Jesuit Journeys
Winter 2006

Fr. Tony's Dream

Story and photos by Fr. Don Doll, SJ

Fr. Felix Opio, director of CARITAS Uganda, and Fr. Tony Wach, SJ discuss ways the Jesuits might help serve refuges in Gulu, Uganda.

Advisors assure me a three-hour bus ride from Adjumani to Gulu in northern Uganda is a safe way to travel; after all, a year had passed since the last attack on an armed convoy. My goal is to meet up there with Fr. Tony Wach, SJ who wants me to see and photograph the desperate conditions in Gulu and the surrounding area.

Fr. Tony has a dream for this place, a vision that starkly contrasts with the horrors of present reality.

On the summer day after I arrive, Tony celebrates Sunday morning Mass and preaches for about half an hour at the Sacred Heart School for Girls run by the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate. He then heads for Pabbo, a refugee camp 25 miles north of Gulu where some 67,000 people live in round, thatch-roof clay structures called tukuls in an area no larger than the campus of Creighton or Marquette university.

On the summer day after I arrive, Tony celebrates Sunday morning Mass and preaches for about half an hour at the Sacred Heart School for Girls run by the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate. He then heads for Pabbo, a refugee camp 25 miles north of Gulu where some 67,000 people live in round, thatch-roof clay structures called tukuls in an area no larger than the campus of Creighton or Marquette university.

As we walk among the tukuls, an elderly woman appears naked to the waist and begging for a dress. “Look at me! I have nothing,” she says. “This is how I have to live!” My instinct is to photograph her as she pleads. But I don’t, lest I take what’s left of her dignity. My professional colleagues may not have hesitated. And maybe I shouldn’t have. I know it would have been a powerful photography, because the image is indelibly etched in my memory.

Looking back over the photos of the camp, I realize they do not fully convey the awfulness of the living conditions or the deep poverty in which these people suffer.

Even more moving is the scene at a nearby rehabilitation camp operated by the Gulu Support Children’s Organization (GUSCO), a local non-government organization that has repatriated more than 7,000 of the 30,000 children abducted by rebels of the very un-godly Lord’s Resistance Army in the past 19 years. The abducted children become either child soldiers or sex slaves to the commanders.

GUSCO counsels the children and works to welcome them back into society. It’s hard to imagine what it must take to erase the images of killings and atrocities burned into their memories – boys forced to kill a parent or their own brothers;girls taken captive to care for the babies of older girls until they are old enough to have sex and bear the children of their abductors. I photograph two young women, now 25, who had escaped recently after being held captive since they were 12. Each had borne babies sired by LRA commanders.

Florence Akello, a social worker from Kitgum in her mid 20s, works with abducted children. She calls them each by name and treats them with the gentleness they so badly need. Florence explains that several types of children come to GUSCO: those direct from captivity; abducted kids who are problems in their local communities; unaccompanied children whose relatives take six months to a year to find; and girls who are abducted when they are young – first to be babysitters, then sex slaves and mothers.

Florence tells us of a woman who just had a baby in a nearby refugee camp. When I hear the story of how this woman was mauled by three LRA rebel soldiers, I ask Florence if we could visit her. We arrive at the camp, about 7 kilometers from Gulu, at about 6 p.m., narrowly avoiding travel near nightfall when it’s dangerous and not recommended.

We meet Nancy Auma, 18, who lives with her week-old child, Aloyo – a name which in her native Acholi language means I have survived. Nancy was recently returning home from a visit to this very camp to see her grandmother. Traveling in the early evening on a bicycle with her brother, she was stopped by three rebels who took her brother captive. When they saw her condition, they said: “You are pregnant; we have no use for you!”

Florence asks Nancy if I can photograph her and her baby. I feel I need her permission because the rebels who dismissed her proceeded to angrily cut off her nose, lips, and ears. Left mutilated and abandoned, she hid in the darkness of her tukul for weeks while Florence gradually tried to convince her to emerge. When Nancy gave birth she sent word to Florence, who encouraged Nancy to leave the darkness of her hut to sell mangoes at a roadside market.

Fr. Tony also takes me to a nearby convent where the “ night-commuters” of Gulu sleep – or try to – on the concrete floors of convent classrooms. Many of these commuters walk seven miles daily from surrounding villages to hide through the night and avoid abduction.

Justin, Nancy, Florence, and baby Aloyo – Fr. Tony fosters his dream for so many people like them. He share that dream with me while we visit Fr. Felix Opio, director of CARITAS Uganda. As they discuss a potential site for Jesuits to work in Gulu, Tony talks of staffing a parish with one or two Jesuits. It’s next to a university currently under construction. Tony is convinced the Jesuits should have a presence in Gulu to begin serving the poorest of the poor who are in such desperate need.

He thinks the parish could be a start and a base from which to serve the university as campus ministers. He envisions a grade school and, eventually, a secondary school. Since Fr. Opio has a connection with the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Tony also dreams of forming a bond of support between a parish in Gulu and sister parishes in the Twin Cities.

I leave Gulu inspired by the tremendous zeal and vision Fr. Tony has for Africa and the people of Uganda where, for 16 years, he has lived “on fire” with a desire to serve the people. If there is a neediest among the many groups in Africa, it may well be the 1.5 million internally displaced people surrounding Gulu in Northern Uganda.

Fr. Tony’s dream is shared and supported by the desire of the Eastern Africa Province and the Society of Jesus to reach out to the people of Gulu. Given his irrepressible passion, this dream may well come true.

The LRA conflict in Uganda:
A brief overview

The 20-year-old war in northern Uganda is a complex conflict fueled not only by the Lord’s Resistance Army’s war against the government and terror against the Acholi tribe, but also by the grievances of Ugandans in the North against the existing government from which many feel excluded.

The war arose out of colonial politics in which British authorities divided and pitted various groups against each other, a dynamic that has been perpetuated by postindependence politics. The British branded Northerners as the fighters, Westerners were servants, and Southerners as leaders in business and politics, creating a North-South divide and competition for power and prestige. Coupled with Uganda’s cultural acceptance of violence as a political tool, conditions gave rise to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency in 1986. When the current president, Youweri Museveni, and his National Resistance Movement took power that year, they alienated people in the North, creating perceptual and actual incentives for rebellion.

The insurgency has undergone four stages since, beginning with a more popular rebellion of former army officials and evolving into the current pseudo-spiritual warlordism of

Joseph Kony and his LRA. To date, the LRA is comprised predominantly of abducted children who are brainwashed by rebel commanders and forced to fight and kill. At least 30,000 children have been abducted to date – horrifying tactics that seriously eroded any support the rebellion enjoyed in the North. Alienated from the people, the LRA resorted to terrorizing civilians to maintain attention and challenge the government, but posed no serious threat to Museveni’s regime.

(Above) Fr. Tony Wach, SJ is briefed by members of the Gulu Support Children’s Organization in a barracks tent provided by the United Nations. The organization has repatriated almost a third of the 25,000 children who have been abducted in the last 19 years.

After peace talks collapsed in 1994, conflict dynamics changed for the worse. When the Ugandan government supported the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan, the Sudan government responded by offering weapons and safe haven to LRA rebels. The West, particularly the United States, saw the war in Sudan as a front in its battle against Islamic fundamentalism and pumped significant amounts of aid to the SPLA through northern Uganda. New elements of a war economy and arms trafficking made peace more elusive.

Since the early 1990s, President Museveni has been hailed as a new brand of African leader, but has been unable to deal successfully with the LRA. And while international pressure has brought the Ugandan government and the LRA to the negotiating table on numerous occasions, mistrust has foiled all attempts to date.

Following Sept. 11, Museveni became a U.S. ally in the war on terror. The U.S. then declared the LRA a terrorist group and increased military aid to Uganda. Recent battle victories against the LRA, coupled with a dramatic decrease in Sudan’s assistance to the LRA with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, makes the time ripe for a negotiated end to the conflict.