Kitgum: All about Kitgum

Kitgum: All about Kitgum

Well, they burn my barn and they stole my horse.
I can't say goodbye...

I've got to be careful,
I don't want to be forced into a life of continuous crime.

Bob Dylan - Working Man's Blues #2

4^th November 2006
Kitgum is located sixty miles to the south of the Sudanese border. It has been ravaged by a civil war for the last twenty years, thanks largely to the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army).

You can feel the pain and suffering that the war has caused wherever you go in Kitgum.

The children are too afraid to sleep in the villages where they might be kidnapped and be forcibly recruited in the LRA. They walk many kilometers every day to the relative safety of the night shelters.

Most adults live in the IDP camps (Internally Displaced People). Their own villages are either too unsafe or just not there: the mud-brick huts are just too easy to burn down. We heard many stories of people perishing in mud-huts set alight by the LRA.

Amos' Story
Amos - who was kind enough to show us around Kitgum - had such a story. The LRA raided Amos' village when he was nine months old. They set fire to the roof of his hut near the door, making it very hard for the occupants to escape. Mercifully, everybody made it out and fled. Everybody that is except for Amos. His father returned to the hut to find it fully ablaze and could hear Amos crying inside. With the help of some friends, his father knocked down the wall and pulled out the now alight Amos. They quickly submerged him in some water and rushed him to the hospital.

Things did not look good for Amos and his family held no hope for his survival. A grave was prepared for him. Amos did survive though and after three months in intensive care he returned to his village. The ordeal left him horribly scarred. His hands are the most obvious deformity. Most of his fingers only have two joints, but - thankfully - he has the use of the thumb on his right hand.

Earning a living in Kitgum
We met Margaret Aloyo (42) during our time in Kitgum. The struggles that Margaret faces to earn a living are fairly typical for the women of Kitgum. She is the only person earning money for her eight children. Her husband passed away from AIDS and she herself is HIV positive.

She begs for neighbors for any sort of work that she can get. The type of work she gets include:

Rock Crushing
She consider herself lucky to be manually crushing rocks for 2,000 shillings ($NZ 1.66) a day. The crushed up rock is added to concrete mix by the builders to keep the cost of construction low.

The rock-crushers in Kitgum are mostly women, but I did see some children at it as well.

People crushing rocks should be confined to B-grade prison movies.
Collecting Firewood
Margaret will often walk many miles to collect wood for herself or anyone else who is prepared to pay for it.

Running into the LRA is always a risk when walking such distances.
Collecting Water
She also collects water for others. Carry a twenty liter jerry-can is not easy...
Farm Work
Margaret also occasionally finds work around crop harvesting time.

The site of a young child working the land was not a welcome one.

She is lucky to earn ush30,000 ($NZ 24.92) a month from all this work.

She still has a family to look after though. She tends to spend one day cooking meals for them, and the next working for money. This means that her eight children eat one meal every two days.

Theft and Mob Justice
People - unsurprisingly - sometimes have to resort to theft. ush30,000 a month is just not enough.

After waking up one morning at a hotel we were staying at, Denmark discovered that his mp3 player was missing. Amos was quite upset when he heard this and was determined to recover the mp3 player.

Turns out one of the maids had entered the room the previous day, gone through his stuff and taken the mp3 player. She sold it to a army guy for 2,000 shillings ($NZ 1.66).

How was all this discovered? Someone had seen the maid enter the room and she was therefore the prime suspect. Amos let the police know and they - to use Amos' words - beat her half to death with a cane and extracted a confession.

If it had been my mp3 player - which is coincidently also now missing/stolen - I would of preferred for her to of kept the mp3 player or the 2,000 shillings and not of been beaten so badly.

Signs of War
There are many signs of war in Kitgum.

One of the continuing struggles the LRA face is food acquisition. Food is hard to come by in the jungle as I can attest to... They often raid the villages around Kitgum and run off with goats, cows and any other food they can get hold of.

One time they tried a daring raid on the heavily guarded food warehouses of the UN sponsored World World Program^* in central Kitgum - which was right across the road from the hotel we were staying at. They LRA was not successful on this occasion. You can still see the bullet holes in the wall around the warehouses.

Idi Amin - former ruthless dictator of Uganda - once owned the most expensive hotel in all of Kitgum. The hotel has seen many battles over the last twenty years and is now but a shell of its former self. The ransacked hotel rooms are now used as classrooms and kids play football in the courtyards.

Landmine signs are a common sight.

Keeping on keeping on
Despite the obvious hardships of people in Kitgum, they just keep on keeping on.

Occasionally you come across a story that lightens your heart and gives you hope for the people of Kitgum.

One such event happened when we were talking to the aforementioned Margaret. This seventeen year old kid came up to us and shock our hand. He didn't say anything and seemed as gentle as a lamb.

Margaret later told us that is was her son Geoffrey. Geoffrey had recently escaped from the LRA after spending seven years with them as a child soldier. I'd hate to think what horrors he had to do and had done to him. I didn't have the courage to talk to him about it.

The mere fact that he had escaped the LRA and came over and shock my hand in a quiet sort of a way, gives me hope for the people of Kitgum and the end to the twenty years of horror.

This is a part of a series of pieces on Kitgum. To see a list of other entries, click here.

^*This is your tax dollars at work people...

Questions? Comments? Try contacting me.
Wanna receive an email whenever this site gets updated? Click here.

(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.