Gulu

Back safely from Gulu, which less than two years ago would have been a much more dangerous trip. The city center was always a reasonably safe place, but anywhere outside of it - and travelling to and from - was traveling into or through a true war zone.

I visited a camp but took no pictures, it did not feel right or respectful, and even somewhat awkward even to be there. Despite all of my good intentions, I am still little more than a disaster tourist there, and there is little my good intentions can do to help people here on a practical basis.

I learned a few important things. One - trust my instincts. The man who was to be our guide gave me an immediate sense of distrust, and luckily I did follow my instincts and ditched the guy at the first sign that my instincts were on. I'm almost out to time so I'll save that story for later. Two - the people living in these camps were largely involuntarily placed there. The people here call the camps concentration camps and they are equally angry at the government soldiers who brutalized and terrorized them as they are the Lords Resistance Army who is publicly blamed for the atrocities.

Families living in these camps were denied the ability to continue farming their land - thus leading to major food insecurity. Most people I talked to said that the lack of food here was due to the policies of Aid providers and government. People were rounded up into camps, supposedly for their own protection, and yet the camps were precisely where many of the atrocities occured.

Having now lived in the camps for more than a decade, they are now being asked to go home. To farms that are not developed, huts that have disintegrated, with very little assistance. Gulu is an Aid economy city, and yet it seemed very unclear just what the NGO's were doing. It seems to me that the help people need here is for some people to pick up a fucking hammer and start building some god damned houses, plowing some land. But when I asked what they were in fact doing the answer was "sensitizing". Now there are some organizations that were exceptioms here - and I will name them, but there is some major evidence that the notion of Aid is nonsense. I just saw alot of nice hotels and big 4 wheel drive cars and lots and lots of hungry poorly clothed children.... More on this later.