In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  But (it's a big but – the biggest but of the whole story and our reason for being here) people in these camps shouldn't be defined just by their misery or inability to support themselves, or even their status as refugees. It sounds banal to say it, but until I met refugees and cooked and ate with them, I thought of them as a concept, as a problem that needed solving, rather than as normal, complex people with lives as complicated as my own. Of course, refugees have the same concerns as us: they are falling in and out of love; the kids are playing up; they listen to the news; like me, they can be happy, frustrated, sad, proud, pensive. And the one thing I really never expected: they can be very, very funny. Odwa constantly takes the micky out of me, cracking jokes. The revelation is a shock: Odwa and Doreen are just like me, it's just their situation that's so completely different.

  The LRA

  As I play with the younger kids, Doreen tells me that her son was abducted by the LRA and forced to fight as a boy soldier. 'He was badly beaten and he was forced to undertake training to fight alongside them. I was distraught, I broke down and cried. But I got support from people around me. I had to just keep my head up. Occasionally my heart would stop, but I stayed firm.'

  Her son finally escaped and returned home two years later.

  The Lord's Resistance Army is a bizarre, brutal and psychotic militia group led by a reclusive man called Joseph Kone, an ex-spirit medium, who has become a perpetrator of self-propagating, aimless spiritually inspired brutality. It's the most evil and destructive organization I've ever come across. The LRA is waging a pointless war against everyone and no one, attacking civilians indiscriminately in their villages. They've never stated any clear political objectives, although they have mentioned that they'd like to rule Uganda according to the Ten Commandments (whatever that means). But the worst bit is yet to come: their tactics.

  The leadership of the LRA consists of a relatively small group of adults. The foot-soldiers are children abducted from camps and villages who are brutalized and forced to fight and work. Many girls are kept as sex-slaves for the adults. They are often initiated by being forced to kill family members or other children, and those who refuse are killed or mutilated. The children are kept within the LRA using violence and threats, and are told that Kone has a supernatural ability to find and kill them if they leave. The young rebels become both victims and perpetrators of brutality, and this is the LRA's cleverest move because any attack by the army against the LRA is perceived by the public as a massacre of civilian children. The level of brutality is astounding and the rebels have been known to cut off the lips, limbs and breasts of their victims.

  The big question is why? The answer is unclear. They live in hiding in the jungle, until recently under the wing of the Sudanese government, who harboured them primarily to piss off the Ugandan government. They seem to have developed a self-propagating gangster lifestyle, existing by looting, killing and raping. What's most worrying is that they have no discernible aims, which means that they are impossible to negotiate with, except possibly using cash.

  That's enough for today. After Doreen tells me the story of her son and about the fractured lives of her friends and neighbours, I go to bed tangled up with anger.

  Cooking with Odwa and Doreen

  I've arranged to cook breakfast with Doreen, but I get up early to watch the dawn first. The light is always best at 'magic hour' – dawn or dusk – so I walk out to the camp outskirts for a better view. As I leave, a truckload of soldiers chases after me – ostensibly for protection. The army has clearly been watching me all night, and it makes me feel uneasy. I watch the sun breaking across the camp in golden streaks; it is breathtaking.

  I arrive at Odwa and Doreen's hut to find that I've missed breakfast; they cook at dawn, and when you've got nine kids clamouring to be fed, you don't need some journalist from London making you late. They have eaten a gruel-like porridge made from flour and water and I try a little that's left over. It's tasteless but filling. Odwa has gone without. 'I can't sleep if they have not had a meal,' he says.

  We visit a field outside the main camp where Odwa grows a small amount of food on land he's borrowed. Trouble is, the harvest is over and the food has all gone. This area has millions of fertile acres but they are wasted because the refugees can't walk far from the camp for fear of attack. Odwa points to the mountains towards Sudan, which is just a couple of miles away, and tells me they used to live there on 80,000 square metres (20 acres) of land. I ask if he thinks he'll ever go back there. He's silent for a while, then: 'No, I don't think so.'

  We go scavenging for wild food, and chance across some jacka-jacka. It grows like a scrappy shrub and to my eyes looks inedible, but Doreen finds some young shoots and offers one to me. It tastes like young asparagus. After an hour or so of foraging, we have collected enough jacka-jacka for a tiny salad.

  Doreen's kitchen is also the hut that she and her daughters sleep in. It is made of mud, and good hygiene is almost impossible. The place is a nightmare when it rains. There are no shelves to keep anything off the floor, but that's fine because she doesn't really have anything. She shows me a handful of dried greens, 'This is what I gathered yesterday from the wilderness. This can is for cooking oil – the oil has completely run out.'

  As we're chatting, Odwa arrives to say that the aid convoy has arrived, so we make our way to the collection point. Robert Dekker is here to oversee the aid distribution and, again, no one is excited about the arrival of the food.

  Then the bad news: Robert tells me that the WFP has decided to reduce rations from 73 per cent of daily calorie needs to 60 per cent . This is to try to end dependence on aid and to encourage people to grow and forage for food.

  Odwa and Doreen are quietly, desperately disappointed. I am worried that there might be a riot, but the whole camp seems resigned to the smaller rations – what would a riot achieve? I ask Odwa if he'd be able to make up the lost food by scavenging or just eat less. 'Eat less,' he says. I say I don't think they could survive on anything less.

  'Then what are we going to do when there isn't any alternative?' Odwa says.

  They queue up for their rations. I can understand the WFP theory, but the reality around here is that it's not safe for people to leave the camps to forage for more.

  Each person is given 1 kg of CSB (Corn Soy Blend), 7 kg maize flour, 1 kg beans or peas and some vegetable oil, and this must last them an entire month.

  Food aid also works as currency in the camps, as the refugees don't have anything else to trade. These people don't have any jobs, although once in a blue moon they can get a day's work making bricks near the camp.

  The next afternoon I help Doreen to cook dinner. She's bemused and embarrassed at first, but she's flattered by my interest. Odwa has swapped some of his maize flour for tomatoes, some okra and Britannia curry powder – a luxury he can ill afford, but I suspect that he's too embarrassed to let me just eat starch in his home.

  During my Surviving Hostile Regions training the medical specialist, Tony, warned me that on no account should I eat in a refugee camp – no sanitation, all sorts of disease, and almost total lack of food hygiene. I would probably come back with an amoeba. But I survived Afghanistan and really should share experiences rather than comment loftily from afar.

  We make an okra curry and ugali, Uganda's most ubiquitous foodstuff. It's basically any type of flour mixed with water and stirred until the carbohydrates swell to bursting. It's so smoky in Doreen's tiny hut that I can hardly see and I cry throughout. At one point Doreen casually picks up some burning logs with her bare hands.

  I am given the task of stirring the ugali, but, bizarrely, I somehow managed to dislocate my thumb after I fall off my haunches. In the circumstances, it seems wrong to make a fuss about it, and I continue stirring in agony. Finally the food is ready, and I'm shocked at how little there is; this meal will feed about 20 people yet it's probably the amount I'd cook for a Saturday lunch for six.

  The men sit in a circle and pass
the bowls of food around, each time taking a pinch of the ugali, ensuring a pretty fair distribution. The women (who always eat separately with the young children) don't bother with such social niceties, and just tuck in. Ugali doesn't taste bad – it just tastes of nothing. After the meal I say fond farewells to Doreen, Odwa and their sweet, calm kids. And once again they gently take the mickey out of me. Doreen reckons that my cooking was OK, but I'll never make it in Aggoro camp with my wimpy little white man's hands.

  I ask her what she thinks about the LRA and she tells me, 'I wish they would return to their homes.'

  I'm shocked. Don't you want them wiped off the face of the earth?

  'No. We just want peace.'

  Gulu

  I'm about to fly out of Kitgum for the notorious town of Gulu. It's a dry, dusty day and the wind kicks up a fierce dust storm. The trip has been an emotional rollercoaster so far – I don't know if I'm miserable for the state of humanity, or elated by the resilience of people. I sit chatting with Robert Dekker in the hut that functions as the airport when he tells me something that almost knocks me off my chair: the WTP have an exit plan ready for when there's a resolution to this whole nightmare, and people are able to go home.

  I am shocked – I had begun to see the conflict as being as irresolvable as it is bizarre. Perhaps I've been sucked into the global malaise that has allowed us to ignore this disaster and avoid trying to solve it. But of course, this will end someday. Probably after Herculean international diplomacy and outrageous, undeserved cash deals with the LRA and a great deal more suffering, but one day people might go home and everything will seem like a bad dream.

  My spine tingles with excitement at the idea of this misery ending, and I sit in our twin-engine prop plane in a mixture of confusion and epiphanical reverie until we hit an air pocket and my mind returns to turbulent reality.

  Gulu is a much bigger, better-functioning town than Kitgum, and has a substantial market where I stock up on food. They sell bo (a leafy, spinach-like plant), dried aubergine, bananas of all shapes and sizes, matoke (cooking bananas), maize oil packed in old Coke bottles, sorghum flour and groundnuts. I chat with the funny, flirtatious women at the market stalls, and they get me to take photos of us together. The meat and fish sections of the market are extraordinary and scary – obscured by slow, shifting clouds of flies that the stallholders don't bother to swat away. It strikes me that I haven't had a single bout of diarrhoea yet. Odd.

  I meet Pedro Amolat, who runs WFP in Gulu. He's an irrepressible, committed guy with a passion for solving problems, and this, combined with what Richard Dekker told me, and the sense of vitality here in Gulu have all helped to lift my spirits. As I set off for the camp at Pabbo I almost have a spring in my step.

  Pabbo

  That spring disappears the moment I enter Pabbo. This stinking soup of unhappiness is home to 64,000 or so of the most unfortunate humans on the planet. This area is so dangerous that everyone crams as tightly as possible into the centre of the camp, causing a cascade of problems, including appalling sanitation, overcrowding, disease, alcohol abuse, violence and social trauma.

  The first thing I see when I enter the camp is a vast sunflower of yellow and orange jerry cans encircling a water pump. There must be 2,000 cans in the queue, and they are surrounded by hordes of bored women and children who have to stand all day next to their cans to make sure no one steals them.

  I ask one woman why there's such a big queue. She tells me that it's been like this for two months since the main mechanical pump broke, and no one has arrived with the spare parts to fix it. I ask how long it takes to get water and she tells me, 'If you arrive now, you'll not get water today.'

  It's only 11 a.m.

  This is the stuff that never makes headlines but which I now realize defines everyday life for refugees: the sheer, grinding difficulty of existence, the boredom, simmering fear and lack of control they have over their lives. What we read about in newspapers are the dramatic natural disasters, droughts and wars. One and a half million people enduring crushing boredom for 20 years doesn't sell papers, so this crisis sinks into obscurity.

  Pabbo is also mysteriously prone to wildfires, with 200 huts lost the day before I arrived. I've been here only a few hours when there's an inferno near the edge of the camp, so I race over to see if I can help. Of course, there's nothing I can do – there's no water available to put out flames, and once one hut is ablaze the others around it follow pretty quickly. The roofs are made of thin, dry thatch so one tiny spark sends the whole thing up in a few seconds. Around 20 huts go up in flames over the next hour or so. The only upside is that because these people have so few possessions, there's not much to lose.

  I speak to Miranda, a woman with seven children, whose hut burnt down yesterday. She tells me that although some people can eventually rebuild their huts, her husband died last year, and she won't be able to do it herself. What upsets her most, however, is that in the melee of saving her family and belongings, someone stole her jerry cans. It doesn't bear thinking about.

  Pedro tries to explain why this camp is so prone to fires. He says that although the thatch is particularly flammable, it's also possible that the most desperate refugees think they might get more aid if they arc seen to suffer more so they sometimes start fires themselves. I am shocked at this suggestion and I wonder if he's just cynical after working too long for the UN, but he says it without malice. And anyway, wouldn't I do the same if I were in their situation? Of course I would: if my kids were hungry, if I felt there was no escape and no one to turn to, I might be tempted to do a lot worse.

  Despite the deprivation in Pabbo, there are pockets of optimism along the road that cuts through the camp. This is an important transit route for freight and passengers, and the flow of people has allowed a few enterprising refugees to make money from them. Mostly its just hawkers selling cans of drink, or refugees trying to sell their rations, but there's a mechanic fixing bicycles and cars, and even a few rudimentary restaurants. These are as basic as you can imagine, offering little more than a bowl of stew on a rickety bench, but I'm intrigued to see them at all.

  I ask the owner of one of them if I can help her in the kitchen. Her name is Joyce, and she stands, arms akimbo, looking me up and down, clearly unimpressed with what she sees. She agrees and says I can help as long as I buy lunch from her. When you work for the BBC you shouldn't pay for interviews (paying for a bowl of their food is OK). It sounds harsh, but if journalists pay money to people with dramatic stories, then anyone in their right mind will just make up a story in order to earn some cash, and the truth becomes even more elusive than it already is. You can, of course, give your own money away to people you haven't interviewed, but even this can cause bitter resentment when one person gets money and their neighbour doesn't. Better to give to a central organization that can benefit everyone. But I'm only human and I defy you to go to these places, to look into desperate eyes and not occasionally sneak some of your own cash into people's hands.

  Joyce she sets me to work grinding sesame seeds to a fine paste called sim-sim that features in a lot of Ugandan food. We know it as tahini. Without the aid of handy electrical appliances, the grinding is done using a couple of stones, which makes it sound very simple. It's not. It's very difficult, especially with Joyce huffing at my incompetence and a table of hungry customers waiting for their lunch.

  We make a stew of goat and another of smoked beef that tastes pretty decent, heavy on bone and light on meat. The whole kitchen carries a hefty patina of mud and muck, although Joyce does her best to keep things clean. There's no power here, so food lies around in the 40-degree heat, and I hope to God that the boiling process has killed as many germs as possible. The stew is served with three different kinds of sweet potato (though they taste identical), and it's a bargain at 30p for a huge bowl.

  The men to whom I serve the food are aghast at seeing a weedy mazungu bringing their lunch, but they enjoy it – or at least they're too embarrassed to c
omplain. Joyce pronounces herself pleased with my performance. Only then do I realize that I've ground most of my fingernails into the paste, which must have added something interesting to the texture.

  As promised, I pay my 30p and eat a bowl of the stew. I've given up worrying about food poisoning and now I'm just hoping for the best. Joyce tells me that she just about makes a living from the restaurant, and at least it's a little more than most people have.

  After lunch we look at one of the other restaurants and Pedro introduces me to Atimango, possibly the most beautiful girl in Uganda, with a captivating smile and a wicked sense of humour. She makes fun of our big white UN 4x4 and the laughter is a relief after everything I've seen.

  That night I stay at the camp's Catholic Mission run by Sister Mary, an archetypal sweet, birdlike Irish nun. Pedro, his assistant and I sleep together with a cloud of whining mosquitoes in a room as hot as Hades (are you allowed to say that about a Catholic Mission?) and I lie awake quietly fuming with impotent rage about the LRA late into the night. All this suffering, and these rebels aren't even rebelling against anything.

  The morning finds us wandering around the tightly packed slum that makes up the centre of Pabbo. It's a dense, apocalyptic vision of a refugee camp, with listless people lying around in the sun, babies playing with turds, and packs of dogs running over everything (what the hell are dogs doing here?). Nowhere is there any water. Pedro is concerned that this place is becoming a dysfunctional city rather than a camp, but it's almost impossible to turn people away.