“Reviving Hope through Art”
by Takako Mino
An American student travels to northern Uganda and learns about how a group of former child soldiers use theater as a tool to heal themselves and their relations with community members. Through her friendship with one former child soldier named Okumu, she gains a deeper appreciation for their common humanity despite their different life experiences.
The community feared us, and we feared them.” These words barely scratch the surface of former child soldiers’ challenges upon their return to their community. As someone who has never experienced war up close and only witnessed violence on the sidelines of high school fights, I could not begin to imagine what these youth had endured while in the bush.
I had traveled to northern Uganda as part of my study abroad program to conduct independent research on the reintegration of former child soldiers into their communities. Thousands of girls and boys had been abducted and forced to commit atrocities against their own people by a notoriously brutal rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Although the LRA no longer has a presence in Uganda, the people of northern Uganda continue to struggle to put together the pieces of their shattered lives in the aftermath of the devastating twenty-two year conflict.
While reviewing existing literature on the issue, I noticed that scholars painted former child soldiers, or returnees, as helpless victims who lacked agency in the process of learning to live alongside those whom they had been forced to terrorize. I embarked on a journey to find out what the returnees themselves had done to climb over the jagged mountains of hostility and to navigate through the sharp thorns of distrust to reach the hearts of their community members and find their way back home.
Although I arrived in northern Uganda with very few contacts, it was shockingly easy to find former child soldiers throughout the region because so many youth had been abducted. One of the first people I interviewed was a student who had returned from the bush a few years ago. I visited his school to ask him a few questions. As usual, my presence at the school stirred up quite a lot of excitement because my conspicuously light skin stood out among everyone else’s dark complexions, and the other students in the compound stared as I sat with the young man and listened to his story.
The returnee introduced himself as Okumu George. He wore a somber expression under his large forehead and shook my hand firmly when I introduced myself. I decided I would begin with the simple questions.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty,” he replied.
Twenty. I paused before jotting down the number in my notebook. He was the same age as me.
My childhood was plastered with gold stars and “I am special” badges. His childhood had been scarred with the deep wounds of physical and psychological violence. I had grown up in a world that emphasized and nurtured the uniqueness and preciousness of each child. He had been forced into an emotional straightjacket that enabled him to grow numb to the screams and pleadings of those he was ordered to kill. Even though we were born around the same time, we have had completely different life experiences, and I felt overwhelmed with sadness when I thought about everything he had endured and survived. But I soon realized that he was no different than me as a human being. We both had the potential to do great good as well as great evil. I also found that he was extraordinarily normal. Although he had a solemn look in his deep-set eyes that made him look a decade older than me, he occasionally broke into a boyish smile that reminded me of how young he was. I would not have been able to tell him apart from someone who had not been used as a little weapon of terror against his own people.
Okumu explained that he led a drama group of formerly abducted people, who reenacted their struggles in the bush for their community. He suggested that I come to his village to meet the group and to watch their drama. Even though I had met him for the first time that day, I decided to take my chances and agreed to travel up there with him.
A few days later, I took a bumpy, dusty car ride, squeezed into the backseat of a sedan with Okumu, a young girl, and a mother with a twin baby on each breast. The babies cried, ravenously sucked on their mother’s breasts, and took turns sleeping since they were forced to lie on top of each other in the tiny space of the car. The woman and her hungry twins seemed to encapsulate the challenge of extremely high demand for limited resources in Uganda. As a muzungu, or a non-African, I was often perceived to be a walking dollar sign by the locals. I hoped that this was not the case with Okumu. After reaching a small town, Okumu and I untangled ourselves from the other passengers and went deeper into the villages by motorcycle.
We soon reached Okumu’s village where twenty-six people had been abducted in one swoop. Most of them had returned from the bush after risking their lives to escape, but some remained with the LRA or had died. I spent the next two days there in that small village where they had returned after years of living in the bush under appalling and dehumanizing conditions.
The village environment was serene. The wind blew in waves across the tall grass and gently rustled the leaves of the trees. The reassuring sound of women steadily pounding sesame seeds reverberated throughout the compound of Okumu’s home. It was hard to believe that the LRA had killed and abducted so many people in this very same place. Okumu’s family kindly gave me a grass-thatched house in which to stay, where I lay awake each night thinking about everything I had learned, not knowing for certain whether I had dreamt it all up.
During the first night, I sat around the fire with the returnees, who had been abducted from that village, as they told me harrowing stories about life with the LRA, their escapes, and their present difficulties. Some of them remained quiet even though they seemed to have so much to say. Okumu’s friends teasingly called him “the late Okumu George” because he had dodged death three times while in the bush. Somehow, most of the returnees could laugh and joke about what had happened despite what they had endured. But their lighthearted nature was only surface deep. A particularly comical and talkative man told me, “We are smiling while you are here, but we are very unhappy.”
When these formerly abducted people returned home, community members feared, distrusted, and insulted them. In order to explain to the community that they had been forced to commit terrible acts by the LRA, Okumu and his friends got together and began to stage dramas showing their experience in the bush and their return home. Okumu explained that they gradually rebuilt their relationships by forging mutual understanding with the community through theater.
The drama group organized themselves spontaneously after my arrival. Okumu informed his friends about his muzungu visitor, and many showed up to his home a few hours after my arrival. Some of the children from the village took on a few roles to replace the missing members of the group. They improvised with materials available in the village for their costumes and props. These amateur actors had no script, but their lines flowed smoothly and naturally as if they had not been acting at all. The actor who played the rebel commander was especially convincing. In one scene, he callously asked one of the child soldiers, “Is it finished?” after ordering him to kill another child. Perhaps, their lines were already ingrained in their minds after years of being with the LRA. I also followed the rule of spontaneity and pulled out my digital camera to capture their drama on film.
The drama group reenacted and thus relived the LRA attack on the village and life in the bush. They moved quickly and silently through the tall grass of the bush under the burdensome weight of sacks of food and jerry cans of water. After they stopped to set up camp, the rebel commander ordered Okumu to kill a woman who was physically too weak to continue. He obediently stood up and carried out his task mechanically. Soon afterward, soldiers from the Ugandan military ambushed the rebel camp. During the chaos of the warfare between the government and the rebels, Okumu made a mad dash for freedom.
After running for miles, Okumu spotted a farmer in the distance and desperately cried out, “Help me!” Though at first suspicious and afraid, the civilian eventually helped Okumu receive amnesty from government persecution and begin the process of returning home.
During their performance, other people in the village burst out laughing as they watched their friends pretend to senselessly beat, kick, and hack the villagers. Although I had not expected giggles from the impromptu audience, I sometimes laughed along with them because I didn’t know how else to react. Some parts were indeed very funny when taken out of the context of the atrocious series of events. We laughed especially hard when one of the boys in the village struggled to carry an unruly goat on his shoulders. But what these young people had experienced seemed to be so brutal and absurd beyond imagination that it bordered on being humorous. Despite the laughter of their friends, the actors remained serious and true to their roles.
Although I knew that the play was only a crude imitation of what had happened in the village years before, it was very painful to watch. Sometimes, the audience became very quiet as well. It was surreal watching these former child soldiers reenact exactly what they had experienced in the setting where they had been abducted.
After I tried to express how moved I was by their performance, I showed the actors what I had filmed. All of them crowded around the little camera screen to watch. I snuck a few looks at the expressions on their faces as I held the camera up for them to watch. Their faces showed a mixture of happiness and sadness as they attentively watched themselves perform for the first time. Okumu watched the recording with a serious expression and claimed that they used to be much better. He was at least content that this video would be shared abroad, where there is little awareness about the situation in northern Uganda.
When it was time for me to leave, I felt a bottomless sorrow. Part of me wanted to sob uncontrollably. I needed time to reflect after hearing about and seeing the dehumanizing experiences of life as a child soldier. I didn’t know how to respond to the stories. “I’m so sorry” wasn’t enough. The returnees asked me so many different things about living in America, but I felt silly telling them about the climate in the US and what kind of food Americans eat. I wished that I could have better expressed my appreciation to Okumu and his friends for their kindness and willingness to share so many stories with me.
A heavy cloud hung over the sky.
Okumu, his friends, and I walked back together to town so that I could catch a ride back to where I stayed. Suddenly, we got caught in a downpour of rain and began racing each other like children toward the nearest shelter. We laughed and dashed through the pouring rain, united in the exhilarating feeling of being alive. The rain washed away my frustrations and sorrow and renewed my belief in human potential. These people, now my friends, were ordinary human beings full of aspirations, and they reversed their tribulations by channeling their pain and suffering into communicating that very essential message: as human beings, they possessed the inner strength and ability to recover from their brutalizing experiences. With this deeper appreciation of our common humanity, I sprinted forward with my friends savoring this moment of absolute hope.
RateYourStudyAbroad.com is an independent website for students to research and review study abroad programs, with over 4,000 programs and reviews added by thousands of students. It was founded by two study abroad students in 2008.
Rudy Maxa and Allan Comport judged the RateYourStudyAbroad.com Fall 2010 Travel Writing & Photography Contest. Rudy Maxa is the host of PBS‘s RudyMaxa’s World, a former Washington Post reporter and the former host of NPR‘s The Savvy Traveler. Allan Comport is a professor of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
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