Today we gave Jennifer some private time. Michael and I went to a displaced persons camp with Godfrey and Albert, two Ugandans who work for a nongovernmental organization (NGO, same as a nonprofit) called The Kids League. TKL organizes soccer teams for boys and competition for girls in a game called netball, which is pretty much like baskeball. The soccer game was between UNICEF blue (blue for the shirt color, UNICEF because it sponsored the team) and MTN green (MTN is a South Africa cell phone company). The green team included one young man who had been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to be a rebel soldier. His story, being forced to attack others and march around carrying heavy loads is like so many other abducted kids here. He said that soccer helped him forget the bad memories. It seemed to help lots of people, including non-playing kids and adults, who formed an audience of at least 100 people. MTN green won.
The girls played netball with as much intensity as the boys showed in their soccer game. The passes to teammates were hard and straight. The girls would dive to get loose balls. All of the shots to the basket were one-handed. As the girls played, I interviewed one young woman who had been kidnapped. Believe it or not, she is one of the lucky formerly abducted girls because she wasn't forced to have sex with a commander. That might have been because she took care of one commander's babies. Actually, there were twins, but one of the babies was shot in a battle.
After the displacement camp, which has been around for years, we went to one of the new camps being built as the fighting has subsided. They are called decongestion camps and are deeper into the countryside and closer to people's own property so they can do subsistence farming more easily. The government chooses the sites. These camps are somewhat less crowded, but no preparations are made before people move to them. There are too few water sources and often no schools nearby. People are forced to dig latrines, but not provided with cement slabs to use as latrine covers. So instead, people make covers from sticks. There are more trees around these camps, but they are going to get cut down mighty quickly as people need them for building huts, for firewood and for latrine covers. Yet, these camps -- hopefully an interim step if peace holds and people can later rebuild their villages -- represent progress.
