World Refugee Day 2008 (June 2008)

I am working on a few overdue chapters of my adventures here -- all about the mysteries of bananas that taste like potatoes, meeting Chairman Mao (OK, his full name is Norbert Mao) in Northern Uganda, intestinal malaise (parts 1 through 3 of a gurgling, groaning saga), random English on T-Shirts ("gettin' Lucky in Kentucky!") and signs ("no hooting!"), discovering my inner domestic diva (banana bread, anyone?), melting in Ghana and freezing in Kenya, and the strange, sometimes amusing flattery of being avidly courted through the wacky medium of text messages (which are THE way to keep in touch in Africa!). Not to mention the frustrations, heartbreak and occasional real joys of trying, however challenging the circumstances within and without at times, to be the change I wish to see in this world.

But those tales can wait a few more days or weeks, possibly years (time being rather elastic here)... I have a more important story to tell you today, and a request. While I'm not an ambassador (yet! *wink*), and I can't hope to compete with the exquisite Angelina Jolie, who as goodwill ambassador to the UN's refugee agency helped make a film to honour and highlight the realities of the millions upon millions of refugees in our world today, displaced by violence and disaster (check it out at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2162983/Angelina-Jolie-films-UN-video-for-refugee-day.html),

I am doing something on a much smaller scale...

Though I'm only beginning to wrap my head around the structures and policies that fail to address - and sometimes may worsen - the problems of these huge numbers of refugees, I have made a personal pledge to make a difference in the lives of one family of refugees as my contribution on World Refugee Day. I would like to help send my friend and fellow peacebuilder, Amos Deeahn Wright, his wife and children, and their bed and personal effects back home to Liberia, a country now in the hopeful phases of post-conflict reconstruction, where I am quite certain he will become one of his homeland's powerful voices for peace. It's also a birthday present to Amos, who celebrates his special day tomorrow, June 21st, on the summer solstice... I've pledged the first $200 towards the one thousand dollars they need in order to relocate -- in other words, I'm covering one family member. While UNHCR will pay for Amos himself to return home, they make no allowance for family or belongings, and each person will cost him $200 to transport by truck overland across West Africa, as will their combined effects. This is a burden beyond imagining for a family with nearly no income, who live in a camp and wake up every day facing the challenge of finding enough food, let alone try to save funds for an international journey. I dearly want to help him meet his goal of returning his family, together, back home by this July, and I'm asking you to join me in extending help to the Wrights, if you share my desire to make a meaningful, personal contribution on World Refugee Day. If everyone I am sending this to contributes as little as the cost of a movie or a meal this very week, then the Wright family could be home by early next month and beginning their new life in now-peaceful Liberia. If you'd like to join in, the easiest way to get the funds over here is to send them to my PayPal account. I am currently working with Amos to try to get him on PayPal as well, in the hope that if it works, I can then transfer the total amount to him easily, and will let you know when it's done if you prefer to transfer it directly to him (bear with us, though, things take FOREVER sometimes in Africa).

Whether you are in a position to help or not, whether you feel moved to do so or not, I would like you to get to know Amos, because he's someone I wish we could send all around the world to share his brilliance and bigheartedness with all of humanity. I met Amos in Ghana, where I attended a week long intensive training in Non Violent Communication (check out www.cnvc.org, and www.nonviolentcommunication.com). The NVC trainers who came to Africa as part of a summit for the African Alliance for Peace offered the course free to a wide array of locals, most of whom would never have the financial means to attend such a training. Amos heard about it through his volunteer work with Mediators without Borders, and we were more than blessed to have his presence in our group.

One of the assistant trainers in the NVC workshop, Donna Carter of California, was blogging about her experience, her way of sharing her adventure with friends and supporters back home. I quote a segment of her writings here about Amos, because they really capture his spirit and his story beautifully:

{ He talks with a syncopated yet measured, rich baritone. The very rhythm of Amos Deeahn Wright's careful speech mirrors the consideration he brings, not only to each word, but also to each person he encounters in his mission – to use mediation and nonviolent communication to build a foundation of peace in Liberia.

The ready smile that seizes Amos' entire face at any moment delights me and belies the challenges this man has experienced after escaping from war in his home country of Liberia when he was 25. He has lived as a refugee ever since, almost two decades.

Amos was with the Liberian security forces escort for President Samuel Doe on the day rebels captured Doe in 1990 during guerrilla warfare. Rebels eventually tortured and assassinated Doe, cutting off his ear in a video aired on television.

"I saw no safety in going back to Liberia," said Amos... He sneaked aboard a Ghanaian cargo ship and escaped to Ghana. There, he found himself in a refugee camp, young, without a country, and without financial means.

Money is limited; however, Amos has an abundance of guile, perseverance and enthusiasm. He saw himself at a crossroads. He opted to change his direction in life from soldier to peace-builder.

"When I got here I thought on the moment of transformation that the war was a result of the failure of the generation before me to accept a platform that we would enjoy as Liberian youth," he said. "On the contrary, we experienced war at the time we were supposed to be decision-makers of the country. So I can use my stay in Ghana to change the future of Liberia by going into peace-making activities."

In the refugee camp he became a classroom teacher, which each month pays 15 Ghana cedis, the equivalent of $15 U.S. dollars. The West Africa Dispute Resolution Center (WADREC) trained him as a mediator. He began volunteering as a mediator in the Ghanian courts. }

(Excerpted from May 22, 2008 entry at: http://www.donna-in-ghana.blogspot.com/ -- I encourage any of you interested in NVC or the Ghana event from Donna's viewpoint to read more!)

In honour of World Refugee Day, I send you greetings from Africa, and I share my hopes and dreams for a more peaceful, just world in the years ahead. And my heartfelt request to help me help Amos and the Wright family repatriate to Liberia to help build a strong and lasting peace there...

Hello from Acholi-Land (May 2008)

Kopa-ngo, friends! (Now you say "Ko-peh! -- there you go, speaking Acholi!)

This is, I think but can't entirely guarantee, going to be a short hello from the field... short because access to internet here is sketchy and I may not have time for more, and a hello so you all know I'm alive! Also I think that being here includes the responsibility to share some news from "live, on location" in Gulu, one of the districts at the heart of the LRA-conflict territory, where for years children were stolen in the night, sometimes even forced to kill their own parents as they went, taken into the bush and drugged, armed, trained and indoctrinated as child soldiers.... I had heard about this conflict for years, and wondered about its roots. Being here I think I am beginning to understand it better, now that I can actually hear from the people who've lived through it. I am utterly amazed by the resiliency, kindness and hospitality of the Acholi people, who have suffered nearly unimaginable horrors from all sides in the last few decades, and yet are committed to healing and reconciliation and moving forward with their lives in peace.

In the North here, millions of people were displaced and have lived, in some cases, for up to 20years in "temporary" Internally Displaced Persons camps. That is like being a refugee with fewer rights, because the international community via the UN/Red Cross do not have jurisdiction and influence over your wellbeing and access to resources. Your own government does. If, as in this case, your government is slanted rather heavily to a tribe or ethnic group other than your own, and that same government receives oodles of money from international aid and donations to "take care of you" but isn't held accountable by those donors for resolving the underlying conflict that displaced you (in which that same government is also guilty of atrocities), well... you could be in that hut without clean water or a place to grow your own food, and living off rations, for a long time. It isn't just unsanitary and harsh, it also erodes all the longstanding traditions and community ties and processes that kept your way of life together and thriving -- children are born and raised not knowing how to grow food, and when one day you get to "go home" to your village (or what is left of it), two generations of people may have ended up with strongly learned-dependency behaviours towards food and support, and have little in the way of education or practical skills for normal village life. In a nutshell, being an IDP sucks. Being one of a huge number of IDPs for 20 years sucks worse.

And what about the LRA, you say, who are at the centre of this displacing conflict? What you read and see reported in the media about the LRA conflict is filtered through a Western lens to the point that unless you are here and talk to the Acholi people, or hear about their situation from someone who has done so, you can't really wrap your head around it. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has, it is true, wreaked havoc under his insane leadership (although he has only very, very rarely been seen in person and spoken to by outsiders, he is widely believed by the Western medical system to suffer from hereditary schizophrenia -- which in local traditional terminology, to many, means he hears and interacts with the spirit world in a direct way, while normal folks don't). What few if any outside media report accurately on is how this fits into the longstanding grievance on the part of the Acholi people generally, who are a minority tribe in Uganda but whose numbers are huge across the border in Sudan (the contiguous group of Acholi people covers an area of land straddling this border -- yet another happy legacy of old white military men carving up former colonies with no regard to ethnic or other relationships amongst the actual inhabitants of these new "countries").

The Acholi were favoured for military, police and similar roles by colonial masters in what is now Uganda, being a traditionally "warrior" culture. Upon the withdrawal of colonial powers, this left them a resented minority in their new country -- in an analogous way to the minority Tutsi in Rwanda who had held positions of favour under the Belgian rulers, then were turned upon by the Hutu majority who'd been left behind by comparison. Conflict naturally ensued in both cases. Here, the result was that the Acholi among others were driven out of their homes and lands, and badly mistreated by the new "powers that be" in their newly formed independent country. Joseph Kony, an Acholi, is the nephew of a (now dead) female spiritual and military leader who founded a resistance movement against the Southern-Ugandan-dominated government. Her group was a proponent of the Acholi people establishing their own homeland and running it themselves along religious lines (most are Catholic but with a heavy influence of local, traditional spirituality). Kony began his leadership as a continuation of this movement, and like his aunt who "talked directly with spirits", he believes that God communicates directly to him -- unfortunately, at the same time as he advocates for "rule according to the 10 Commandments" [in itself, a troubling proposition], he proceeds to break most of them daily and has killed and tortured many, many people, including his own Acholi tribesfolk. The fact remains, however, that when he set out, he went into the bush as the head of a resistance movement declared to be directly on behalf of the Acholi, and was blessed by their elders -- this blessing has not been rescinded, and the current attempts to negotiate a peace treaty and have him sign it and come to justice are confounded by the insistence of the international community on enforcing ICC (International Criminal Court) indictments against him, of which some Acholi people do not approve. The Acholi population has suffered from all sides these past 20 years as the LRA and the Government forces fight each other and they are abused and trodden upon by both. Each side claims the other is entirely in the wrong and must surrender. Without going into all the painful layers of detail, the Sudanese government (based in Khartoum, the North part of Sudan) for its own reasons has allowed the LRA safe haven within its borders, and has armed and supported its struggle (and has long denied doing so).

At this point, with many lives lost, people crippled, and violence and trauma inflicted widely, the LRA is largely in retreat or hiding, and the peace process has been patiently and painstakingly helped along by the international community -- but at this critical point of concluding it and putting the official seal on the peace that has been slowly returning to this region and these people, Western cultural blindness among other things is getting in the way of successful resolution.

The Acholi are pressing for restorative justice according to the traditional "Mato-oput" system. Almost every traditional community in Africa has its own version of this, and it works very, very differently from "justice" as Western legal systems use that word. In my own opinion, most Western justice systems, being retributive and focused on punishment alone, are hopelessly ineffective and have a great deal to learn from traditional, reconciliation-based means. Laying the word "guilty" on someone and cutting them out of society for a number of years (supposedly equivalent to the damage of their crime somehow) heals no one and nothing. It does not bring peace, or forgiveness, and it does not compensate for the loss to the whole of society in any meaningful way. Mato-oput, like Gacaja in Rwanda and other such systems (such as the one that used to resolve the differences in Darfur between the settled farmers and the nomads, before the Khartoum-based Sudanese gov't began arming the northern-based nomads, who now simply raid and kill the southern sedentary farmers' villages instead of resolving land and resource-based conflicts on the tribe to tribe level), works very differently. In past, before external meddling and influence began arming and supporting one group over another, upsetting the balance of power and creating the much-hyped criss situations that CNN splashes about here and there, restorative justice along these traditional lines was the means for restoring harmony at every level, within the tribe or inter-tribally. It involves the whole community on both sides of an issue coming together under the guidance of their chiefs, elders or leaders, collectively clearing up the matter through total truth-telling, and then reaching consensus on how the loss or injury will be compensated -- community to community, as a whole. No matter how insane Kony is and how atrocious his crimes, getting him to sign a peace deal and disarm, and come out of the bush, will be nearly impossible until all sides agree to create a reconciliation-based process of justice for all parties to take part in. Attempting to apply the black and white, right and wrong, guilty and innocent logic of the ICC will just fail the Acholi people yet again...

In the meantime, young women and men and children have been returning in large numbers from the bush and are being rehabilitated by a variety of organizations here in Gulu. Yesterday, I visited St. Monica's Convent, where former abductees (usually now teenaged or in their early 20's), and children born in the bush to child soldiers, are healing and starting new lives. One young woman sat with us and told us her story. As she talked of being taken at age 15, forced to carry outrageously heavy burdens of food and water, plus her gun (and later, her child as well, conceived through one of the many rapes she endured as the sex slave of the male soldiers), we were gradually joined by a large group of children ranging in age from about 2 - 18. Each Sunday, they come together at the St. Monica grounds to sing, play and learn. One of the friends I'm here with, Isabel, had her guitar with her, and when the whole group of about 80 kids and youths had gathered in a circle with us, under a towering and shade-giving fruit tree, we all sang together, teaching each other songs in Spanish, English and Acholi. Later they divided up into boys and girls, and the girls played volleyball (the older girls carrying little ones on their backs, tied with long swathes of cotton) while the boys played soccer. Some of these children were abducted, others were born to soldiers and abductees in the bush and came out when their parents (who were also children) managed to ecape. One small girl of about 4 years old caught my eye as seeming different than the others. She had a protruding belly and a sort of squashed face, and she seemed to isolate herself from others and often hit those who came near her. One of the young women who lives at St. Monica's and had recently completed her vocational training in hotel and restaurant service, whispered to me that this little girl is Kony's child, according to sources in the bush. The mother is no longer alive. As I watched this odd little girl, I wondered what she had experienced from birth to the time she left the bush, whether the hereditary schizophrenia -- if that is indeed the correct diagnosis for Kony -- would affect her, and whether she would go through her whole existence being pointed at and and whispered about, and what her future held. It was, to say the least, a strange moment.

With that, I'll sign off. I'll be back to Kampala in the next few days and meeting with all sorts of NGO's and organizations there gathering information and contacts for an urban-youth resource centre project I'm helping with. Soon after that I'll be back in Nairobi and near the UN. But I hope that life will bring me back to Gulu and other parts of the North of Uganda again, and not too far in the future, to learn more of the Acholi language and hear more of their incredible stories of strength, survival and healing.

With love from Africa, I wish you all happy trails wherever you are!