Ending Wars on Uganda's Children

By Barbara Gibby

By turns painful and exhilarating, always honest and deeply affecting, Gibby's book gives readers a chance to hear and learn from a variety of Ugandan voices. It will provide new insights for specialist readers as well as those learning about Uganda for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988682504

Barbara Gibby

BARBARA GIBBY - A practicing clinical psychologist in Forest Grove, Oregon, the author is the family historian and a world traveler. The title of her next book, Ending Wars on Uganda's Children, narrates the experiences of her travels to Uganda, Africa, during the past five years.

Book preview

2010

Chapter One

We are on Our Way 2004

THERE WERE SIX of us women on our first trip to Uganda. Our number varied from year to year, but in 2004 my sister Joy and her friend Bonnie organized The Team: the two of them, plus Dolores, Julie, Mandy and I. We became part of a cohesive, collective effort between people of two countries, people who shared the belief that progress in Uganda would come through the education of its children. But every small achievement—including getting to Uganda in the first place—meant overcoming personal, cultural, political and financial obstacles. Some of these obstacles were predictable; others came as a complete surprise.

That year, we would be staying with a couple from an organization called The Gospel Messengers: the minister, Moses Mbuga, and his wife Hopkins. Bonnie and her husband first met Moses in the winter of 2000, at a gathering in Virginia of churches involved in mission work. When they heard his story—how he was struggling to build and organize schools in the bush following the civil war in Southern Uganda—they wanted to help. The thought of helping where it could make such a difference was exciting. They flew over to visit Moses that fall, during the rainy season. They went with two of their daughters and a son-in-law, and while there organized a sponsorship program. Bonnie recalled telling her daughter, This is everything I thought Africa would be, and more.

Afterward Joy and Julie visited Bonnie’s home in the U.S. Picking up a decorative bowl from a table, Joy asked, Where did you get this? Her simple question sparked a lengthy discussion about Africa. Bonnie told them how a boy at one of the schools she had visited had looked at her with pleading eyes, When you come back would you bring me some shoes? Chiggers were a big problem in the bush of Uganda. The children walked barefoot, an open invitation for infections, causing them to miss a lot of school days. When Julie heard the comment she enthusiastically told of how she worked for Avia, an Oregon company which manufactured tennis shoes. They often donated irregular products. I think they would donate shoes that you could take over with you. They do a lot of things like that.

Bonnie and Julie were stirred to action: We could apply for a federal nonprofit organization status and call it ‘Bless the Children.’ Joy was hesitant, thinking she was already busy enough, but when they reassured her they would help she started the ball rolling.

Bonnie and Julie agreed to be board members. A nonprofit organization needs at least three members. With that understanding, Joy completed the paperwork and sent it in. Within three months the application had been accepted, stamped for approval and returned by mail. No one had expected it to be completed so quickly. Another of their mutual friends, Lois, was interested in helping children in Uganda get an education through a grass roots effort that had been started by Moses.

Joy, Julie, Bonnie and Lois began planning a trip together for the fall of 2001, but there were setbacks. Our mother had a major stroke in the mid 1980s and our father had died of lung cancer in 1990. Mom’s care was in our hands. In addition, Joy’s daughter-in-law had been diagnosed with breast cancer and treated with chemotherapy in the hope that the progress of the disease could be stopped. None of these considerations by themselves were enough to prevent the trip to Uganda, so dates were set, airline tickets bought and plans made for organizing sponsorships.

But surprises will happen, and in 2001 Joy’s husband Jerry had a near fatal heart attack. Just as he was improving his father had a stroke, and then her daughter-in-law’s cancer worsened. When Julie became involved in harsh custody battles over her own two children, she realized she couldn’t be as supportive of the organization as she had once been. She had to set priorities. Finally, my oldest son, Tom, became homeless after his wife and he separated. They lived in Seattle, Washington. Joy and Jerry offered him emergency housing as Tom plunged into a major depression following the abrupt end of his sixteen year marriage. On top of that, he was having trouble finding a doctor who would treat him for his chronic pain. His wife, an R.N., had already vowed she was not going to help him if he developed a major health problem. She was tired of helping sick people. When Tom moved to Salem they traced his health issues to a blood transfusion he had been given after a work related accident in the 1980s. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Joy felt like she had become Job the II.

Through it all, Joy remained determined to go to Uganda until she received a letter from Bonnie saying, Due to other commitments with the Gospel Messengers I am going to have to resign as a board member of Bless the Children. The second blow came when Julie contacted her, I can’t be an active member of Bless the Children any longer; I’ve got to stay focused on this child custody struggle with my husband. But I can stay on as part of the board. Joy’s youngest daughter Jeni agreed to take the empty board member position on a temporary basis.

Joy was stunned. How had this happened? she wondered. Bless the Children had never been her creation. Bonnie and Julie had come up with the idea. Now it was all on her shoulders. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Bonnie contacted Joy again: Lois is concerned about Julie going to Uganda with us. She would worry about her safety. There was still political unrest in areas of Uganda, in addition to Muslim issues over a woman’s modesty. Julie was an attractive woman.

Joy and Julie had already purchased tickets. Offhandedly, Joy asked Julie if she still wanted to go to Uganda with her. Sure! Let’s go, Julie responded.

On September 11, 2001, however, Arab terrorists flew airplanes into New York’s Trade Center. I doubt many of us will forget those days as the attack was shown over and over—planes crashing into the towering buildings. Only the year before, I had attended a week-long workshop in those same buildings. I had stayed at the hotel of the trade center, attended daily meetings in one of the tower buildings and even walked with a friend to the roof of the tallest building. Now it was no longer there. It was gone. What a crazy world. A couple of days later as I was with a friend buying shoes and reading the newspaper account of the tragedies, a middle aged woman wrapped in a hijab sat down next to me. She looked at what I was reading and her expression of fear became transparent. I could only assume her fear of me had come on because of her Arab identity.

With the 9/11 incident and so many personal tragedies going on in their own lives, Joy and Julie decided to stay home. It was not the right time to go. Family needed them at home. They applied for a refund on their tickets and were surprised to get their money back without any argument. The letter sent to them said, Any tickets issued after 9/11 will be refunded due to cancellation of all the flights in and out of American airports.

Yet Bonnie, Bart, Lois and her husband went on to make the trip to Uganda in 2001. Bonnie had volunteered to seek sponsors from California for the schools in the villages of Rwenjiri, Kasemenene and Kassanda. Lois volunteered to find sponsors in Oregon for the children of the villages Lugazi and Kitonga. Lois had also looked into buying vitamins for the children.

Bonnie and Joy had drifted apart, but two years later, during a visit to the U.S., Moses found a way to reconcile the friends.

Bonnie asked Joy’s forgiveness for suggesting that Julie stay home. Accepting her apology, Joy agreed to go with Bonnie on her next trip to Uganda, in 2004. Bonnie added, And please ask Julie if she could come with us.

Because of my background as nurse and administrator, Joy’s husband Jerry had asked me to be the medical director back in 2003, and then to serve as a board member after Jeni retired her spot. I got a call from Joy in the spring of 2004: Would you consider going to Uganda with me? I’ll have to think about it, I told Joy. Julie had already agreed to go. She had moved to Alaska and started life anew. At thirty-seven she was working for International Data Systems and the Alaska Bar Association. It was time for that new adventure in her life.

At first I wasn’t sure I could schedule that much time off from my private practice as a clinical psychologist. My oldest son, Tom, was still living with Joy and Jerry. He was struggling emotionally but had helped Joy make small flags in commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attack. He took them out to sell and raised a fair amount of money for Bless the Children. He talked about how pleased he was to have helped her in this way.

Tom had lived on a kibbutz in Israel for six months after he dropped out of college. He once said it was one of the best experiences of his life. He explained how his kibbutz was only five minutes away from the Lebanon border so they were in a rather hostile zone, being shelled each afternoon. The mornings were spent in the banana orchards, picking bananas. When it got too hot they went back to the kibbutz and learned to read and write Hebrew. One day he was carrying a bundle of bananas over his shoulder when suddenly a co-worker came out of nowhere and tackled him to the ground, then start hitting at him. Startled, it wasn’t until he looked down that he saw what was happening. He was covered with tarantulas that had occupied that bundle of bananas. It had shaken Tom up but he’d learned from this experience that not everything was what it seemed. When I talked to him about going to Uganda he quietly responded, You know Mom, it might even be fun.

I still hadn’t made a decision until I saw Joy at my youngest son’s wedding and thought, I need to go. It is a cause that means a lot to her and it’s one way I can thank her for being such a support to my family. I applied for my passport and got my immunizations at a traveler’s clinic in Portland, totally unprepared for how much planning it took.

In the meantime, Mandy’s grandmother had all but begged Joy to take her seventeen-year-old granddaughter on the trip. Please take Mandy to Uganda with you, too. She doesn’t appreciate anything we do for her. Maybe spending time with people who have so little will help her appreciate what she has at home. Mandy was a typical teen of America. She wore what she liked and rebelled at restrictive rules.

Joy was hesitant about assuming responsibility for Mandy. It felt pretty risky to take a girl I didn’t know to a country I didn’t know. But I turned it over to God and agreed to take her with us.

I wondered if this had been God’s way of speaking to Julie. Though Lois and Bonnie remembered Julie as the rebellious teenager she’d once been, Julie took Mandy under her wing for the duration of the trip.

It was nerve wracking as we gathered at the SeaTac Airport near Seattle, Washington. Joy, Julie and I had ridden together from Salem, Oregon. We thought we had allowed ample time to get to the airport. Mandy was riding from Portland to the SeaTac airport with her mother. I hope they get here soon. I have to get a signature on the temporary custody papers.

A few minutes later Joy got a telephone call. Her face fell. Mandy’s Mom just called. They are still at Tacoma stuck in an early morning traffic jam, she groaned. That’s only fifteen miles away but the early morning traffic from Tacoma into Seattle is always bumper-to-bumper. Drivers cut each other off trying to get to work on time. Well, let’s go ahead and check in so at least our luggage will be on its way.

The three of us waited in line to get to the ticket desk with our passports and e-ticket information in hand. The tickets were the easy part.

This suitcase is over the weight limit, the ticket agent announced.

Joy was taking a sewing machine to Uganda and Julie had added a computer. Julie’s second suitcase was filled with clothes for the school children in the villages.

You could send one of the items back home or you could put it in a separate container and pay extra luggage, she was told.

I can’t do that, Joy retorted, I have to take it all to Uganda. It is one of the reasons we’re going there.

You can get a box to ship it from the luggage department.

I’ll go get it, Julie volunteered. In the meantime find out where Mandy’s at. Julie ran off to get a shipping crate.

Joy kept her cell phone nearby and called again. We’re about ten miles out but traffic is going a little faster now. We’re trying to hurry.

In the meantime my two suitcases were checked in without a hitch. My second bag was filled with part of a thousand shoes, donated by a Muslim vendor from Concord, California. Bonnie was never able to get the image out of her mind, of that twelve year-old boy she had met earlier looking at her with pleading eyes. She had gone home to pray for shoes, and while she was at it, why not pray for a thousand. And so it was. God was pleased and he let there be a thousand.

Julie ran back to us with the box. She and Joy packed the sewing machine in it and then Joy called again, Where are you now? We’re going to get back in line to get the box checked in but our boarding time is getting close and we still have to go through the security gate.

We’re trying to hurry. Mandy’s mom answered, The traffic is bumper-to-bumper and we can’t go much faster. But we’re getting closer, probably less than five miles since we last talked.

Okay! Do what you can. We went back to stand in line. The box was checked in and Joy paid the extra for the additional weight.

Joy called Mandy’s mom one more time, How much closer are you? We’re all checked in and we have our boarding passes but we can’t go much further until Mandy gets here.

We’re moving faster now. We’re hurrying.

We went back to the front, near the front doors. Suddenly Joy spotted Mandy and her mother running toward us and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Joy got the signature and Julie hurried Mandy to the ticket gate to check in her luggage and get her boarding pass in hand. We were on our way to the security gate as we waved goodbye to Mandy’s mom. We were pressed for time! Our flight would be boarding soon.

Prior to the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Center in New York there hadn’t been many problems about checking into a flight. One could simply rush to the boarding gate and catch it on the fly. I’d had surgery a few years back and a titanium implant was inserted to my back. Now departures were slower due to an annoying ritual. Approaching the security gate I resignedly showed my Medtronic card to the guard and informed him, I will set the alarm off, as I stepped through the gate. Of course the alarm buzzed. An alarmed look crossed the guard’s face, and he exclaimed, The alarm just went off. Stand over here. It never ceases to amaze me how a security guard reacts to that sound, as though I hadn’t just said the same thing.

Female assist, he yelled looking behind him, and then he turned to me. Step over here please. A woman guard came over to check it out. I have this pump right here, I explained, and patted my tummy to show her where the pump was. Follow me, she directed. When we reached some chairs, she instructed, Now sit down in this chair. Raise your leg. She passed her wand over my leg. Nothing! Then she said: Stand up! Raise your arms, turn your hands upward. Nothing again! Place your feet on the footprints on this mat, spread your legs. The wand was poised as she added, I will scan you with this wand, and wherever the alarm sounds I will have to pat you down. I had already taken off my necklace and removed all items from my pocket. It was annoying but I guess it was for my safety, too. I was well aware where the alarm would sound off, but it seemed she didn’t want to know that information until she could see it for herself. She patted my tummy to feel what was there and finally decided it was internal and let me go. After awhile my team knew they would have to gather my items left behind to go through the scanner on their own and wait until the guard was through searching me.

It was in other countries that I sometimes had problems. Leaving Uganda that first year I had wanted to go back out of the security gate and shop for books about Uganda in the bookstore before I boarded. I had time. So I thought. But when I re-entered the security gate, the alarm went off and two women came up to me, one on each side. They took me aside, We’re going to take you to the bathroom where we can search you a little better. They escorted me down the hallway. My first thought was, Am I being detained? Now I was worried. How long would this take? My team was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back in time to catch the plane. On this occasion, however, I wasn’t really worrying about missing the plane. I could catch another flight if I had to. What I did worry about was, What if they didn’t believe me? At another time, at a London security gate, an Asian woman was almost convinced I was wearing something more than my implanted medical apparatus. It was still a fairly new practice. But she finally decided to let me on board.

Except for Julie, who was thirty-six, and seventeen year old Mandy, the rest of the team was in their sixties—not exactly young, but we were all anxious to visit Uganda. Joy, Julie, Mandy and I were supposed to meet the rest of the team, Bonnie and Dolores, at the Mc-Donald’s Restaurant of London’s Heathrow Airport. Dolores, our fifth Oregonian, would be on our plane but none of us had ever seen her before so we had no idea who to look for. Joy tried to keep an eye out for some slight hint, something that would make us think one of the passengers was going to Uganda. Dolores didn’t know us either. She didn’t even know Bonnie, whom she would pair up with while in Uganda. Dolores later told us that she sat two or three rows behind us on the airplane, observed our interactions, and concluded that we might be going to Africa, too. But she didn’t venture further.

The popular hamburger stand had worked nicely as a rendezvous place for Bonnie’s earlier flights to Uganda, but in 2004 the McDonald’s restaurant in the Heathrow Airport no longer existed. What could we do about it? We worried briefly, then concluded the only thing we could do was to meet at the gate for the flight that would take us into Entebbe. Fortunately, Bonnie came to the same conclusion.

We had a six-hour layover in London. Six hours to sleep, read or stroll the halls and shop at the airport. Heathrow is a large airport and has lots of shops. Quite by accident we came across a quiet room with reclining chairs for people who wanted to sleep. It was a good central meeting place. It would be our first step into African time. Later Moses would request that we write a book and call it, ‘Let Us Wait.’"

We agreed to take turns: one of us would stay to watch the luggage while the others went out to get something to eat or to shop. I went out first and when I got back we stood outside the waiting room for a while to discuss arrangements. Dolores walked up to us, Are you Joy? Are you going to Uganda? We didn’t have to find her, she found us. She trustingly left her luggage with me and went off to do some shopping. Later we found Bonnie at the departure gate and that’s how we all met that Thanksgiving Day in November 2004.

We were an interesting mixture of travelers. Joy had a degree in elementary education. Julie was a business manager at that time but later went into the Army National Guard as a second Lieutenant and worked toward getting her Bachelor of Arts degree. Mandy was a high school student, Dolores was a secretary of a private school and Bonnie was a busy mother. My degree is in clinical psychology. Those of us who were older had succumbed to a few gray hairs and added weight but we were still in an eager grass roots mood. We didn’t have any gift tags from Bill Gates or Phil Knight. We paid our own way. None of us were wealthy, although we were never able to convince our African friends of that fact, and maybe in retrospect they were right. In their eyes, considering their circumstances, we were wealthy. In many ways it didn’t seem we had much to offer, just ourselves. But Moses reassured us time and time again, The biggest gift you have is your presence. It tells my people that you care enough about them to travel all this distance.

Julie and Mandy paired up, and over time the four older women became the core group. We had raised families. Joy had four children and then adopted three more: a girl from India, a boy from Vietnam and a boy from Korea. Bonnie had four children before adopting five others: four from India and a daughter from the U.S. In 2001 she and her husband had adopted Moses’ youngest brother, David, so he could go to school in America. Dolores had a family of seven and hadn’t needed outside assistance to make it large. I had three adult sons and Julie had two children. Going to Africa was a new adventure.

Our flight to Entebbe took an additional eight and a half hours. My sole knowledge of Entebbe at that time involved the June 27, 1976 hi-jacking of 256 passengers on Air France - Flight 123, and the surprise rescue of the Jewish passengers by a well-trained Israeli team of commandos. The hi-jacked flight originated in Tel Aviv, Israel and was routed from Athens to Paris before heading south to Entebbe. I had heard vague stories about the former Ugandan president Idi Amin and his association with Libya’s mad dictator, Gaddafi. But other than that I was in the dark.

It was startling that year to step onto the aircraft—destination Entebbe—and hear a man in the back of our plane yelling loudly in guttural tones, Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! The flight attendants came around to calm the passengers, He is being deported back to Uganda and this is part of his ritual. Later they told us, He is saying ‘I saw! I saw! I saw!’ They made another round to assure us that the man would settle down once his ceremony had been concluded. The man had been brought aboard between two others dressed in suits. He was wearing handcuffs. We had no way of knowing what his crime had been but he continued to wail for several more miles before he settled down. We prepared for a long, long trip and sat back to wonder, What kind of country is this Uganda? Most of the passengers were dark skinned and I assumed they were more familiar than I was with the man’s protest, but everyone stared straight ahead in an attempt to ignore the uproar. The sounds did eventually fade away and we offered our own small prayer of thanks when it quieted down.

After we got to Uganda I asked a little about their prison system. My impression was that it would be unpleasant and not too many of us Americans would survive it. We would not have the immunity to survive exposures to the poor sanitation, dirty water, malaria, diarrhea and diseases like AIDS. The prisons are over crowded. For instance the Luzira Prison in Kampala has a capacity of 120 prisoners but currently housed a crowd of 456. Sometimes the population numbers ten times more than the prison space should hold. The deaths from diseases went up accordingly. Toughened criminals didn’t go easy on the newly incarcerated.

Ugandans have a healthy fear of their policemen. We were told several times, Take all the pictures you want but do not take pictures of police or government locations and people. We pulled our cameras back but I don’t know that we always understood why. The significance was made more real when I pointed my camera at a young man walking through the schoolyard at Lugazi. He was wearing boots and a stitched jacket. I assumed he was a parent coming in to talk to or about his child but he did an odd thing, he brought his arms up quickly to cover his face, crying out, No pictures. No pictures! Then almost as quickly he added, I work for the government. He was pleasant and talked a little more before going about his business at the school. There is a good reason for the precaution. Regimes have changed so quickly in the past that no one could safely predict who would be next in power. Once that change occurs, military or policemen became targets by members of the new regime.

From my window seat of our airplane I watched as we lifted up into the gray, fluffy, rain-filled clouds above London. The lights from the city slowly disappeared as we gained altitude and turned southward to fly over Europe, cross the Mediterranean Sea and travel over miles and miles of the Sahara Desert. At last a large body of water, Lake Victoria, came into my view. We passed beyond and then banked around to go back north to cross the great invisible equator and settle down on the Entebbe runway below. Excitedly I waited for that moment, an experience I hardly ever thought possible when I was young. I was not rich now, but I was much less so when I was younger. Mr. Smith, my freshman high school geography teacher, had tried to make the equator a reality to his students. From the front of the class he humorously lifted his leg up and over, in an exaggeration of someone trying to step over some barrier stretched out before him. The equator is an invisible dividing line around the world, there is nothing to step over.

Our plane taxied up to the terminal and stopped. My heart skipped a beat when I heard the pilot shut the engine off. Exiting from the plane’s back door, I walked down the twenty-foot moveable stairway to the tarmac and across into the basement of the building in front of us. We were directed to customs where we would pay our thirty dollars for a one-time entry visa.

Moses and his team from Gospel Messengers met us at the luggage department. We introduced ourselves. Our luggage was piled high onto a cart and we walked to our rented fourteen-passenger van, called a matatus. Only a few individuals own a vehicle in Uganda. Visiting groups rent matatus, and for extended travel into the bush they rent trusted drivers. At the end of a working day the vans fill a large parking lot inside the city of Kampala to wait for the next day’s calls. The other source of commonly used transportation in Uganda is the motor scooter, called a bodaboda. They are cheaper than the van and can easily carry one passenger, sometimes two and if desperate three, and a suitcase. The bodaboda is a much riskier source of transportation though and our African team often talked about the spills and injuries they had taken. Bicycles are also heavily used and are much less expensive. The most frequent source of travel in Kampala and in the villages, of course, is by foot. People walk everywhere.

We all climbed into the matatus, passed through the airport gate and out into the outskirts of Entebbe. It is a town of about 55,000 people and the first town we drove through after we arrived in Uganda. Its buildings appear clean, even relatively modern from the outside. The tarmac is in good condition. A large church building (a Christian church I was told) looms on the ridge to the left showing little of the poverty I expected to see in this third world country. Yet, on this same 30-mile highway vans have been hijacked and passengers robbed as they hurried from Kampala to catch their early morning flights out of Entebbe.

There was a lot to learn, more than I could ever absorb on one three-week trip. We had planned our visit around the short rainy season (from September to November) on purpose. Uganda is about the size of Oregon and shares its weather; that time of the year, at least, is similar to our weather in Oregon. There are actually four seasons in Uganda: the dry season (December-February), the long rainy season (March-May), the second dry season (June-August), and the short rainy season (September-November). The rains vary in intensity but those that occur during the long rainy season are often monsoons from the Indian Ocean. They bring in high winds and flooding. Cars mire down in heavy, slippery mud and water has been reported being so high it reaches past the headlights of the van as it rolls over the roads. In contrast the dry season is hot. Fine dust stirs up quickly, getting into your nose and mouth. Sometimes it’s so bad you can hardly breathe, we were told. The short rainy season is a little less problematic, though the bush’s undeveloped roads and heavy rains can still make it tough going. Traveling can still become a struggle as we fishtail in and out of ditches trying to get to schools in the bush.

The things we take for granted during our lives in the United States don’t prepare us for many of the circumstances we find in a third world country. The road from Entebbe was actually an anomaly. I soon learned that most of the roads to the east, to the west and to the north show the poverty of the country.

As we got closer to the main city of Uganda, Kampala, our noses tried to adjust to the smells: mud, lack of sanitation, garbage scattered about, latrines and most of all the settling of stagnant water. One of the first things we did is to stop and buy several cases of bottled clean water. I have seen hovels in Mexico, Guatemala or Puerto Rico, built in the shadow of some fancy bank, or armed policemen carrying automatic rifles as they patrol the sidewalk along the beach front, or windows and doors that are sealed by iron bars in homes of both Puerto Rico and Mexico. Even so there is always a variety of good food and hotel rooms, clean cold or warm water, plus toilets with handles to flush them and western seats to sit on. The main roads are usually paved and most families own one, two, maybe even three