The night before we arrive, the Bomah Hotel, Kitgum, has played host to the US Ambassador. Standing beneath the thin trickle of cold, brown-stained water that passes for a shower, keeping watch on the mournful bullfrog that gazes up at me from the toilet bowl, this fact gives me the measure of the place. In Kitgum terms, the Bomah is pure luxury.
I've travelled here with Oxfam to see their work in northern Uganda, an area disembowelled by 20 years of civil war, where 1.7m people exist in wretched camps; an area of darkness that at last has the chance to come into the light. A ceasefire between government forces (UPDF) and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, appears to be holding and, despite the odd outburst from President Museveni ('We'll hunt them down and kill them in the bushes,' he said on a trip to the north this week, frustrated at the failure of LRA's second-in-command, Vincent Otti, to show up at a scheduled meeting) the Sudanese-brokered peace talks are set to continue.
In the Bomah's large and largely deserted dining room, while the television plays (Kampala's 'Royal Ascot' Goat Races; the goats seem inclined to the verge rather than the finish line) and the mosquitoes whine, Mary Kudla, Oxfam's programme manager, with whom I have spent the day, has a question for me. 'So, has anything you've seen so far in Africa taken you by surprise - anything you've not expected?' Mary is from Seattle, a former special needs teacher, park ranger, mountaineer and Peace Corps activist, a woman for whom the phrase 'capable hands' was forged. Little, I imagine, takes Mary by surprise. I mumble into my vegetable curry, reluctant to admit the truth. Everything, I should be saying, apart from the poverty, for which I was prepared.
For a start there are the Californian housewives and models, trip-trapping across the airfield in Prada high heels and tight black T- shirts bearing the mysteriously ungrammatical slogan, 'Passioned for Fashion'. We are fresh off the Air Eagle flight from Kampala, heading for the waiting row of metal rhinos.
'It's so real here,' squeaks Model Number 1. 'Hot. Kampala wasn't so real. You know what I'm saying?'
I am far from sure that this is real. Indeed, the encounter has a hallucinatory quality, but I agree wholeheartedly that it is hot.
'We're a start-to-finish fashion show,' says Model Number 2. 'Clothing an orphanage,' chips in Number 1. 'Then we go up to Sudan and we're all so excited about that.'
I am more than surprised; startled, bewildered even, as we climb into our respective four-wheel drives. But on the short drive into town, past the hosts of NGO signboards that sprout along an otherwise barren road, I realise I've entered a Wild West of foreign aid.
'Yeah,' says Mary, as she shows me around the Oxfam offices, 'there are six big agencies here. And after that ...' She shrugs. 'Some of the small ones do good work.' She directs me to a table stacked with laminated, hand-drawn cards depicting latrines, latrine covers, brushes and hand-washing facilities. 'We call this the hygiene ladder. One of our educational tools for our public-health facilitators.'
There have been cholera outbreaks recently in many of the camps. Diarrhoea is the major killer of the under-fives. 'Great,' I say, 'these are really clear.'
Then we go to Amida, a 'small' camp of 'only' 16,000 internally displaced people (IDPs). It has begun to rain. As I slide through the mud, between the tightly packed huts, following Geoffrey, Oxfam's public-health facilitator, to his home, I almost laugh at the naivety with which I viewed those laminated cards. Children, ragged, barefoot and giggling, race through the slime. There is one latrine for every 80-100 people. The water stands are switched on for only eight hours a day. Many of these kids, because space in the huts is so limited, sleep outside. Keeping your family clean under these conditions would be, more or less, a miracle.
Geoffrey shows me his hut. It is miraculously clean. 'Too small,' he says with a smile. He is tall, even by Ugandan standards, and I imagine he would have to lie with his knees bent to fit the bed that spans the room. We walk around and talk, Geoffrey telling me about his child-to-child hygiene education programme. I listen while struggling with a mounting sense of shock which has lodged like a fish bone in my throat. Well, I think, trying to turn it into something positive, though the poverty comes as no surprise, it's good that you can still be shocked by it.
I write notes by candlelight in my room at the Bomah. The electricity has given up long ago. Slowly I am working it out. It's not the poverty that has got to me. I've seen people with as little before, or even less, like the children who live on the railway stations in Calcutta. It's the way these people have been terrorised into the camps by both the LRA (which says it is fighting for their rights) and the government (which says it is protecting them). The street children of Calcutta highlight where the system has failed; for the Acholi people of northern Uganda, this is the system. This is where the system has driven them and kept them, interned in many cases for a decade or more.
But now there is a chance for peace, a chance that the Acholis may be able to return to their villages to farm their land. Peace at any cost. It is a phrase I've heard often in Kampala. I'm told it's what the people in the north want. They want the LRA to come out of the bush, go through the traditional Matu Put system of reconciliation, and be re-integrated into the community. It sounds like forgive and forget. I read survivor accounts of atrocities committed by LRA guerrillas, of women raped, their children slaughtered in front of their eyes, the lips cut off victims, girls taken to become sex slaves, children forced to kill their parents, or each other.
I read a report, Counting the Cost, published by coalition of 50 NGOs, which states, among other horrifying statistics, that 25,000 children have been abducted, and a quarter of children over 10 years old have lost one or both parents to the war. Surely the Acholis need justice. For the suffering he has inflicted on their loved ones, they must want Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, brought to justice.
To everyone I meet in the north, individually and in groups, I address two questions. The first is, what chance do you give the peace talks? There is surface scepticism, overlaid on a hope so keen it is almost unbearable. Peace is the necessary condition for them to begin their lives. And they have had, since the ceasefire, a taste of what this might mean. A few, the lucky ones whose land lies close to the camps, have begun to cultivate again.
The second question is, what should happen to the LRA and its leaders? I ask in one-to-one interviews, and I ask a group of students at the library that Oxfam helps to fund, a group of widows, and impromptu gatherings at two of the camps. The answer is always the same. One of the students sums it up. 'As Acholi, as a tribe, we have a means of resolving conflict and dispute - and we bring our brothers out of the bush and we reconcile with them. The ICC [everyone knows and worries about the International Criminal Court's indictment of Kony and his cronies] should withdraw and give us time to settle the conflict.'
It perplexes me, this willingness to forgive. The rank and file of the LRA is one thing - most are victims themselves, abducted at a young age and forced into killing their own. But how could Kony be forgiven? How? The desire for peace must drive the anxiety about the ICC, but I get no sense that if Kony were to give himself up that a trial would then be welcomed.
At a gathering of men and women beneath the spiny spread of an acacia tree, I press my point. Is it because the LRA has some support here, because they claim to speak for you? A polite but strongly dissenting murmur rises up like heat from the ground. Jerity Lamong, a striking 73-year-old in a peach silk dress, stands, and, with an air of infinite patience explains. 'Kony has no cause for the Acholis. He is not our voice. A leader who kills is not a leader. If you are a father, you do not kill your children.'
Then how, I insist, can he be forgiven? In response I am taken through, once again, the Matu Put system, the rituals involved, the slaughter of a sheep, the drinking of symbolic potions, the casting of omens. Thank you, I reply. The rituals I understand, but I do not understand why. Many people respond. It is about reconciliation, they say. It is their way. Then Ocira Luka, an elderly man in a frayed red bellboy jacket, offers this: 'If you give birth to twins,' he says, 'they may not weigh the same. And one twin may be good and one may be bad. Kony is like the bad twin. Still, he belongs to you. Kony should be talked to by the elders so they bring him into line and then he will be accepted back.'
When the candle has burned out I lie shrouded in a mosquito net and a pall of citronella, thinking about Ocira Luka. I think about justice and what it means. I think about our prisons, bursting at the seams, the lip service we pay to rehabilitation. I think about my expectations for this trip, how I expected to be moved by suffering, when what has moved me most has been this; another way of seeing.
The next morning we drive out of Kitgum in an Oxfam convoy, white flags fluttering from the vehicles' satellite communication aerials. 'Mobile one to base,' says Mary into the walkie talkie. 'We have one delta, four tangos and three victors and we are mobile. Standing by.' Until recently, aid vehicles only left Kitgum under armed guard, and Oxfam, which campaigns against small arms, did not send vehicles out at all beyond the urban district. Though we can now move about freely within the curfew times, Mary takes security seriously and maintains regular contact with the base and all her field staff. We jag and jolt along the spectacularly potholed road, past a UPDF detachment, two youths on bicycles, a string of women balancing loads - a basket of beans, a bundle of cloth - on their heads, three children tending an ox, a man weeding a field.
'Look at that,' says Mary, smiling, 'it looks like Africa again.'
We drive for an hour, soon leaving the cultivated fields behind, passing abandoned school houses, seeing only small bands of men in fatigues. It is not clear if they are UPDF or LRA.
'You know what surprised me when I first came here?' says Mary. 'How green it is. How lush. This is fertile land. They used to grow two or three crops per year.'
We stop at Padibe camp, which houses (if you stretch the meaning of the word) 44,000 IDPs. There will be a soap distribution and some work with beneficiaries who have received the famous Oxfam goats. 'This is a much poorer camp than the last one we went to,' says Mary. I look at her. How much poorer is it possible to be? 'Oh,' she says, 'you'll see. When you get this far away from town, you really have no way of earning any cash at all.'
Immediately we are surrounded by children. Uganda has a policy of free universal primary education, but 250,000 children in the north have no educational facilities at all. Those who attend school contend with class sizes of 100 or more and the struggle to buy uniforms and text books means that many drop out altogether. For the peace dividend to reach these kids, they need not only the security to return to their villages but also a substantial and sustained investment in educational infrastructure. Their parents may not put it quite like that, but education is prized so highly here that it leads people to make staggering sacrifices. 'We have a cash-for-work livelihood project,' says Mary. 'We save up the money for them in a bank account and then discuss how they're going to invest it. I know at least half of them want to use it to put a kid through school, but I can't advise them to do that. These are people who don't even have food security. They don't know where the next meal's coming from, but they want school for their kids. They see it as the way out of poverty.'
We're picking our way through the camp. Last night there was another fire and 12 huts burned. We pause outside the Therapeutic Feeding Station run by the UN. Fifty per cent of the children in the Kitgum area are stunted by malnutrition. The children who are now surrounding us need school and they need food. It doesn't seem a lot to ask. I talk to a young mother, Florence Achan, and ask her to tell me the most difficult thing about life in the camp. Her baby pees on my feet and we laugh. Then she tells me the World Food Programme has cut their rations so she has only one meal a day, sometimes not even that.
Justin and Darius, Ugandans who run the Oxfam livestock project (Mary is alone in being a mazungu, a foreigner) have gathered together the goat beneficiaries for a meeting. There are about 200 people present and for the next three hours we talk about goats. Some of the goats are sick or have died and Justin and Darius want to know why. Reasons are volunteered. Justin, who has a doctorate in veterinary medicine, is not impressed. One woman stands up and says, 'Tell the truth. After all these years we have forgotten how to look after our animals.' She is quickly shouted down. But with expert coaxing from Justin and Darius, the real problems begin to emerge. They range from the very general to the very specific, and Justin and Darius talk through every point in depth, announcing that a vet will be coming to live at the camp for a week, to help them re-learn some of the livestock skills they have lost. I ask the beneficiaries how long they have known Oxfam. Most hold their hands at about thigh level: since they were this high. It's easy to worry about aid dependency. The five-litre yellow jerry cans are known locally as 'Oxfams'. Then we return to the goat conversation and one of the elders gets to his feet. 'You have been given this goat,' he says, looking solemn and fixing us all - me included - with his yellowing eyes. 'Do not think you will be given another. When a man is given a fishing net it is up to him to feed himself.'
On the last day I return to Amida camp to see Geoffrey. The camp is in festive spirit. There has been a peace march that day and now there is dancing and drumming, a circle of men and a circle of women, a certain amount of home brew and a great deal of singing. Geoffrey has arranged a special song for us with his child-to-child public health crew. In a brick-built shed with glassless windows, a hundred or so children have gathered. I squeeze in and sit at the front. More children push their way inside. Those who can't fit inside insert their heads through the windows. 'We welcome you dear visitors,' they sing, 'in Jesus's name.' They sing with harmonies, and beautifully. They have been rehearsing a drama, scripted by Geoffrey, which highlights key health and sanitation messages, but because the room is so crowded and the peace jamboree is going on outside, the performance is abandoned for today.
Geoffrey walks me to the car. 'Enjoy your evening,' I say. 'Enjoy the party.'
He smiles broadly. When Geoffrey smiles, you feel yourself smiled upon. 'I'll go home to my wife.'
I thank him for showing me around, for the song.
'Tell the world about us,' says Geoffrey. 'Tell them what you saw.'
I say that I will; that I'll try.
And then he says something I haven't heard for a long time. It's something I used to hear when I was young, but which has fallen out of favour, out of fashion, now that we've become so anxious to 'respect' or guard our differences, and to patrol the boundaries of who is representing whom. 'Speak for us,' says Geoffrey, staking a claim for our common humanity. 'We are different colours, but we are just the same.'
· To find out more about how you can support Oxfam and their work in northern Uganda, go to www.oxfam.org.uk or call 0870 333 2700
