A WORLD OF SCARCITY

As we drove away from our first eight hours of working with children in northern Uganda, our friend Moses broke the silence with the words, “we all live in a world of scarcity”.  Our team of five from Denver, Colorado went to serve with a local non-government organization established after over 100 girls were abducted from a boarding school We connected with this organization because two of our friends, Ben and Holly Porter, moved a year ago to Uganda to work for the next three years with the organization as technical advisors. Our hope for going was to encourage our friends, work alongside their organization, and possibly bring a few moments of hope and healing in the midst of this incredible suffering. Looking back at what we brought to this part of the world was not what we had planned, but what occurred was more than we could have imagine.

The humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda has come to the surface in the United States in the last few years. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been responsible for over 1.4 million in northern Uganda being displaced from their villages and forced to live in IDP Camps (Internally Displaced People) and over 50,000 children being abducted from schools and villages and forced to become child soldiers and sex slaves. The children who avoided abduction are known as “night commuters” because of their choice to walk for hours each night to sleep in protected centers. It was the story of these children that introduced our team to the crisis in northern Uganda through a documentary film called “Invisible Children”. Just six months later we were thousands of miles from home leaving an IDP camp after spending the day with these children listening to Moses.

Moses works with Concerned Parents Association (CPA), the organization formed after the abduction of the girls from the boarding school. Moses and his friend Max, both in their late teens, lead a group of twenty youth that work with children in the ICP Camps. They informed us with a sense of pride that they had been trained in “making the fun.” We received a brief overview of how they “made the fun”, and offered our contribution – a hybrid of “Duck, Duck, Goose” called “Goat, Goat, Chicken”. We chose “goat” and “chicken” because we could pronounce those two words in the northern Ugandan dialect. Our “fun” training concluded with singing and dancing to a Ugandan favorite, Where is the Love?, by The Black Eyed Peas.

Our team returned to Ben and Holly’s home to unpack all of the supplies we had spent the last three days hauling in transit. We had planned to work alongside CPA in several IDP camps over the next two weeks. We had brought three body size duffel bags, each over 100lbs., stuffed full of art supplies, stickers, bubbles, and balloons – basic materials for a children’s day camp. A fourth giant bin held 30 soccer balls and 50 soccer jerseys donated from a local professional soccer team we planned to give away. We estimated we had brought enough to work with close to 200 children per camp.

CPA would coordinate the morning and our team would facilitate the afternoon activity. Our first day at Boli Stock Farm, the smallest camp we would visit, there were hundreds of children waiting for us when we arrived. Moses and the CPA youth divided the children into age groups, they lead them singing and dancing to different areas and began chanting “make a circle, make it larger”. Over the next few hours we would dance, clap, sing, and laugh as “the fun”’ required no resource other than every ounce of energy and childlike joy you had. The different groups all played variations of the same games. The only resources CPA had were a handful of balls, a few drums, and a parachute. The older boys were intent on showing us their skills with the battered soccer balls and the young children would stare with smiles at us as they held on to the sides of a parachute waving it up and down. Often we were the direction of the children’s laughter as we would lose the rhythm, fall over while running, or simply makeup words for a song.  

After lunch Moses asked how we would like the children to be divided for our activities. We quickly realized what we brought in our giant duffel bags was not enough.  As the children were divided into groups we counted over 400 little faces. We begin to pray for the multiplication of crayons and construction paper. Our bags of stuff felt like two fish and few slices of bread with thousands looking around to see when lunch is served. We broke every crayon we had in half and tore each piece of paper into. The children sat with a half a crayon and a torn piece of paper waiting for us to tell them what to draw. We said draw images of hope. They drew houses, bicycles, schools, and farms. All realities many of them had never known. At the end of the first day all of the paper, all the crayons, and all of our words were gone. We drove away in silence. Moses said “we all live in a world of scarcity.” Somehow his words told the truth that encouraged us to return ready to play the next day.

NEVER ENOUGH

By the third day word spread through the camp that the munus, a Ugandan word for white people, had arrived, and close to 1,000 children were sitting in rows waiting for a single piece of candy on our last day. The reality of the scarcity of life was seen in the children’s threadbare clothes, the scavenging for our used water bottles, and the magical disappearance of the one piece of candy we gave them on our last day. The candy did not disappear into their mouths, but in a fold of their shirt where a broken crayon was hidden too. Over the three days in Boli Stock Farm we would come to see the incredible value of holding the dirty little hands of children, sitting with them while they would draw, chasing them back and forth across the camp, and taking their picture on a digital camera to show them and all of their friends. What we brought each day did not matter nearly as much that we had come. We were not another official driving though, staying in the car. We were sitting with them, laughing with them, playing with them.   

We would visit four more IDP Camps in northern Uganda in the next two weeks. At every camp we visited we would blow bubbles over the children’s heads and toss balloons into their sea of hands. We painted a mural in one camp that the whole camp came to see. We gave the coveted soccer jerseys and soccer balls to a selected few after a game where we were the honored guests. Every moment was a further lesson that our presence there was our greatest gift. There was never enough bubbles, balloons, or candies. We gave what we had but were left looking into the eyes of children with nothing. They exist in what the Ugandans call “suffocating poverty”. There were moments when no matter how hard we tried to summon our American, Christian, Western, Capitalistic, “you can make it better” attitudes, we looked out at hundreds of children and felt like there was no duffel bag big enough to make it right, to end their suffering and meet all of their needs. In those moments we would pause and pray. Our team of five could not end the suffering and poverty of so many, but what we could give was our presence. And that we would give completely.

We were not the only munus in northern Uganda. Many days it felt like we were the only ones there as we walked down the main road of town and not ever see another white face. If you ever had the vain dream of wanting to be a celebrity – to be noticed by everyone, everywhere you went – be a munu in northern Uganda.

While in northern Uganda we met a handful of incredible people from the States; many were students who have only finished a year or two of college. Some were like us and only there for a few weeks. Others were there in Uganda for several months, and some of them have planned to stay for a few years. They are there because at some point they became aware of the humanitarian crisis in northern Uganda and, like us, came to give what they could. The ones who have been there longer understand the reality more than those who just arrived. The most important thing any of us have to give is ourselves.

PLAYING REQUIRES PRESENCE

It is good to bring what we can. But we can’t bring enough duffel bags to end the poverty, illness, and suffering. We visited villages where few munus have traveled, and, to the best of our understanding, none have ever spent an afternoon eating fresh honey from the hive and teaching marbles to the family. I asked one of the women working with the children in a night commuter center what she thinks about the munus being here. She said any help that anyone can bring is good. She said she is thankful to God for hearing the prayers of the country of Uganda and that people are now waking up to the tragedy that has been occurring. In the last year the attention of thousands has coincided with peace talks and cease fires. 

Since our return hundreds have asked about our experience. Many want to return with us to be a part of bringing hope to the children of northern Uganda. My concern is with our help we don’t bring too much of our way of life – our dependence on resources and over-planned agendas. I like the way Moses and the youth of CPA sing and dance and play. To be honest, I don’t dance too much here at home.  The truth too often is when I am here, back home in the USA, I think too often the stuffed duffel bags are the solution.. The words Moses said the first day as we drove away from the IDP Camp are still roll in my head: “we live in a world of scarcity”. He’s right. We all do.

We all live in a world that we can never stuff enough in duffel bags for the hurting and hopeless. We all could use a day where we dance and play; where we sit with each other and hold hands rather than depend on our stuff to make the difference. Playing in a world of scarcity requires your complete presence, your childlike laughter and joy, and being willing to not holding anything back. What the children of northern Uganda, and those who exist amidst the “suffocating poverty” of the world, need is our presence. Our willingness to play with them and pray for them. You can pray for them here, to play with them you have to go there.  

This essay was was published in YouthWorker magazine, October 2006. Used by permission.