On the road to Yumbe
Written on Monday, May 12th: I leave this morning for a town called Yumbe, about 90km north of Arua. I was there Tuesday through Friday last week, and I will spend at least the next three weeks there. WellShare works with two small Civil Society Organizations there, and I'm helping them "build capacity" - development-ese for making sure they're functional and financially stable. This week should be a telling one as far as how much work I will be able to get done in my brief time here.
The above photo is of the Needy Kids Uganda office. It is, by Yumbe standards, a grand building. Even the thatched hut on the right is an upstanding piece of architecture. The town, which is much closer to Sudan, and therefore (I'm not sure if this is logical) drier and even hotter than Arua. In many ways, northern Uganda lags behind the south - health, education, and above all, economy. While the whole country was pretty well ruined under the oppressive dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, the devastation continued in the north under the reign of terror of the Lord's Resistance Army, well into the 2000's. The LRA, under the leadership of madman Joseph Kony, roamed the northern countryside, looting, raping, maiming, murdering and recruiting child soldiers. As a result, people living in small villages (which constitutes most of Uganda's population), sought refuge in larger towns under the protection of the Ugandan army. When the LRA was chased out of the country - they are still wandering poorer, more anarchic areas like the "Democratic Republic" of the Congo, southern Sudan and the Central African Republic - people left Yumbe to return to their villages. So until recently, Yumbe had quite a few residents. On top of these woes, Idi Amin came from a town not far from here, Koboko, and so he recruited many military men from the area. The bitterness felt by the rest of Uganda towards the far northwest has not entirely dissipated. Today, the town looks a bit like the sub-saharan version of Detroit - as you walk down the street, you see an occupied thatched hut, an empty lot, a burned down thatched hut, a crumbling building, an occupied building, and yet another burned down thatched hut. The people here have visibly less money than the people of Arua, who in turn have less money than the people of Kampala. You see protein deficiencies in the distended bellies of children, there isn't much in the way of local crops, and as a white person, I'm asked for money about once for every 50 feet I walk through the town. The washed-out look of the photo is if anything, an understatement. There's a filter technique sometimes used in American films like "Three Kings" of "Blackhawk Down" where the whole landscape looks bleached and hot. From squinting, sweaty eyelids, this is how Yumbe looks.