By Orla Ryan
September 24-30, 2003
Ms Christine Amono came to Awer camp, which is about 15 kilometres from Gulu town last November with her husband and three children.
Before the rebels came, there was lots of food in the village she came from. Now she eats once a day.
She has been in the camp for ten months but her family has only just started receiving food from the World Food Programme.
Previously they were not on the ‘list’ of people who receive one 50kg bag of maize per month for their family.
She says the hardest thing about being in the camp is the fact that she doesn’t have any income. The children are safer here than in the village, she said, but they have hardly any food or clothing.
There is no field for her to plough, she just waits for relief food to come.
When her children are ill, she queues at the camp’s only health centre for hours, day after day until she gets help. Often, there are no drugs.
Illness is everywhere. One day, one neighbour is sick. The next day, it is another neighbour.
Amono says people in the camp feel they are part of a community, but poverty and idleness have forced many of the people to drink.
When they want to drink, they can go to Justin Ayela, who has a bar in a grass thatch hut, similar to the ones most people live in.
It is just before 1.00 p.m. and there are four or five people crowded into the hut, which sells Kasese, a local wine, Nile Special and Citizen beer.
Ayela arrived at the camp with his wife and four children in October 1996. In an effort to get more money he started the bar in March this year.
A small bottle of Kasese costs Shs 500 but there are few customers because people have little money. Kasese isn’t the cheapest drink in the camp, the locally-brewed Lejuru is the cheapest drink for sale in the camp but Ayela doesn’t sell it as he would be overcrowded.
The biggest problem in the camp, he says, is lack of food.
There are 33 Internally Displaced People’s camps in Gulu district alone, housing nearly half a million people who are escaping from violence inflicted by rebels of the Lords’ Resistance Army.
The lasting solution may be peace, but in the short term, analysts say more money needs to be spent on improving the humanitarian situation.
The WFP is currently carrying out a census and an emergency food-needs assessment, the first in two years, in an effort to improve their distribution system and establish exactly how much people need and how much they can get on their own.
The 50kg bag is meant to sustain a family of five for one month as their current data suggests that the average family is 4.1 people.
However, the huge disparities in family size mean that many people have far less to eat, Mr Jakob Mikkelsen, the programme co-ordinator for World Food Programme in northern Uganda, admits.
I visited two camps in Gulu district, Unyama and Awer.
These two camps, Mikkelsen said, are relatively better off as people are close to town and have opportunity to make money.
Both camps are crowded with grass-thatched huts, each housing families of six, seven I lose count, 12, 13 children.
The huts are as close together as they can be, so close I sometimes find myself crouching to walk under the thatch roofs, as there is no obvious path.
There are open spaces between the huts, where children play and millet dries. The huts stretch as far as the eye can see in a maze of thatch and mud.
Surprisingly to me, anyone can walk off the road and into the camp and daytime security feels lax.
The vast majority of the camps’ inhabitants appear to be under the age of five and wear ragged clothes. Children are playing but no child has shoes and some have the distended stomachs of famine victims.
It isn’t clear where people wash from or where they use the toilet.
As you walk about the camp, you feel you are treading on people’s lives.
Nobody minds if you take a photograph, everyone tells their story in the disinterested manner of someone who has either told it a thousand times before or does not believe that it is happening to them.
Occasionally, when people speak, there are flashes of anger in their eyes or voice, but people seem to have accepted where they are.
Unusually, people seem happy to talk to journalists, offering pleas for the government to make peace, the rebels to stop fighting, the WFP to bring food or the district to build schools – in the hope that if it appears in print, it might somehow make a difference.
The one thing that everyone I speak to has in common is that they all want to leave the camp. Mr Charles Odong has been in Unyama camp for two years.
In 1999, he was abducted by rebels with his first-born child, Dennis Ocaya, then aged 17.
Six months later, the rebels released him. He still doesn’t know what has happened to Dennis.
“I don’t know whether he is killed or is still around that is the main reason I left the village,” he said. Now in the camp, he has two grass-thatched huts.
“I have my children here around me, two huts, 12 children, one wife,” he said.
He is lucky. He has a job as an askari at the nearby National Teachers’ College.
Some people make money from selling firewood or doing labour locally but most people live from WFP handouts.
“The food is not enough, they give just one bag for one full hut, a man like me that has 12 children, that is not enough,” he said. There is nothing to do and people drink. “That is one way of passing the time and relaxing,” he said.
Mr Odoki Ray Lamaho is Unyama camp leader.
He says there are about 15,000 people in the camp, but people keep arriving. He notes their names in a classroom exercise book and calculates the total number by drawing in the sand.
About 360 people have arrived from Pader district since June, he says, as people flee violence near Lacekocot camp.
The problems in the camp are many, he says.
“We have too many children who are loitering without going to school,” he said, adding that they have only three primary schools. Many people are ill, with malaria or HIV/Aids.
The camp offers its inhabitants some protection but soldiers can bring problems, he says. They arrive, look for women, steal from the camp and get into fights.
The lucky people are those who have a plot nearby, who can plant and dig.
For those that don’t, the day is long but it ends early as the curfew starts at about 7.00 p.m. Anyone found outside after that has to answer to the soldiers who patrol the camp.
As I leave Unyama camp, it is about 6.00 p.m. Earlier, a group of women performed a dance for me that they had performed for district officials, who had opened a nearby health clinic.
An adult literacy group is taking place. I hear music, lara-raka. It is loud and lively and a crowd has gathered. “That is our disco,” Lamaho says.
Mr Amos Coxson Okweraa has been in Awer camp since 1996. He was twenty when he arrived, escaping rebels from six miles away.
He was the eldest of his father’s six children. Since then, his father and stepmother have died of HIV/Aids and he looks after the family.
He used to sell firewood and sim-sim until he saved up enough money to set up a shop in the camp in April 2000.
His dark shop is crowded with items, such as padlocks, eggs, toothbrushes, flour, sugar, and Lifebuoy soap. Most people, however, buy soap and salt.
“There is not enough food, there is no money in the hands of the people, they are no longer rearing animals. People lack clothes. There is not enough education,” he said.
So what do people do?
“Nothing,” he says. Sometimes, people plough nearby plots and sometimes people drink.
Mr Benjamin Oballim is Awer camp leader.
He says there are 20,432 people in the camp. He says people need access to land to grow food. “The future of these children is dark,” he said.
Food may be people’s most basic need, but others fear that the camp culture is replacing local culture.
Mr Amos Omoya, emergency co-ordinator for World Vision in Gulu, says the camps have dealt a blow to local culture.
“You find people who were not even drinking before they came to the camp, they are now involved in drunkenness,” he said. “You find a girl of 15 with a child, it used not to be like that in our culture.”
World Vision is building semi-permanent classrooms in the camps and offering toolkits to help people build latrines.
The long term problems of being in the camp are clear – a generation of children are growing up thinking that food arrives off the back of a World Food Programme truck.
“You are used to receiving relief, it creates tendency of dependency,” Omoya said.
The solutions people offer require money, military support and the recognition that the camps are no longer temporary. Life, everybody says, will be better when there is peace and when that happens, the camps will disband.
Mr Charles Uma, chairperson of the Gulu district disaster committee, doubts anything will improve in the camps.
“The problem is that people have remained for some time in the camps, they have exhausted the plots nearby, what you are looking at is exhausted land, which cannot yield anything meaningful,” he said.
He says the only way to life better for the people in the camps is if the camps are economically productive, but this would be difficult to sustain without army protection or help.
“Do you think the UPDF can take people away to where there is enough land to farm it? If they cannot protect people when they are in the camps, they cannot protect people if they march,” he said.
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
