After the Cease-fire

FILMING CHILDREN IN UGANDA AFTER THE CEASE-FIRE

It is a cloudy day in Mbale. I never imagined that Africa had cloudy days. I am walking in old oatmeal colored shoes that are meant for the pale dirt of America. They seem ill-fitting next to the rich, sun burnt Ugandan soil. I should be following Dory, one of the students on the team with me, to find transportation to get back to PCCP but I am distracted. I watch old men sewing in front of their shops. I smile when I see huge beet red coca-cola advertisements painted on the sides of buildings. People teem in and out of stores and in alley-ways kids play with soccer-balls and stop to watch me as I walk past. I keep my eye out for a place where I can get bottled water.

A big-headed youngster sidles up along next to me as I walk.  He is already holding out his hand and he looks up at me with his big eyes. His head seems five times the thickness of his legs, which look like short little stilts. He is wearing a knit-sweater that droops to his knees. He does not look where he is going while he walks. “Muzungu. Muzungu!” He says to me. I am holding my video camera. I look down again. Having caught my attention he smiles, his feet pit, pit, pit, pit against the crunchy slab-sidewalk. He starts to speak in his own language to me. He is being very insistent. Pitch increase, high squeaks in his voice. He is making a plea.

            Pallissa Children’s Concern Project (PCCP) lies about twenty-five miles outside of Mbale, Uganda. It is set back from the road, out of plain view, but otherwise arranged like any other village house would be along the single dirt road that connects trading center to trading center. The resident orphans mill around the timber-goal posts of a well-worn soccer field and wait for a game to start now that classes are over. Many of them rush over to me and the ten other American students who are done teaching for the day, who are exhausted after learning how hard it is to teach in a foreign culture. To them, we are now free game to be questioned about America. The barrage of questions is endless, the most shocking being probably, “Do they have the sun in America?”

Under the umbrella of Melchizedek’s Treasure, a small non-government organization based in Maryland, the eleven of us, organized with the help of Pali Dacanay (RISD ’08), came together from schools in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Chicago. In June we flew over the Atlantic on Ethiopian Airlines. As part of the program, we each designed our own personal internship. As a film major, I would be filming a documentary project and helping teach an art class on the side. Others would do other things, art, art therapy, drama, music, even, by popular demand from the kids (and some of the teachers), psychology. As I sat on the plane the one thing I was sure of was that I knew a lot more about my camera equipment than I knew about Uganda.

I distinctly remember getting the first inkling of what I was getting into when I talked to an American-Ethiopian woman sitting next to me on the plane. Ethiopia is not so good, she told me. She had heard that on the streets, some bad men had been known to find parentless street urchins and befriend them. They would then gouge out their eyes, and tell the kids to go out and beg. What the child would make, the men would take.

            Back at PCCP I tell at least five kids I can’t interview them tonight. Beyond the orphanage, behind the soccer field, the sun is now settling into the green bush. Soon the cloudy sky will be a frosty blue. Alexandrine, 17, speaks in English with an elegant, British influenced Ugandan accent as I hold the camera. “I would like you tell you my story.” She says.

            Alexandrine, and over half of the 200 plus kids who now live at PCCP were child soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Like in Sierra Leone (for those who have seen Blood Diamond), Rwanda, and the Congo, these kids are abducted and given guns to aid existing militaries or opposition groups. In Uganda, the LRA attacks outlying rural villages, kills all of the adults and toddlers and captures the remaining young, looking primarily for those between 11 and 18 years of age.

            The conflict was brought about by Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army who started the LRA to bring power to the northern Acholi Tribe.  Since 1991, however, he has been massacring the Acholi instead of helping them, claiming they have turned away from God and become sinful beings. Statistics currently report that to date over 30,000 children have, at one time, been abducted.

            Alexandrine, who herself escaped and was rescued from the streets, speaks: “My story goes like this, my mother died when I am one year old. I was brought up by my step mom and my father. One night in the village, rebels came and broke the house, brought us out of the house and killed the mother in my presence. Gave me to kill my dad…..and I killed my dad. After-they took me to the bush to be a rebel, trained me how to shoot a gun, and gave me to kill people. After, in the bush they used to rape us. Like in the bush, they could just make us lying, and every soldier could just come and select the one that he wants, the girl that he wants. And then, the ones that are left, they would be tied to a tree in order that they did not escape.”

            She is looking at me now, just at me. Then away. Her eyes retreat deep inside. “I was given to kill so many people, I cannot recall…and sometimes, they could kill people. After killing someone, they give you take that blood of that person, and if you refuse, they kill you, and giving-you taking that blood, was to show them; it means, you are now strong to be a rebel. Like-I was given to take blood of my father after killing him.”

            Tears stain her face. She begins to sing. She sings about how she hoped in no one save Jesus Christ. “One time when I was caught while I was singing that song, I was beaten severely, but I was warned, whenever I was caught singing anymore, they could kill me.” She pauses. “But I could still continue singing, when they are not there.”

            On the last night I spent in Uganda I tried to navigate around scattered luggage bags and piles of medical-supplies, art-supplies, clothes, and other debris that had accumulated in a hurried attempt to leave everything behind for the orphans at the school. In an attempt to create some order I brought kids in one at time to give them each a few of my belongings. My camera is packed.  

            I pointed a flashlight down the hall. Lawrence’s feet, in battered flip-flops, shuffle down the narrow hallway. “Lawrence. Come in here, you can sit down.” Lawrence, 14 makes himself a space on the cement floor and just looks up at me. I sit next to him. Out of all the orphans, Lawrence and I had grown closest over the four weeks. Lawrence wants very badly to be a film director and I spent nights reading his scripts. “I made you a peanut-butter sandwich,” I say, knowing he has never had one before. He tries it. I am afraid it will be too sticky. “It is very nice,” he says.

            “What do you most need?” I ask, pointing to my pile of things. “I need new shoes,” he says. “These ones, they are not so good.” I hand him my dirty shoes, coated with red soil. “Here, try them on.” They are too big. “No, no, they will fit, they are very nice,” he says. He looks at me, my flashlight is lying on my bunk, and his eyes shine white.

j.m. betz november 2007.