(From a friend who works for an International Aid Agency)

HAVE A NICE LIFE

It’s time to pick up the pieces and go home for many former child soldiers at Northern Uganda’s Gulu compound.. But what do you tell Richard, gang-marched into a rebel army at age 12, now 8 years later he came back a hardened killer. “Just get over it” isn’t enough. Do you start him in Year 7 with the 12 year-olds? Would you teach him to butcher cattle instead of dismembering men? Will you plead with his parents who refuse to take him home for fear of violence? I looked into Richard’s eyes this afternoon and there was nobody in there. He doesn’t know who he is either, but is eager to learn. Mercifully there are skilled Ugandans here to help him.

Girls taken to Sudan many years ago have all come back with children — some have 3 or 4. The family welcome the girls back but often refuse to take the illegitimate sons of rebels. The Centre has had to care for 70 of these, many in hospital, left behind when girls were taken home minus unwanted dependants. Babies born in captivity (as they call it here) are lowest in the status hierarchy. When later they get into normal playground fights it confirms the label of wild savages.

Jane, the 17 year-olds daughter of a World Vision manager was ambushed and stolen from high school. How long could you wait for news of your kids? Knowing only too well what fate awaited her, the family prayed every day for 12 chilling years for her deliverance. Last week they learned that the army had allocated her as “wife” to a heinous veteran guerilla fighter who was older than Jane’s father. A week afterwards he was shot dead in a stake-out. The LRA has a strict disease-prevention code that forbids “widows” being reallocated to other officers. So Jane worked the next 12 years washing and cooking for the LRA without molestation. Her family welcomed her home in early October, giving thanks to God for her protection.

Child mothers like Florence meet their parents here who haven’t seen them in ten years. Mum and dad didn’t recognise Florence. She has a blank face, an emaciated body carrying burdens beyond her means and a sickness that won’t heal, The emotional scars she bears are beyond calculation. Parents gape at this care-worn adult who they’re told is the little girl they’ve been looking for all these years.

Alice’s face was scalded for trying to escape last year. She now has scarring with a lump the size of a banana swelling her cheek. The Foundation I travel with will have it removed next week with plastic surgery in Kampala for $700. They’re looking at an adolescent training program for 5000 boys to learn carpentry and motor mechanics, 3000 girls to learn tailoring and cooking, providing both with TAFE standard teaching for a year or two. Throw on the cart a possible peace advocacy program and more clever strategies to be to wheeled the checkout when the Foundation meets in December. It could ring up an extra $1.5 million over 3 years.

Gulu radio broadcasts day and night warnings of prostitutes in plague proportions. It betrays a distorted self-image that demonic forces have given them, that of being human toys. Taken from their mothers before they could learn normal household routines, the girls haven’t been trained for anything: domestic or in the workplace. Their self esteem has been demolished and they sorely need loved ones. They want school. They lack skills to get jobs. They’ve been cheated out of all three. God why did it happen?

The man who knows the answer is Joseph Kony, leader of Lords Resistance Army. Based in Southern Sudan, Kony has been disowned by Khartoum, the Arab host government. Six months ago Sudan signed a peace treaty with Uganda vowing to longer grant Kony refuge. The news published in Kampala Times reinforces this, saying that the LRA is finished, calm and tranquility will be resumed in 6 months time, the rebels have been taken out.. Perhaps Kony will retire, join the international lecture circuit or pursue a new career in the Sudanese government. That’s as maybe.

Not everybody is so sure. Up here at the border town of Gulu they rate that end-game scenario at no better than a 50% probability. Aid workers here who know the real story say there’s a 30% chance Kony could survive to mount occasional smash-and-grab raids thus remaining a source of irritation. Those are the good scenarios. The guys who run the Gulu compound at World Vision see a 20% probability that Kony could reorganise, rebuild his rebel army to resume conflict. Uganda’s best efforts would be seen to have failed, maybe leading to a change of leadership in Kampala by a regime more like the LRA itself. It could get very ugly.

Which way it goes depends on whether 50,000 LRA defectors can reintegrate back into Ugandan society. It could even turn on whether Richard’s parents take him back so can find out how to be a man without wielding an M16. Multiply that situation a few thousand times and you can see the future. Five surrendered rebel army captains that I saw here in Gulu compound last May have since reinvented themselves as Ugandan army captains. Some careers are easier to rehabilitate than others.

Meanwhile the festering sore does not heal and wishing will not make it so.. Kony is too agile to ambush, too criminally cunning to corner and too strategic for Sudan. God will have mercy on Jane, Richard, Florence and Alice but I’ll have to rethink my theology if there is yet deliverance for Kony. He is Sudan’s sinful nature that so easily entangles Uganda’s innocent children.

October 14, 2004

DOCTOR AT SEA

Imagine a doctor in charge of a hospital treating 700 outpatients a day, a team of skilled surgeons and specialists under him and a 3 hectare complex to manage. Could you believe that he spends 20% of his 70 hour working week trying to find water for his staff and patients? This is Dr John Opolot at Kumi Base Hospital in outback Uganda, close to the Kenyan border. His operating theatres have enough plasma, thanks to blood donors, but not enough water. They skimp and recycle to have enough liquid to sterilise surgical instruments. All patient toilet blocks have been locked shut for years since they can’t be flushed, forcing 500 in-patients to join outpatients in the trek outside to extensive pit-latrines. That can be tough in a wet-season storm if you’re in hospital because of dysentery.

Most in-patients therefore leave their wards during the day. Their carers carry them out to lie under a tree. Today I can see 300 prostrate Ugandans, half of whom are children, covered only in hospital sheets talking to their carers. Each patient needs two of these: one to buy and cook food (no hospital catering service or canteen) and one to find water for the patient.

This would be comical if people weren’t dying like flies. It is little wonder that the average life expectancy at birth here in 40 years. You have to go back to 1820 in Britain to when our society’s death rate was comparable. Kumi hospital used to have a surface pipe that sucked on Lake Busina 8 kilometres away until rebel soldiers from that other East African army madman Idi Amin looted the whole works 20 years ago . So Dr John created a commuter trucking fleet that brings a few dozen 100 litre barrels in twice a day. He rations out water like Melbourne’s Monash Medical Centre CEO might allocate heart-rate monitors. Then, while John should be over-seeing doctors doing their ward rounds, he is reduced to unseemly begging for funds from this Foundation which might build a new reticulated water system. Up off your knees John, we’ll do it.

John is about to become the proud owner of a new 8 kilometre pipe that will be a metre thick, pumping gargantuan quantities from the lake. It will be laid underground, to prevent any future crazies carting it away for the own home. The project will be come self-sufficient by running a connected gravity flow service to local communities who will pay by the litre. Why would they pay? Because unlike Dr John, they don’t have trucks, depending instead on a far more primitive, if exploitative method of cartage.

Women in this far flung part of Uganda now walk an average of 4 hours a day for household water, carrying jerry cans on their heads in the sweltering heat. If water needs at home are too great, they make that trip twice a day. No chance they’ll be watching The Young And The Restless this afternoon. How far do they walk? Surveys show that only 4% of homes have water that can be fetched within 400 metres. The median average distance women must march to fill their vessels from a creek or water hole of dubious quality is 6 kilometres. Mum can only carry enough for the family’s drinking needs and, if they’re lucky that’s she’s strong, for cooking as well. Nothing for the vegetable garden. Forget washing. Livestock can scavenge or die of thirst.

The price is insidiously high. Not enough to drink means dehydration, leading to kidney stones and eventually renal failure. In the much shorter term the kids eyes develop trachoma because they never wash their faces. Their bodies have scabies. Private parts infect. Even the scant water they drink is adulterated, exposing children to GI infections, hepatitis and cholera. 30% of kids here carry water, doing so instead of school. It’s great to help around the house, but no school means no prospects.

Dr John’s water kiosks will bring purified water within 400 metres of every home. It means 4000 communities where families can drink their fill and bathe every day. They’ll stop getting sick and won’t have to go to hospital. The carers can go back to their jobs, the patients back to their lives. Mums and kids can go back to more productive pursuits.

The doctors can concentrate on preventative health, like non-existent vaccinations and ante-natal care. Freed from the distraction of trucking in enough water, they can practice holistic medicine instead of hole-in-the-bucket hydrology.

October 22, 2004

FOOD ON THE TABLE

Most people spend most of their time thinking about what is do-able and doing what is thinkable. It is all so rational, logical, civilised. St Francis prayed for the courage to change the things he could, the serenity to accept the things he couldn’t and the wisdom to know the difference. It was to the third of these endeavours that John F Kennedy so eloquently addressed himself when he called not for people who see things as they are and ask “why” but people who see how things could be and ask “why not?” “Amer” is a water engineer from Ethiopia. In the late 1990s he worked in Afghanistan for six terrifying years under Taliban rule. He lost his family there in a stake-out while he was at work. His wife and children spoke Webster English and wouldn’t look at the sergeant when he barked at them, so the Taliban thought they were black Americans with attitude. Having a Roman Cross on the wall didn’t help. Later it was learned that the Taliban had simply been given the wrong house number.

Another decade, another continent, another life. Amer transferred to Asia where he has drilled 598 wells in Laos for us since 2002. In two years we have worked with him to give 85,000 subsistence farmers an unlimited clean water supply. Amer reminded us over breakfast yesterday that water isn’t enough to put food on the table. Lao men working in the rice fields cannot provide enough crop to last until the next harvest. Lao women don’t breast feed their infants after the first few months and the combination has been pinpointed as the major cause of 12% infant mortality. Amer recalled that Ethiopian nomad infants were weaned on goats milk and thrived. So he worked out on the back of a table napkin that 15,000 goats could fill the infant nutrition gap when they’re between 2 months and two years of age. Older children and adults could eat the baby goats when rice ran out, preserving the breeding stock for dairy produce.

Goats can forage in the forest, content with vegetation that cows won’t touch. They are more hardy survivors of altitude, heat and disease, resistant to many infections that plague cattle, sheep and chickens, Amer assures us. No fodder supplements, no veterinarians and no stock losses. As an additional food security measure, Amer wants to show the men how to plant beans right after the rice is harvested, since they will provide food in two months whereas an impossible second rice crop would take four. When this innovation is complete by the end of 2007, a million dollars will have been invested. But the goats will have multiplied and with it, the human infant population. The trend will be irreversible and lasting. Then Amer might go back home to Addis Ababa.

In the great Commission, Christ commanded us to go into the world and make disciples of all men. At the Last Judgement scene in Matthew 25 He raised the bar a little higher. Admission to the Kingdom of heaven is reserved for those who feed the hungry, give a cup of cold water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, care for the sick and imprisoned. Amer does not directly set out to make coverts of Lao peasants, for any attempt at doing so would see his visa revoked and him deported. Having given water to the thirsty, he’s now going to feed the hungry. And when the Animist Lao Tung tribal people ask why Amer came from Africa to help them, any reference he makes to Jesus of Nazareth would be like me saying in Australia that I was inspired by Osama bin Laden. So I ask, dear readers who have studied theology extensively, do you think that Amer will nevertheless be deemed to have fulfilled the Commission? November 23, 2004

WHAT MEN DO

Men in Indo-China are suffering an identity crisis that stultifies family and community. They don’t know who they are any more, or what their role in community is. Their fathers knew: They were warriors defending their families from the Americans, culminating in euphoric victories in Saigon, Phnom Penh and Pakse around 1975.. They had learned from their fathers who fought and defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Between battle engagements they were also hunters, providers, protectors, leaders and teachers of a cultural way free from colonial domination. Lao women know who they are: mothers, housekeepers, gardeners, chicken raisers and water carriers.

Today’s sons of Khmer Rouges, Pathet Lao and Viet-Cong warriors don’t have a readily recognisable enemy to crystallise their communities behind them. There are very few wild beasts left to hunt for food since the trees were logged and forests cleared. The Party’s armed goons protect the villages by simply shooting bandits or thieves. Arrest and trial are some of the foreign concepts which this totalitarian regime have discarded.

Lao men have no career from which they can earn steady income, even if educated. Few jobs pay a wage. In a Stalinist state all men are employed in the advancement of society, everybody works according to his ability. It’s just that, almost without exception, the government can’t pay them. So the usefulness of fathers has been scaled down a little, limited to back-breaking manual labour in the fields and carrying onerous cartloads of produce.

A visiting (female) American academic at this year’s Lao Womens Union Annual Conference summed it up this way: men here are just like water buffalo, only not as good looking.

Looks aside, if men cannot provide for their families, something inside them slowly dies. Eventually their wives and children will as well. There are no huge employers like Coles, Telstra or BHP since everything is owned by the people. When Lao students graduated in Economics from Moscow University in the 1970s and 1980s they had been expertly taught to control the Means of Production. Of everything. Whatever output it was: food, timber, electricity, clothes, the state commandeered and monopolised it . The entrepreneur who started a thriving soap factory with money from Thailand at the start of the dry season found that it belonged to “the people” by the time the rains came.

So what is a guy to do to raise a dime if he can’t buy and sell, if government “jobs” come without wages, yet he aspires to feed his wife and hungry children?

Well, let’s see. How about if he repairs motor bikes? We could lend him $200 for tools and train him up. Another guy wants to learn how to fix TVs so our expat colleague Siddhartha can bring an Indian guy here to show him and provide tool kits. These Lao men aren’t part of the Means of Production since there is no output, so don’t appear on the Party’s radar screen. They can leave the traded goods sector to the Party and form the almost non-existent services sector.

It was the leftward-leaning American classical economist, John Kenneth Galbraith who noticed that society’s need for services has no beginning and no end.

If we mobilise 10,000 Lao men in 70 different villages, equipping them for 35 different portable trades, we could create something even more important than the Means of Production. We can give these guys back the Means of Feeding Families.

November 24, 2004

Related Articles:

• Review: The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage, Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, Baker, 2011
• Why do Ex-College students Leave Christianity?
• Effective Evangelism: 18 Obstacles
• WAS JESUS GOD?
• COUNTRY CLUB TO MISSION BASE: THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF THE PASTOR

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.