Displaced

I spent Saturday night as a refugee. I slept in a sleeping bag on a piece of cardboard in a parking lot between the lake, the expressway, Soldier Field and McCormick place. 26 people from Trinity were refugees that night with more than 5000 other people from the midwest. We marched, we held signs, we yelled, we wrote letters to the Ugandan president, we filmed part of a message to congress, and we were nourished by saltines and water.

Why? Because in Uganda, there has been a war for 21 years. It’s the rebels (the LRA) against everyone else (the government and the regular people). And no one cares about there cause, because it has been going on so long and everyone just wants peace. But the LRA wants to keep fighting, and since they don’t have any volunteer soldiers, they go around abducting children.

They take the children and beat them and make them kill their loved ones. They say, “Shoot them, or we will beat you until you are dead.” And so they change from children into soldiers, having no way to live but to kill. They live with the army in the wilderness and fight. If they escape from their captains/captors, their nightmares still follow them.

Some children walk from their homes in the outlying villages into the cities every night so that they don’t get abducted. They run the streets with their peers and then settle onto a slab of cement for the night. There used to be more children who did this, but the situation is improving, in part because of last year’s protest/simulation, the Global Night Commute.

This year was Displace Me, to advocate for those who have been displaced. Because of the violence, many families chose to move into Internally Displaced Persons camps. About ten years ago, the fighting was getting so bad that the president of Uganda told all the people living in the countryside and villages, “You have 48 hours to move to the IDP camps.”

48 hours to pack for a camping trip that would last for ten years. What would you bring to survive? What would you bring to keep, knowing that while you were fenced into an IDP camp, your family home would be looted and burned by the rebels? How would you feed your family? You are a farmer and there is no land in the IDP camp. There is no clean water. There is no industry. There are no jobs, no schools, no nothing. Just dirt, germs, flies, mosquitoes, AIDS, malaria, and a little bit of diseased water.

1.5 million people live in these IDP camps. There are children who have gone from birth to death-by-starvation in these camps. Around 1000 people die in these camps every single day.

They want to go home. They want to farm and eat what they have grown, instead of the mush that the aid trucks drop off. They wanted to be treated like the intelligent, independent people that they are. They know the camps have done little to keep them from harm and much to harm them. They want to go home.

So we left our homes to bring them home.