Awer Camp

I took a boda to the IC office, it is on the other side of town and thus costs 1000 shillings for the boda ride compared to the usual 500 we pay. Valerie who is the house mother of the IC office and also took us to St. Jude’s orphanage was there to lead us. It really helps to have an experienced person go with you, they know the nuances and the language and your experience is so much better this way. Hopefully, I talked about Katie who led us to Awere the first time. Katie speaks better Lwo than anyone I have heard in the IC house, and it is fun to watch and hear her joke with the Acholis. The other groups have had a kind of mixed experience with the Awer camp. Sometimes the people have been less than excited they were there. Today, we had none of that. We drove about a half hour away from Gulu to the camp. This is a camp where 50,000 people are still living in horrible and diseased conditions due to displacement from the war. We are within two hours of the Sudan at this camp. Another place of trouble and desparate conditions. Awer was what you expect when you think of the poor in Africa. Children everywhere some missing tops, the little ones often missing bottoms. As we walked through Awer, I was soon followed by about fifteen little children. It is a very bad place, and I wonder why these places exist. A small fraction of what we are spending on our war, could seriously make a difference here. I think I am very close to being able to send a picture home. If so, it is me with the children of Awer. IC is on the ground here and helping men and women make an income by the bracelet program. They are teaching saving and investing, and even in this place of desolation. There is a small loan program funded by the savings of the people making the bracelets. That is actual funding small businesses in this camp. We then went to a school that has been constructed in the camp by Save the Children. We met several of the teachers, there are 11 teachers for 1400 children in the primary grades. On the board, they were deciding how to allocated their funding of 16,394,000 /=. I was not sure but they may be only getting 35% of that money. If you turned away from the schools and away from the camps, you could see beautiful, rolling hills that stretched for ever. The green was green, green, green. On the way back, Valerie borrowed my camera to take a picture of a man wearing an apron saying, “since I’ve been microwaving, I have more time for misbehaving.” Kind of a surreal moment in a depressing day. This is usually where I try to end the message with a quote or a neat moment. I have neither today.

God Bless