On Sunday March 6, I dropped off my mom at the airport and then waited to pick up some of the volunteers who flew in for our project trip. We had a team of 13, including John (our office director), myself, 3 interns (Dan, who was an intern with me last term, plus Tim and “K2”), 5 American volunteers, and 3 Australian volunteers. On Monday, we had our opening meeting with the volunteers, met with the Watoto leadership downtown, had a fancy Ugandan lunch, and then headed out on a 5-hour bus ride to Gulu. We stayed at the Watoto Guest House in Gulu the whole time, which was pretty nice, complete with a bathroom in each room and fans! Since I was the only female on the trip, I got my own room and bathroom to myself. =)
Here's some information about what our project was all about:
Watoto Childcare Ministries was formed to help the thousands of orphans and widows in Uganda, many of whom are the result of AIDS victims. As I explained in earlier posts, they have a few “children’s villages” around Uganda, where hundreds of orphans are placed in group homes, with up to 8 children to a mother. The idea is that “it takes a village to raise a child,” not an orphanage. (Watoto is starting a new village soon in Cape Town, South Africa, and churches and ministries from around the world are visiting Watoto to learn from their model of care.) Watoto (Swahili for “children”) values the idea of community, and wants these children to have every opportunity possible, including growing up in a loving home environment. (The house mothers are also a focus of Watoto, and many are AIDS widows themselves.) Watoto's current tag line is “Rescue. Raise. Rebuild.” communicating their goal of not just raising up youth but of empowering future leaders who can help rebuild their own country. Some of you may have heard of the Watoto Children's Choir, which is made up of children from their villages.
Gulu, one of the main cities in northern Uganda, was the hub of the LRA’s activities. The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) is a rebel group that committed terrible, horrible acts against their own people, the Acholi tribe, since 1987, and is/was one of the longest-running conflicts in Africa. They were originally formed to resist the Ugandan government’s oppression of their people after a change of power, but eventually turned to torture their own people as payback or insurance against being turned in to the government. This is one of the places that is famous for the child soldiers who are taken from their village and forced to kill people. The LRA finally left Uganda only a few years ago (but is still violently active in the Democratic Republic of Congo next door), so now various efforts are focusing on how the people in the area, all of whom were affected by these atrocities, can experience healing, rehabilitation, restoration, and growth.
Watoto has been conducting a trauma rehabilitation program (somewhat like group counseling) in dozens of IDP (internally-displaced people) camps that were set up to protect residents during the fighting. Families lived in these IDP camps for 26 years and now are returning to their land, but they are realizing that they lack both practical training and an older population to glean that information from. That’s where we came in. Our project was to design an agricultural and technical college, which will help provide people in the area with practical skills that they can use on their own farms or to get jobs to support their families. It will be more than a vocational school. It will offer college degrees in agriculture, livestock, farm management, farm mechanics, etc. Not only will it provide a place for Watoto children to go to school, but the intention is to provide skills and hope to the entire Gulu region. We were given an odd-shaped plot of land (435 acres, I think) and tasked with designing a college campus for 400 students plus 100 staff, including land for crops and livestock that will serve not only as a training ground but also as a food source to feed the college’s 500 residents (plus additional food, if possible, to feed those at Watoto’s Gulu children’s village or to sell on the market as an income-generator).
More on the actual project trip soon....
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