June 17, 2007

Dear Friends,
 
Yesterday we travelled about an hour and a half to Lira, where Ken and I were two years ago when we started this stove project thing. We had  hoped to visit with Mathew Langol at All Nations Christian Care, but he didn't answer his phone. So we called JK who was a camp resident when we were here. He now works for ANCC building stoves in the area for them. We found him in a small village south of town. Ken said "South! Why is he south of Lira there was no war there. He should be working in the IDP camps!"
 
The official political line has been that  the people are leaving the camps. Ask anybody in town and that's what they know. But none of them have ever seen a camp and don't even know where they are. However, when we talked with JK we learned that it is true!
 
This is where I have to change my story. I've told you before that I thought the normalization process might take a decade. I described how the residents have no resources to return to their homes where there are no houses, no wells, the have to re-clear their fields and plant and harvest a crop before they get any money. Impossible I said. I was wrong! :-) It looks like there will be considerable progress in five years or less. The government had been moving residents from urban camps to more rural camps, leaving behind the elderly, the very young and the sick and disabled who then had *no* resources. The government has changed the program a bit, decongesting the biggest camps. Pabo, for instance had 60 thousand people, but many have been relocated to camps very close to their original homes and there are now only (!) 39,000 people in Pabo.
 
Ken and I had a long chat with Santos, an employee of Norwegian Refugee Council. He lives in Pabo camp all week and comes to Gulu just on the weekends. He was very hopeful about the relocation process. I make a joke that I didn't know there were so many Norwegian refugees here ;-) Their organization is by far the largest here with over 400 employees and volunteers -- and their volunteers get paid.
 
Back to JK. Since so many of the camps around Lira are being emptied, he has moved his operation to serve the villages where the people are moving to. He has started a new brick yard and hasn't yet fired a batch of bricks, but he's hard at work. He says that so far this year he has built almost 30-thousand stoves. I videotaped an interview with him about the stove project and then I asked him about what happened to make him leave his home. He proceeded with the most heart wrenching story about how the LRA had attack and killed many of his neighbors and his third son and how he escaped but had no certain food or shelter for over a year. I hope all of you can see at least part of it someday. Later, we were in the van with him when we realized he hadn't told us all of the story, so we just stopped by the roadside and continued the interview.
 
It was late when we finished, so we had dinner in Lira and stayed the night, returning here to Gulu this morning. I'm about out of time again. The weather has continued to be cool (about 80 today) with little rain. I am doing well despite the lack of electricity and water.

Peter