Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Fierce desert winds batter our graying tent. I lie huddled in a stiff wool blanket on the floor amidst 50 teenage girls, imagining that the sound of dust pelting our tent is actually hundreds of feet dancing on the roof. A fluorescent light buzzes above us.

“We always sleep with the light on,” Alice says. She is a sturdy 16-year-old girl whose parents were both killed by Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels. “The children get nightmares in the dark.”

I am at the Noah’s Ark Children’s Centre in Gulu, a place where children from neighboring villages come to sleep together and be safe from LRA raids.

At 6 a.m., the call to prayer rains down from a nearby mosque and soldiers chant through their early morning calisthenics. The girls in my tent sleep soundly. Around 7 a.m., they slowly roll from their makeshift beds, fold their blankets and trickle outside, joining the hundreds of others who emerge from a row of identical shelters.

Shivering in thin dresses and T-shirts, they begin the long journeys back home to their villages. Alice walks two-and-a-half miles from her village every evening before dusk to sleep in Noah's Ark. She treks back every morning after sunrise.

“They came so many times last year,” Alice says ruefully, looking out at the moon, which still hangs in the morning sky. “And girls our age, we look so good to them. Even a girl of 12 years they may take as their wife.”

It was Jeremy Kamps, my partner in running a youth theatre workshop in Namuwongo, who suggested that our group spend the night at Noah’s Ark. He saw it as a gesture of solidarity and a way to gain a deeper understanding of their experience. We arrived at 7 p.m., in time for their prayer service, and then broke into groups to share songs, games, and stories. I taught my group the Greek myth about goddess Atalanta and the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome.” Four children shared traditional Acholi legends in exchange.

Each member of our group was placed in a different tent. I spent the night with the teenage girls, who found me an extra blanket for a pillow and told me of their losses, their aspirations, their craving for normalcy in the midst of this two decade-old civil war. Alice has slept at Noah’s Ark for two years now. She doesn’t expect the war will end any time soon.

A few nights later, five of us go out to a club in Gulu. It is packed with young people in hip-hop gear. One man with no legs is dancing on the floor, twisting his stump of a body back and forth with great enthusiasm and agility. We drink shots of waragi (a viciously strong local brew) and dance to gangsta rap hits from the mid 90s. On the dance floor, men and women fight off unwelcome advances from both sexes.

At the end of the evening, we elbow our way through an unyielding crowd in which everyone seems primed for a fight. Victoria mentions that LRA commanders are known to sneak into town in order to go dancing, so it is possible that we are rubbing shoulders with high-ranking rebels as we edge through the crowd.

Meanwhile Coolio croons in the background:

Fool, death ain't nothing but a heartbeat away,
I'm living life, do or die, what can I say?
I'm 23 now, but will I live to see 24?
The way things is going, I don't know…