Personal thots April 1, 2006
This morning has been hard. I have been back from Africa for 3 days now. I got up early and started looking through my 24 rolls of pictures from my trip. Picking out the best ones to put together to show people.
Eating my Cheerios brought tears to my eyes as I thot of the children in Northern Uganda living in the huts and not having anything to eat. Flies cover their dirty faces. Where most children are playing and having fun, these children spend each day in search for food and water, walking each night to shelters to sleep so the rebels can’t abduct them. What kind of living hell they experience each day. What is worse is that this is all they know. They were born in war and live it each day of their miserable lives.
Where do I put this? Where do I file this information? Sleep is difficult. When I close my eyes the haunting faces appear to me. Pleading for help, and I feel so helpless. My heart hurts, my mind swims with thoughts, faces, smells, filth, poverty, hopelessness.
I wonder about Daniel, a young boy I met in Sudan. Will he be safe from the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) tonight or will they again come to his village and steal, burn huts and kill? All he wants is to go to school, but that is even impossible since he has no money.
I think if I pour out my thots on paper, then maybe I can go through the day without this aching in my soul. Somewhere to dump all this information. Pass it onto others so I don’t have to carry it alone. But the burden on my shoulders grows heavier with each passing day. No relief insight.
Would I trade my experience in Africa? Not for all the money in the world! God has allowed me to see what most people will never see. He has allowed me to walk in their shoes even if only for a day, so I can remember, so I can know what they go through, so I can tell others. Lord, help me to know what to do! How to help these precious people whom you love and died for.
While we were in Gulu, (northern Uganda) a woman asked “Where is God?” I had no answer. But later I thought of how we are the “body” of Christ, we are Christ in physical form to the world around us. And in Gulu the body of Christ is not there, the church is not there, believers are NOT THERE!!! So in answer to her question: “Where is God?” I am sorry but He is NOT IN GULU!!! Because we, his body is not there!
Joyce's story: Congo
"I was raped 2 different times. The first time there were four of us in our home, 3 women and 1 boy. The soldiers came in, killed the boy and sodumized him and then they raped the rest of us.
The second time four soldiers came into my home and each one of them raped me. Shortly afterwards I found out I was pregnant. My husband rejected me because he blames me for being raped and doesn't know if our baby is his or the soldiers baby."
What could I say to this woman, who has shared the most humiliating story with us, she feels guilt, violated, ashamed, and yet she is holding her baby in her arms. I just sat and wept with her.
She is only one story of over 26,000 "reported" rapes in this city alone. Many of the women contract HIV from the soldiers, which just intensify the problem.
Orphanage in Congo
Bahati, greeted us at the orphanage with her hair in 15 four inch braids sticking straight out of her head. She welcomed us and showed us around. Bahati, was an orphan with no education, but one day she found a baby nursing on his dead mother. She took in that baby and 68 others since. They live in 3 rooms of an elementary school. The rooms are dark; one room has a bed, another only a blanket, but it is home for these children. There is one toilet and no running water. ALARM, our organization bought them gutters to collect the rain off the roof and a holding tank to gather the water.
I started to write a list of their needs, blankets, clothes, toilets, food ... then in my journal, I wrote, "needs: EVERYTHING!"
Congo the Forgotten Country
We drove 4 hours through the green lush mountains and valleys of Rwanda to Congo. Arriving at the border, our staff from Rwanda began taking our luggage out of the truck. I said "what are you doing, aren't you going with us?" "No" Andre said, "We will pick you up in 2 days."
Our staff from Congo walked us across the border into Goma, Congo. It was like night and day. In 2001 the Nyiragongo Volcano erupted and covered over half of the city in lava. The streets we drove across was lava, the buildings were covered up to the second floor in lava, so people just live on the second floor or build their home on top of the lava. There was no electricity in the entire city, so we drove down the dark streets of Goma.
We arrived at this huge white guesthouse, with flood lights, 10 foot fence and guards at the gate. "This is where you will be staying, we would invite you to stay in our homes, but someone would get you in the night." Mbusa said. (He is our director in Congo).
We ate dinner together, he told us of the situation in Congo. "Congo is surrounded by 9 different countries and all 9 countries send in their solders to kill our people and rape our women. When the refugees came in from Rwanda after the genocide, the militia also came in and started killing and raping. The congonise people are a peaceful people. But after years of attack they have become angry."
Driving through the town the next morning, the volcano was smoking in the distance, waiting to erupt again. How symbolic of the people here, just a smoldering pot waiting to explode. They have been beaten down again and again. A bicycle almost ran into our truck; both drivers jumped out of their vehicles and almost went to blows. The tension was so evident in the atmosphere around us. When will Congo be the next Rwanda?
The Invisible Children of Uganda
The Invisible Children of War in Uganda
Arriving in the town of Gulu (5 hour drive North of Kampala, the capital) we drove to a city of huts. They refer to them as "camps". Displaced families from north Uganda fled here. WHY?
The rebels, who live in the bush, go from village to village, burning down huts, killing adults and abducting children. They take young girls and use them as prostitutes in the rebel camps. The boys are taken to be work slaves and taught to be rebels.
So families run to Gulu for "safety". But there is no safety. The rebels still come to Gulu. In the night the raid the "camps" killing, stealing, burning, raping. So each night the moms say goodbye to their children and send them off to shelters (large one room tents) where the children spend the night...so they can be safe from the rebels.
We walked the dark streets of Gulu to a shelter where we interviewed children who had been abducted by the rebels, but managed to escape. One 11 year old girl explained how the rebels came and killed her parents in front of her, and then abducted her...raped her... and then after 1 month let her go with these instructions: "Go back and tell everyone what we did to you and tell them, we will do the same to them."
A 15 year old boy told about his 4 years of living in a rebel camp. He was abducted when he was 11. They kill you if you can't work or get sick. They put a machete in your hand and tell you to kill the weak child, and if you don't they have another child holding a machete, who will kill you. You don't have a choice. The rebels do this to desensitize the children.
As we walked back to our lodging, the streets were dark, just 2 days before the rebels had come to this very place and abducted 48 children. It was hard not to look over my shoulder, fear was thick, my heart raced. How can people live in this type of fear day in and day out?
A young boy came up to us as we ate breakfast and said, "I just escaped from a rebel camp, can I eat your leftovers?" We bought him breakfast. I took my bread from breakfast with me, wrapped in a napkin. As we drove to the next camp, I saw a boy along the road and handed him the bread. He wouldn't take it. So I asked them why? I was told that he can't take the bread because UN gives them food once a week (which will feed their family for 1 week) and they are not allowed to take food from anyone else.
We walked through a maze of huts, hundreds and hundreds of them. This was one of the 18 camps in this city alone. Children sat on the ground, with flies all over them. They didn't swat them away; I guess they are used to them. A 12 year old boy came up to us crying. He stood in line to get water all morning. Once he did get his water, someone accidentally knocked it over and now he had no water to give his 3 orphan siblings. He is 12 years old, for goodness sake. He should be playing soccer, or watching TV, not looking for food for his family, not being the head of his household.
UN doesn't give families run by orphans ANY FOOD. You have to be an adult to get a card which allows you to get food once a month. So the orphan run families have NOTHING!!!!!!!! The girls don't go to school, because they have to find food, and if they can't they will sell themselves into prostitution.
The situation in Gulu is not getting better. This has been going on for 23 years. They are born in war and live each day of their lives in war.
So who funds the rebels? It may not be P.C. to say, but it is the Arabs, the Muslims. They want to take over Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda. So they send in the L.R.A. (Lord's Resistant Army) or the rebels (same thing just different names) to destroy a people, to bring despair, destruction, to kill, rape and steal what little the people have. Who suffers? The innocent! The young! The helpless!
I wish I were making all of this up, but I am not! I wish this was just a nightmare that I had and I could just wake up, but this is as real as it gets. Not a reality that most of us in America will EVER see, not a reality that makes us feel comfortable or good. But it is reality!
Since I left Uganda, I have had nightmares each night. But thankfully I can wake up from my nightmares...these children will never wake up from their living nightmare.
Dreams of Africa
Since I was four years old I had dreams of going to Africa. I think my years of watching Tarzan and movies like Out of Africa gave me the "romantic" ideas of what "I thought" Africa would be like.
But after three weeks in Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan, reality hit and it hit hard. I went to places most people will never see. I saw poverity, the effects of years and years of war, dispair, orphans fending for themselves and so much more.
Would I go back and do it differently? Would I just do the safari's and nature tours? NO WAY!!!! I was allowed to experience the real, hard, depressing Africa. I got to walk in the shoes, if only for a day, of the people who live there day in and day out.
Now the question remains: What do I do with this experience, with the information I gathered, with the brokenness I saw?
As we walk through the situations of each country, each experience, hopefully we can come up with an answer.
Welcome
Welcome, to Cindy Cunningham's BLOG! This BLOG is more a place for me to write my experiences in Africa than it is a place for people to read about my adventures. But hopefully in the process, both of us will get something out of this. Keep in mind most of this is raw, hard-core thinking process, not some elequant story.
