church of Uganda, who visits the settlement regularly, and with the permission of OPM. We were welcomed to the settlement by South Sudanese Church leaders, who had committed themselves to working together to support the refugees - despite being refugees themselves. This is a profound commitment, bearing in mind the divisions within South Sudan on tribal and political lines.
First impressions of the camp are that it seems quite orderly, although there has been an outbreak of cholera early on. The refugees are not fenced in and may go off site during the day. The dwellings are mostly thatched round houses, with the occasional brick built home for the elderly or disabled. There are a reasonable number of latrines and wash rooms, and bore holes ensure water is available - in many ways the camp is no different from some of the other villages we had visited, but looking across the camp it is clear that the scale is much greater than a village. The main cross roads in the camp provided an area for small shops to have been established. However, there is little substantial cover - no large trees are visible which would provide natural shade. This is land that nobody would want for any other purpose.