The young woman in front of me is particularly specific about one thing: “I was in captivity for ten years and eleven months.”
She does not round the figure up, or down. Every single month is clearly important; she lost all her teenage years.
Her name is Evelyn. She looks into the middle distance as she talks, taking us back to the day it happened.
She was twelve years’ old when she arrived home from school one day to find her parent’s home surrounded.
“I was told to throw away my books. They said, ‘You can’t go back.’ They beat me, and I started to cry.”
Evelyn was snatched from her home by the Northern Ugandan rebel group known as the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ (LRA).
She was taken captive to lead a desperate life in the bush with the soldiers. By just thirteen, she had her first baby.
As I listen, I try to imagine Evelyn as a twelve year old girl. My cousin, I reflect, is twelve years old. It is hard to imagine any innocent twelve-year old, and certainly not an I-pod listening, Harry Potter-reading British child, going through what Evelyn went through.
A staggering 25,000 children have been abducted by the LRA soldiers in the last twenty years – that is one in three young men, and one in six young women in Northern Uganda have experienced the horror of abduction at some point in their lives.
They are used as child soldiers, porters carrying heavy loads long distances through the bush, or sex slaves, to support the LRAs war which has most heavily impacted on its own people.
Caritas Gulu is the social arm of the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Gulu. They have been nursing the returning abductees back to health, counselling their nightmares, and reuniting them with their families.
When Evelyn escaped captivity, she was welcomed into the Caritas Gulu’s Reception and Rehabilitation Centre. To date, over 3,000 children have passed through the centre, a place with only 12 social workers.
The Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, led by Joseph Kony, and the Ugandan Government agreed a breakthrough cessation of hostilities in August 2006.
If the peace process continues, Caritas Gulu anticipate an influx of thousands more of these women and children who are still in LRA captivity.
This huge wave of traumatised abductees will need the same help to reintegrate that Evelyn received. CAFOD are helping Caritas Gulu to prepare for the anticipated influx by training local community people and parish priests in basic trauma counselling.
It is a mammoth undertaking, with only one certified counsellor in the whole of Gulu. Father Felix Opio, head of Caritas Gulu, explains,
“If we don’t do this, none of the mental health needs of the community affected by two decades of conflict would be met.
“Peace and reconciliation at the community level would be very difficult. In short, it would perpetuate the conflict and the peace process would fail. But with the help of CAFOD, we’ve been getting ready. We hope to be prepared.”
Posted by BridgetB
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