The Biggest Weapon in Northern Uganda

Update, 12/31/08: In late November, when a government ultimatum expired, Kony failed yet again to sign a final peace agreement that would end the war. A week after this article went to print, the Ugandan, South Sudanese and DR Congo militaries kicked off a renewed military campaign against the LRA. Now, reports are circulating (here, here, here, here, and elsewhere) that LRA fighters slaughtered over 400 villagers over Christmas in northeast Congo. The LRA denies the allegations. For more, check out the Ugandan dailies The New Vision and The Daily Monitor, as well as the great Ugandan news magazine The Independent.

Lucky Bosmic Otim, a popular musician from northern Uganda, is practically impossible to reach by phone. He has one, but it’s always turned off. The only way to contact him is through his friends, whose cell phones have invariably been turned off as well. When I finally met him last June, at his wife’s house a few kilometers outside the provincial capital of Gulu, he explained that his fame has attracted undesirable fans.

“The rebels, they used to call,” he said. “They wanted me to be part of the peace talks. When they call you like that, it’s very, very, very bad.”

Bosmic was referring, of course, to the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel outfit that has terrorized the north’s predominantly ethnic Acholi population for over twenty years, kidnapping children, forcing girls into sexual slavery, training boys as fighters, and turning them against their own villages, neighbors, even families. But since the Ugandan government’s peace talks with the LRA ushered in a period of peace in this war-torn region two years ago, Acholis have begun to rebuild a society devastated by violence, poverty, disease, and mass displacement. And a fledgling music industry has exploded, with musicians like Bosmic rocketing to stardom.

While many hits sung in the Acholi language of Luo deal in love—like Jackson’s “Atye ii Mar” (“I’m in Love”)—a strain of popular songs by artists like Bosmic, Jahria Okwera, and Jeff Korondo are raising questions about the complicated, controversial issues that haunt Acholi life, like domestic violence and the return of battle-hardened child soldiers. “They’re all educative,” said Nicky Afaye, a producer at the leading Mega FM radio station. “They all endeavor to really speak about peace.”

For his part, Bosmic, a lean twenty-four-year-old with an intense, searching expression, is perhaps most famous for his reggae-tinged entreaty “Peace Return,” a chart-topper at Mega FM driven by a syncopated piano line and a synth flute melody. The song echoes a desperate refrain commonly heard in the north: “Peace return/To northern Uganda/It’s our prayer.”

Judging by Bosmic’s penchant for battle fatigues—as he sat on a grass clearing with his two-year-old in his lap, he was decked out in a grey camoflage jacket, green designer camo pants, small dreads with orange tips sticking out of a maroon beanie, and a wristband in Rastafarian green, yellow, and red, embroidered with a marijuana leaf—he addresses the subject with militant zeal. “They call me a freedom fighter,” Bosmic said. “But ours is not through guns. Our guns are the microphones. The mic is the biggest weapon.”

As with many others here, war and all of its attendant problems have dominated Bosmic’s life. He was born in Kitgum, a province close to the border of South Sudan, but his parents died in a civil war in the ’80s, when a southwestern Ugandan resistance movement led by Yoweri Museveni overthrew the government and established a de facto military regime with democratic flavoring—which Museveni still rules over today, still as president of Uganda.

After he was orphaned, Bosmic came under the care of the bishop at a Protestant church in Gulu, where he played a traditional stringed instrument called the adungu and sang for the church. “When I was in the church, others were already singing this ‘world music,’” he said. “But to me, they were not bringing out the message I wanted to pass to the world. Their music was full of obscenity, talking about love only. We have got so many orphans who need help in the world. We have got victims of war, wars around the world. So I thought it wise I should join, so that I also pass the message to the world.”

As he grew into his teens, Bosmic began writing lyrics loaded with Christian themes and political messages. Eventually, inspired by the late South African reggae artist Lucky Dube, he himself took on the name “Lucky” and produced a string of Afrobeat-style songs using the music programming software FruityLoops, the inexpensive, easy-to-master backing band of most northern Ugandan singers.

With cheap cassettes of his music sold in the market, and his songs playing on Mega FM, Bosmic quickly took on a devoted following, mostly in the Acholi districts of northern Uganda. He incorporated English lyrics into his songs to reach a wider audience, and became something of a regional icon when the low-budget music video for “Peace Return” showed up on YouTube a year ago, boosting international awareness of this often-overlooked war.

There is a telling contradiction between the stark messages of Bosmic’s lyrics and their backdrop of reggaeton beats, squeaky-clean instrumentation, and uplifting melodies: His music bursts with hope, but songs like “Suicide Drinking” are also dogged by anger and frustration about a broken Acholi society.

Gulu, a small town where hundreds of international aid organizations and local, small-time NGOs are headquartered, is full of bars and clubs. In the three weeks my traveling partner and I spent there, a party scene thrived. Scores of locals and expats alike spent long nights drunk on Ugandan beer and liquor, shooting pool and grooving to Bob Marley, American R&B, dancehall covers of songs like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” and Acholi crowd-pleasers with relentlessly fast beats.

Music and dance are cornerstones of culture in Acholiland, the central districts of the north. Norman Okot, a music and dance trainer at Health, Education, Literacy, and Sports (HEALS), a Gulu-based nonprofit for war-scarred children, told me that the Acholis have a dozen traditional dances, each geared toward a specific activity: the Bwola, or royal dance, for the coronation or death of a king; the “war dance”; and the Laraka Nraka and Ajere, courting rituals for boys and girls. “Anything to do with life in Acholi, whether life, or death, or pleasure, is always accompanied by dancing,” Okot said.

So it is with northern Uganda’s contemporary music. The north’s nightclub scene, locals told me, often serves as a venue for dancing and drinking away the horrific memories of war and the difficulties of everyday life. “If you go to my village, there is a dance hall,” said Stellah Akello, an Acholi college student from a village near Gulu. “If you go to my mother’s village, there is a dance hall. People are tired of war. They want peace of mind.”

Yet the happy excesses of the clubs sometimes mirror the more poisonous excesses of the men who wallow in the hundreds of Internally Displaced Person camps scattered across the region. An estimated two million people have been displaced during the war. Many of them were forced to move into these unsanitary camps of crude mud-brick huts, starkly different from the lush forests of trees, elephant grass, and corn and cassava crops that surround them. Traumatized and unable to work their fields because of the LRA rebels stalking the bush, many men in the camps turned to alcohol. Today, aid workers and camp residents say, lots of men still laze away their days drinking locally brewed beer, while their wives take care of the family.

Alcohol, aid workers and residents say, fuels the gender-based prejudice, domestic violence, and rape endemic in Acholiland. Sometimes, aid workers and residents say, men will even steal the food aid their wives pick up from the World Food Program in order to buy more alcohol.

In “Suicide Drinking,” Bosmic blasts the widespread use of alcohol as an escape. “They are trying to drink off their lives,” he said.

It may be peaceful in northern Uganda these days, but the war isn’t over yet. The LRA has continued attacking villages and abducting children in villages near rebel hideouts in Central Africa, destabilizing the region and stoking fear. In Uganda, thousands of IDP camp residents have no means to go home. By all accounts, Ugandans will only believe the war is finished once Kony has signed a final peace agreement. But he failed to show up for the signing last April, and rebuffed negotiators again in late November. The Ugandan military has considered taking on the LRA in a renewed military campaign, but Acholis will only be able to fully restore their society after the war ends, international aid workers and Ugandans say. And reconstruction is, itself, an extremely daunting undertaking. “Where do we begin? Educationally, we are nowhere. Economically, we are nowhere. Politically, we are nowhere,” Bosmic said. “We are crippled. We don’t have legs.”

To Bosmic, the Acholis’ only remaining wealth is the thick greenery and fertile soil of the land, which they have depended on for survival for hundreds of years. Last June, he pulled out a notebook with lyrics scribbled on the lined pages, and showed me a new song he was about to record.

The song is called “Kakana,” Luo for “My Tribe,” and it sends a sobering warning: “Don’t sell off your land.”

This article ran in the December/January issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Limbo in the North - Will the war in Uganda ever end?

Eveline Alobo, a weary, rail-thin 50-year-old mother of five, turned in her chair to look at the man waving his arms in the air. In one hand, he clutched a cane; in the other, a bottle of home-brewed beer. Through the hot, hazy air of the dry season, the babbling man, in his torn shirt and hat, resembled a marionette.

“He is drunk,” Alobo said, frowning. An Association of Volunteers for International Service (AVSI) staff member hopped up and ran towards the man, clapping his hands in the air to scare him off.

Alobo, an ethnic Acholi, lives in the Acet Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, about 75 miles from the border of Sudan, one of hundreds of camps that dot Uganda’s northern region. Acet looks like most of the other camps: The fertile undergrowth typical of neighboring villages has been cleared away, making room for a few simple structures that serve as schoolhouses and a clinic, plus row after row of mud-brick huts with thatched-grass roofs, many of them furnished with little more than a pot for cooking. Every few yards, a latrine shaped like a porta-potty juts out of the ground. Using the latrines makes the camp more sanitary, but children fear them, so small rivers of human waste run down the mud pathways.

“The sanitation is just shit,” said Louisa Seferis, program director for AVSI’s Northern Uganda office, which monitors and manages camps in three of Uganda’s northern districts.

Alobo moved to Acet 20 years ago. She fled her home after the Lord’s Resistance Army—a rebel outfit that’s been terrorizing the region for more than two decades in an attempt to overthrow the government—raided her village in the middle of the night. She watched as rebels pulled her husband and daughter from their hut and hacked them to death with machetes, then made off with her son.

Now, like most of the displaced, she faces the filth and widespread alcoholism of the IDP camps.

Continue reading this article, which I co-wrote with Hannah Rappleye, at San Diego CityBeat...

The Smell

At the edge of the Rift Valley in Nairobi, Kenya, little Wendy strikes a pose. Photo by Hannah Rappleye.

Nairobi, 6/8/08, the dry season:

I am sitting on a well-kept couch and eating fried green beans and oily beef, picking it up with chunks of chapati, and feeling a little sick. Hannah and I are in the living room of the family of our friend Mike Tiampati, Program Manager of the Mainyoito Pastoralist Integrated Development Organization. His two adorable daughters are going crazy on orange Fanta, and we're watching "Project Fame," a low-budget East African imitation of "American Idol" sponsored by Kenya's famous Tusker beer. First up is a cover of "Billie Jean." Later, a fellow in a tilted stetson hat sings Usher. They're all amateurs, but they're strivers. Before we discover who is dumped and who is saved, I look Hannah in the eyes and suggest that it's time to go.

It's dark as we walk through a sort of grimy alleyway towards the guest house. Mike, 35, tall and burly, a bold man with a genial manner, totes his defensive weapon - a long club with a knob at the end. A drunk man stumbles by. Any moment, I tell myself. It's just about to happen; and then it does. I double over and eject all the contents of my stomach onto the ground. My eyes water and snot bursts out of my nose. I can taste bile and Fanta . I amble a few steps and vomit some more.

"The Maasai say it's the best medicine," Mike says, chuckling.

There is something peculiar about our guest house. As we cross a muddy field in our approach, I notice a young man and woman standing together awkwardly move away from each other, and proceed to stroll towards the front gate separately. Once Hannah and I enter the dimly-lit barroom, buzzing with activity - couples sit at a few couches, smoking cigarettes and chatting, in groove with the music - I go in search of a bathroom. The place hosts many rooms, but only singles and double-sized beds. The bar sells water, cigarettes and bottles of Vat 69, Bond 7, Waragi, and other hard liquors. In this crammed, convivial atmosphere, I find the bathroom along the hallway. Mike's only gone here a couple times for drinks; he describes it as a "rendezvous" site. Mike would never stay here, because he is a married man.

The next morning is overcast. Hannah and I are sitting in patio chairs by the front door, waiting for Mike to bring us to Narok, where we will meet Maasai tribesmen and women. We're feeling slightly annoyed - inside, as the ladies clean the bar, a Christian radio program called "Women of Faith" blares over the speakers. Stentorian voices spread subliminal messages in a fog of pious feedback. "The Father goes so far beyond what a wayward child deserves," an intense voice says over the radio. "The Father runs and throws His arms around you."

The show ends and on comes a loop of power-ballads that praise Jesus Christ, in all his glory. I imagine that the point of all this is to rock the sin out of the entire guest house, using blessed noise.

"This music makes me want to drink whiskey and have sex," Hannah says.

A few minutes pass, and she recognizes one tune and sings along:

"Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from Heaven above
With wisdom, power and love
Our God is an awesome God!"

Then, suddenly, something familiar emerges from the daily morning bustle. It's the smell again.

The smell is pungent, wet, but neither sweet nor bitter. It is not distasteful, but it's not pleasant. It may be the ruddy mud fermenting in the heat - but the smell shows up where there is no mud. All of a sudden, anywhere, it is there. I might be walking around one of Kampala's suburbs, or cramming my legs into the seat of a rumbling coach bus and resting my head against a window that doesn't open, or sitting calmly on the back of a sputtering bodaboda while swerving through a busy street: the smell is there. A couple days back, I passed an invisible wall when I entered a grass lawn at a hostel in Jinja, and there was the smell. Its formula activated and prodded the swirling in my intestines, and I threw up. I've never asked any locals, ex pats or visitors about the smell; it remains a mystery.

Now, in the parking lot before me, I smell the smell.

I feel truly mystified, haunted, dare I say harassed! I sniff and shake my head, turn to Hannah and rattle on about the smell, the smell again. It's everywhere! I write into my notebook every instance I can remember of encountering the smell. I want to know, What is the smell?!

Yet we're waiting so long that eventually we get up to go walk down the main street, and we buy bicuits and a toothbrush. By the time we're back at the patio chairs drinking Krest with Mike telling us about Maasai tradition, the smell has disappeared and I've forgotten for a time that there ever was a smell. When I go up to northern Uganda, to Gulu, the smell is not there.

The smell is omnipresent, here or not here. It could be a sign.

Do you know what the smell is?

Would You Rather...

Gulu, Uganda. Recently:

The rain is finished. The sky is overcast and a thick dew encroaches on this wide, windowless conference room. I realize that the interview conditions are terrible. There are too many note-takers here. One of them, thankfully, is a woman, Hannah. But I, unfortunately in this circumstance, am a man. What's worse, our interpreter, too, is a man: Victor Oloya, former abductee of the Lord's Resistance Army, and founder and Chairman of War Affected Children's Association, an NGO based in Gulu. My only consolation, at this point, is that the woman we're going to interview has approached us herself.

The three of us sit in cramped, wooden desk-chairs and create something of a circle around Anena Aginess, a 23 year-old from the village of Awach. Aginess has a small face and smooth features. Her hair is drawn down tight in cornrows. Her front teeth are missing. She pays no attention to the swarm of mosquitoes that harass us. Her head hangs down and she focuses her big brown eyes, her dilated pupils, down at the floor.

We begin with questions that are usually basic, but always churn your guts here. She has two brothers, who live in Gulu, and one sister who lives in Awach. The LRA killed her father in 1995. She has two children, one of them conceived in the bush.

In 1996, LRA rebels ambushed her village, abducted her, brought her to the thick wild of Kalongo in Pader District and gave her away to a rebel commander 20 years her senior. She became a mule, carrying water and supplies on her head for her captors. They beat her when she walked too slow.

The commander who called himself her "husband" raped her and made her pregnant. He forced her to stay at his side in the battles against the Ugandan army. One day, she tried to escape. As punishment, he stabbed her in the right leg with a bayonet. Aginess lifts up her long skirt to show us the scar.

During the battle of Atiak, two years after her abduction, he was shot and killed. She asked her cousin, another LRA commander, to let her escape. She told two of her companions, who were also abused and treated like mules, of her plan. Together, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they fled into the bush towards the nearest town. They found some civilians, who took them to the local council.

Finally, after going through experiences too horrific to relate, Aginess and her friends were free. Back in the bush, rebels found out that her cousin had helped her escape, and they killed him.

When Aginess returned to Awach, the villagers feared that the LRA would return, to seek vengeance. There were no rehabilitation programs available. And, she says, nobody in her community helped her. Eventually she met a man, and they had another child together. But he rejected her first baby, so she left him and moved in with her family.

Now Aginess lives alone. Every morning, she goes to the market to sell fruit. She's trying to start a small garden, where she can harvest crops to sell. But she hardly sees her family and she has little help. Her children are 8 and 2 years old. She worries about their education.

About a million LRA abductees have registered with the government, she says, but there is no government assistance. There are just UPDF soldiers, who themselves are known to commit sexual abuse and violent atrocities.

When we are finished asking questions, Victor, Hannah and I walk back to the center of Gulu. Victor chats with me and ignores Hannah, who walks behind us. The three of us are stuck in an overwhelming quiet, so there is not much to talk about. Victor waves goodbye when we reach WACA's office. When he is gone, Hannah recounts a match of the game "Would you rather...?" We had played it the week prior. I asked, "Would you rather be a man or a woman?"

Now that she's given it some thought, Hannah says, she would rather be a man. It's interesting that she has been thinking about this, I tell her, because so have I. If I could do it over again, I say, I would rather live the life that is undervalued, neglected, even despised, but that is ultimately more admirable, which requires ineffable strength and responsibility in the face of great ugliness, corruption and impotence: I would rather be a woman.

Women

I've been traveling around Uganda and Kenya for a month and a half now, and I would estimate that 98 percent of the people I've interviewed so far have been men. I already was sick of it a while ago and now I am really sick of it. I am in Gulu now and I realize that women's rights are the most important and the most overlooked and underappreciated issue affecting Uganda as a whole, if not, you know, the entire rest of the world.

"Ugandan men are arrogant," Emma, a young student, told Gary and I at Embassy Bar the other night. I get the impression that "arrogant" is only one of the many of nasty adjectives you could use. Christine Okot, the Ugandan Government's Gender Officer for Gulu District, recently offered a couple others: "stubborn" and "big-headed."

I'm not trying to say that all men are bad here, nor am I trying to say that I truly understand the issue - because, of course, I can't - but it's become obvious: Women are like mules in Uganda. They are property. "A man has a right over the wife and everything the woman owns in the home," Okot told Hannah and I yesterday.

Ask any woman here and they will tell you that gender inequality is rife, that domestic violence is normal and, if anything, encouraged. The situation has become so much worse because of the war. LRA rebels used rape as a tool to destroy the lives of Acholi women. And after the Acholi community was crammed into overpopulated, isolated, dirty and dangerous IDP camps, where many people have lived for decades, rape and incest increased and gender roles changed radically.

"All the time you spend roaming around," said Michael Ojok, a 24-year-old resident of Acet Camp in Gulu District, who has lived there seven years. "You don't have your garden, you don't have crops." Living in the IDP Camps, Ojok and many others have told me, so many men feel helpless and resort to drinking. When they run out of money, they steal bicycles, land, or the food aid distributed to their wives, to drink more. Then they come home and beat their wives.

Meanwhile, the women take care of the children, take care of orphans, collect the seed from the World Food Programme, dig the gardens, grow crops, fetch water from the bore hole, and pretty much do everything else. "All the responsibilities are on the women," Esther Abwol, a mother who lives in Olwal Camp in Amuru District, told Hannah and I. "It is up to you to struggle and make sure your family is O.K."

Today, aid workers and camp residents said, now that people are free to return to their villages and tend their crops, the problem is still huge. Just look at all the drunks farting around in the camps on an average weekday. There were plenty at Acet Camp on Tuesday. Even the Local Community Leader of Odek Subcounty was falling-down drunk.

There are a number of aid groups that deal with women's rights, like Straight Talk and Boy Talk, which holds regular sessions for women and men about sex, health issues and how to stop domestic violence at home. Christine Okot, the Gender Officer, runs working groups that network with state institutions and aid groups to promote gender equality in development programs.

But Okot said that too many aid organizations here fail to address the underlying causes of gender inequality, domestic violence, rape and the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is intimately connected to these problems. "They tackle the symptoms," she said. "They think that drinking is the problem."

Women here, working women, students, aid workers and government officials alike, say that the true problem lies with culture and tradition. Girls just getting into maturity have been pushed into marriage. Women can't leave the house, even to go to the hospital, without asking their husband's permission. If women are raped, they are often blamed for it themselves. Some women worry that they are not good enough wives if their husbands don't beat them.

It's a matrix of issues - political, cultural, economic, psychological. How do you find a solution? Women here say that men need to be more deeply involved in promoting gender equality. And ultimately, the next generation of leaders need to be educated about gender equality and human rights. "Your children are still young," Okot tells the women of the community. "Train the young people."

The Holy Spirit Lives in Gulu

Gulu, Uganda. Sunday:

Hannah is going out on a wild motorbike ride through IDP camps with some people from UNHCR today. My frame is too large to ride on the back of a such a bike, while swerving through narrow and muddy roads. So I spend the day searching for the church of Severino Lukwoya.

Severino Lukwoya is the father of Alice Auma, the founder of the Holy Spirit Movement, a paramilitary group that brought together numerous militias with strong ethnic Acholi membership, after President Yoweri Museveni led the National Resistance Army to victory in 1986. She is otherwise known as Alice Lakwena (Lakwena means "messenger" in Luo), because she believed that spirits spoke through her and told her to eradicate the "sin" of her society. When she went into exile in Kenya in the late '80s, her father took over HSM. Meanwhile, Joseph Kony, who claimed to be Alice Lakwena's cousin, led a small rival movement. But it grew, eventually, it developed into the Lord's Resistance Army, a force of children who were abducted and ordered to maim and kill, supposedly to institute a government guided by the Ten Commandments.

I find the New Jerusalem Temple, Lukwoya's church, near Gulu's used-clothes market, off a dirt road and behind some houses. It is a modest church-house made of brick, with a smooth concrete floor and a roof made of corrugated-iron. Near the door, there is a twin bed adorned with a blue mosquito net. At the front of the room, a frilly banner made of tinsel reading "Happy Birthday" is strung across the ceiling - over a simple wooden pulpit and a table covered in a white lace cloth. The back wall is painted teal, but shapes are left in a background of stone: a cross with a sun on top, four stars, a moon; a shield with spears run through it; a triangular mountain, with a tree and a human figure sticking out the sides. Covering the mountain is a square painted in lush blue, making water.

Two men are plucking out a trance-like melody on adungus, stringed insturments that vaguely resemble boats. A woman is fluently working a flat, metal shaker imprinted with a red, white and blue "USA" logo. Another woman is tapping out a simple rhythm on a drum. They all sway back and forth, their heads tipped down, and sing in murmurs.

A dozen barefoot people are sitting and looking forward, while some oblivious children stand around. A few women sit on a bamboo mat to the left. The rest sit in short benches to the right. They finger small prayer-books.

And there Severino Lukwoya sits, over in the far right corner, at a small table with a white table-cloth on it. An ornate cross decorated with stars and a moon, and with the shape of a sun atop it, sits in front of him, along with a green bottle of holy water and a cellular phone. He is sunk into his chair and he looks lost in thought. He is a very old man, with deep wrinkles in his thick and charcoal skin. He has mangled and missing teeth. The puffy white hair on his crown is somehow imprinted with a cross shape. I find out later that his dark, penetrating eyes glow. That his voice silences the church-house.

I am still standing at the door when the young priest, Acaye Isaac, a man with a soft voice and gentle handshake, walks up to me. He invites me to remove my shoes and sit. He seems to know exactly why I am here. I sit at an empty bench as the day's mass continues.

Acaye Isaac and one of the adungu players take turns reading from their small prayer-books and delivering sermons. After each turn, the band starts up another swaying song. The congregation sings along. Everything is done in Luo, so I understand the amens and not much else. I think the day's services are nearly over when Isaac delivers a long sermon, standing at the pulpit and speaking soberly and seriously.

An adungu player plucks almost inaudibly as Isaac speaks. Heads hang down or look forward. Then Isaac finishes and there is a song. In the few moments of silence afterwards, an eerie metallic pattering begins on the roof of the church. They are sprinkles of rain. But when I turn around and look outside, I see no rain falling.

The service continues. There are more readings. There are more songs. There are more sermons. There are more songs. Because I understand basically nothing, I have time to think.

Then there is communion. Isaac pulls away the white cloth on the table next to the pulpit, to expose a bowl of some kind of paste and altar wine. The children line up first, then the adults. Isaac dabs a spoonful of paste in each of their hands, then presents them with wine from a goblet. The congregation finish the communion with a song.

Finally, Severino Lukwoya stands up to speak. I am urged to sit at the front of the church. Obina Hallan, a man in a suit and a tie printed with the American flag, sits next to me to translate.

It is not Lukwoya who speaks to me, he says, but the Holy Spirit. I am welcomed. I am urged to spread the word of the spirit across the word. "I know your father Abraham. I also know Jacob. I changed my name from Jacob to Israel. I am in Africa because I am the son of Cain. Now I work with the black people. I changed my name from Israel to Melta, which means Rock." He gestures to the stars, the moon, the mountain, the shield, on the far wall of the church. "I am the rock. I am all of this."

"The whole world is killing each other without getting tired. That's why the soldiers of God come down, to ask people to stop sinning," he continues. "And they stopped sinning."

Lukwoya gestures at Isaac, sitting in a chair behind the pulpit. "Look at his body. He is doing the will of the Father."

"Very many people poured their blood," Lukwoya says. "This shows that the lamb died. And they are saved with the blood of the sheep." I did not take communion with the church. He says that the holy water is still there for me to take. "It has the spirit and seeds of all these stars." There is a brief pause and I do not take the holy water.

He says that he is black because of Cain. He wants to get God's blessing, to be like the whites. But he is content with his duty here, to drive away the evil spirits in Africa.

Then he sits. He has finished his sermon.

Isaac stands to deliver his own sermon. When he is done, the adungu player, a thin man with smooth cheek-bones, wearing a blue-striped button-up shirt and blue pants, stands to speak. He looks straight forward. "Very many people were killed, because they want leadership," he says. The New Jerusalem Temple is here, then, to cleanse the world of its evils.

"What we call sin is the struggle for leadership," he continues. "And that's why we call ourselves the descendents of Cain. Cain was the first killer for leadership."

"If your eyes look at good things as bad things, cut out your eyes," he says. "Our body is a temple of God. If you would like to kill your friend, it means you refuse Jesus and that you want to kill Jesus."

"If we live a bad life, animals rebel and also live a bad life," he says. "People who are going to live with God will live forever."

The adungu player is done and the entire congregation breaks into song. The hymn is slow. At the pulpit, he bobs back and forth in strange meditation. He gestures at Severino, the Father. "Here is truly the God," he says. "Our ancestors are here."

When he is done, he invites me to ask the Father questions. Severino is sitting at his small table, looking at me through the bottle of holy water, when I ask him when and how the spirit found him. Severino chuckles. "It is a long story," he says. "God has put me down as a promise."

Long ago, the Holy Spirit was born as a person. Then He became an animal. In 1928, Severino Lukwoya was born and the Holy Spirit went into Severino Lukwoya. In 1948, God made Severino's Bible catch aflame. A voice emanated from the book: "You are my worker."

Suddenly, rain comes pounding down against the iron roof. The deafening roar eats the church-house. Severino stops talking. I look around. Behind the pulpit, two congregants kneel down to pray. They face the wall, their eyes closed, hands together, and tilt back and forth, back and forth. Obina, my translator, asks me, "Are you scared?"

Obina Hallan is an economics and history professor at Gulu University, he says, and a volunteer for the local office of the World Food Programme. He says that the New Jerusalem Temple is an unpopular and controversial church among the Born Agains here. They do not agree with New Jerusalem's baptisms, but he asserts that this church is only following the word of the Bible. He smiles. "I don't know what God did," he says. "I just found myself here."

Thunder strikes. Several minutes pass and eventually the rain dies down. Severino, standing now, is talking to a little child. Eventually he turns to me. The interview resumes. I ask him what the stars, the moon, and all of the other rocks tell him.

"Their communication is all about peace," he says. "That is why I brought stars. I plant the stars into people. That is why I have the soil of rebirth, Melta... I have not come to talk like Abraham, to kill. I have come to give people peace. I am the God of life. I need life."

I ask him where the evil spirits come from. He points at his heart, then points at me. "It comes from inside you," he says. "It comes from the teaching of the whites." Their technology has created weapons. Their money has introduced the world to greed. "They possess all the evils."

"The Bible has been written with a lot of wisdom," he continues. And the world must heed the warning of his church: destroy all of the wisdom of weapons and greed. "Extend your network across the world," he tells me.

I ask him when his church began. He says that it ascended slowly, very slowly. "We are very few here," he says. "People go where there are riches."

When Americans come to other churches in Uganda, he says, they bring nothing but money. The priests use the money to fatten themselves. The congregants dance because they are getting richer. "They are doing all those evil things," he says. "They don't want the word of God."

If Severino Lukwoya is a charlatan, then he wants me to think that he is at least a very poor one. He says that he never accepts money from visitors. He goes about town with his pulpit, only to preach on the streets.

I ask him how there will be peace in Northern Uganda. Severino, speaking as the Father, says that people must convert to his word. "I heard people crying," he says. "That's why I descended down to help them."

The peace here at the moment, he says, resulted from his work: He went to Lake Victoria and removed the evils there. He removed a fire from the mountains. He convinced "the whites" to start the peace talks in Juba, South Sudan. "This is a country of peace," he says. "Everybody is at rest."

I have one more question, I say. I want to know about Joseph Kony. Do evil spirits speak to him?

"I do not communicate with him," he says. "I do not want to say anything about him."

He refers me to Luke, Chapter 10, verses 1-24, and Matthew, Chapter 10, verse 2, verses 12-22, 22-32, and 38-42. "If the people of Uganda do not want to repent," he says, "then there is suffering."

He says that Joseph Kony and Yoweri Museveni are the same and that they may both be the supervisor in the Garden of God. "All of them are doing the same work in the Garden of God. All of them have killed," he says. "If they are the Garden Supervisor, they have to repent."

I thank him for his time and exit the church, entering the damp afternoon day. As I walk back to the market, crowds of children flank me, screaming, taunting, laughing. I stare straight forward as I step across a rickety bridge over a small and muddy channel. A few blocks away, I reach my hotel.

Update, 5/2009: It may seem from this post that I believe that Severino Lukwoya is actually the Holy Spirit. I do not. That was not the purpose of this entry. In hindsight, I suppose that I could have discussed this controversial church more objectively.

The Bwola Dance

Gulu, Uganda. The Saturday before last:

An Irish woman is sitting near Hannah and I at Kope Cafe. She gets up to do something that wazungu often do in Gulu Town: complain.

"I ordered my food over an hour ago," she barks at the man behind the counter. "Is it coming or not?" He assures her that it is and, a couple minutes later, out it comes.

A few minutes pass and the unmistakable rumble of a parade rounds the corner. Hannah and I, along with everybody else in the restaurant except for the Irish woman, gather outside.

A banner proclaims: "Manchester United Fans."

A rag-tag marching band slams out a boom-chuck beat and fills the air with triumphant brass.

Following them, a man in a red Manchseter United jersey, the uniform of the British football team, yells into a microphone, riding atop a white pickup truck weighed down with giant speakers and fans waving Manchester flags. One of them holds up a poster of the great footballer Nani.

All around the truck, men in red jerseys chant and dance, going forth with their knees bent low.

The parade passes. Hannah, myself and everybody else return to the interior of quiet Kope Cafe. The Irish woman is enjoying her smoothie, no doubt, but she has a sour expression. I read The Saturday Monitor. Hannah reads The Independent. Two hours pass and we are served: an omelette for Hannah, pancakes for me. We eat, pay, exit and then proceed down Gulu's main drag.

Gulu is abuzz today. The parade is up ahead. The weighed-down white pickup blasts the indestructible beat of Acholiland: a driving kick, a shaker going double-time, jaunty tom-toms.

Hannah decides to fetch her camera in our hotel room. I am equipped with notebook and pen. Thematically, but not on purpose, I'm wearing bright red Ray-Ban knock-offs. We chase the parade.

We merge with the crowd as we enter a wide, dusty field. Hannah branches off to ride on the hood of a car. I'm just behind the weighed-down pickup. The fan on board looks around at the crowd and yells, over and over, "Mansester fan! Mansester fan!"

Men in red jerseys are everywhere. Some of them walk up and ask me if I'm a fan. No, I say, I'm a journalist. Accordingly, I try to make sense of what's happening. Did Manchester win a game today? Yesterday? Will they play tomorrow? Has the season opened or closed? They give vague and unclear answers. Later, Stella, a student at Makerere University, explains that Manchester won the season and brought their shining cup to Kampala for a stupendous celebration. That was last May, she adds.

So, then, it's just a celebration.

Sammy, a gaunt, red-jerseyed fan with a huge smile, shakes my hand. He tells me that the parade has just visited Gulu Hospital. Now, a contingent of fans will present boxes of laundry soap to the inmates at Gulu Government Prison.

"You should be friendship to everybody," he tells me.

It's right over that way, he says, gesturing off to the left. Henry Kaija, a prison officer, a rather young and gentle-looking man with a generous expression and a "Rooney 10" jersey, red of course, bids me to come along. Already Hannah, taking photos a few yards away, has been invited by some other fans. We look at each other and agree to go to prison with them.

The police in Uganda wear khaki fatigues and tote AK-47s. The cover story of The Independent this week is about the Inspector General of Police, Maj. Gen. Kale Kayihura, and how the police force is building its muscle as the strong arm of President Yoweri Museveni and his party, the National Resistance Movement. The police used not to play the army's role - and in fact most police did not support Museveni - but now, apparently, it does.

In early June, the police raided the offices of the Democratic Party. Then, two opposition MPs were thrown in jail after staging public demonstrations. A few days later, Kampala District MP Nabila Sempala was touring her district when police dragged her off to jail, all the while tearing at her skirt. In protest, on the day of presenting the 08/09 National Budget, opposition MPs walked out of parliament.

This is bad, but the Independent investigation team expects much worse by the time of the 2011 parliamentary and Presidential elections.

Taking all of this into account, you might expect the police of Gulu Prison to be fearsome types, all scowls. Not true, with all these Manchester fans filling up the reception room. The khaki-fatigued cops are all smiles and handshakes.

Everyone checks their cell phones and Hannah and I check the camera, my notebook and our bags. The group counts itself out, to 21, and without further ado the big door to the prison courtyard opens. Hundreds of young men's eyes greet us.

The first thing I see is a man with no legs wearing a yellow shirt and matching shorts. (Later, I wonder, how does a man with no legs get thrown into prison?) We walk to a canvas tent in the center of the courtyard. I look around at perhaps 400 men in matching yellow shirts and shorts, sitting on the dirt ground, waiting, staring forward. A man with a sinister gaze licks his lips. Another, his eyes buried beneath a brow so furrowed that it looks frozen in place, glares forward. Some of the inmates look soft. Others are shirtless and menacing.

There are some large, metal, steaming bowls at the other end of the courtyard. There's what looks to be a shower area that has been hit by a rocket. There are about eight wide rooms with nothing in them but inmates. And I gather that this decrepit prison contains nothing other than this incredible amount of people, all crammed together and watched by a handful of Kalashnikov-toting cops, penned in by some crusty walls and a very long length of barbed wire.

The fans offer Hannah a chair at the very center of the tent. I sit to her right. The fans place four heavy boxes of soap at the edge of the tent. The deputy warden calls up a skinny, older man in his yellow uniform to translate what's going on from English to Luo. Then, each of us introduce ourselves. The fans all yell something, wait for the response of the crowd, then give short, bombastic speeches, presumably about football.

Then comes the "royal dance," the bwola dance, to entertain the guests of the prison.

The bwola dance used to be performed only in the courts of Acholi chiefs - during their coronations, during special ceremonies, after their deaths. Now the bwola dance goes on in competitions, festivals, at schools, at prisons. Norman Okot, a music and dance trainer at Health, Education, Literacy and Sports (HEALS), a lifeskills program for children, tells me later that bwola is a very special dance of Acholiland.

A man sits on a drum before the tent of fans. He taps out a beat with wooden sticks onto the two drums in front of him. Twenty men in shorts and t-shirts are lined up in two rows off at the other end of the courtyard. A man stands at the lead. He yells out a nasally call, a long and oblique statement in a form of Luo that, some say, doesn't make sense to many Acholi. The men call out a response, deep and guttural.

In unison they kneel down, elbows elaborately placed to their sides, and then move forward, the shells on their ankles jingling. Their arms arc around and each of them hits a small drum in their hand. All twenty of them pop together.

Standing behind them, a man in a ragged shirt slams on a giant drum. The call is still oblique and nasally, the response deep and guttural. They all creep forward in short and majestic stride. The cycle continues and then, without warning, everything comes together.

Now they are in yaro, the true shape of bwola, a fierce and ornate circle that consumes the man at the drum. The two drummers converge and make a galloping beat. The circle is swift. Lean male bodies gleam with sweat. Vigorous but ornate, synchronized perfectly, their shells jingling at their ankles. The arms of the prisoners arc around in unison and hit twenty small drums. Pop.

Hannah sits at the center of the tent, one leg crossed over the other. She tells me later that the experience felt colonial. The men, she said, seemed to be dancing only for her.

A cloud of dust swivels around the dancers as they reach acura, the climax. The Manchester fans around them join in the dance, angling themselves to widen the circle, kneeling down and trotting forward, clapping their hands in unison. A hefty fellow in a red jersey blows into a flute made of animal horn, an obute, wiggling his fingers. There is a loud, high-pitched, two-tone cry.

The Manchester fans invite me to join, but I turn down the offer. Sammy tells me later that he is disappointed in me. He is a man, he tells me. He dances the bwola because that is what men do.

The galloping of the drums slow and eventually stop. The circle breaks apart. The bwola has come to an end. It is time to leave the laundry soap for the prisoners.

After the inmates give a ceremonial clap as a thank you and goodbye, the fans, Hannah and I exit the courtyard and head back into the free world. The sun is beating down and a crowd awaits us all. Hannah and I, as newly-coronated Manchester fans ("You're a Manchester fan?" countless people ask, to the point that I get sick of explaining myself and just start saying "Yes.") are strongly urged to join the parade in a march towards the hotel at the other end of town. There will be a feast to finish off today's celebration.

Hannah and I are being separated by more and more delighted fans. I wonder about going to the feast - if we will be hit by an inertia of meeting and eating that will spiral off deep into the night, then into next morning, then into God knows when. We break through the crowds and reunite, then slip away and head back to our hotel.

And the parade - banner, marching band, weighed-down pickup truck, indestructible beat of Acholiland, red jerseyed Manchester fans, and all - continues its journey through the day.

Nile Special

Gulu, Uganda. The other day. 3:30 in the morning:

"Peace Return Northern Uganda," a song by the famous Acholi musician Lucky Bosmic Otim, fires out of the P.A. at Havana Pub. Some expatriate friends, Hannah and I are all dancing in the far corner of the dimly lit, modestly-sized, ever-bumping club. I am dancing with myself, convulsing along with the irresistible hooks of Bosmic's entreaty.

I interviewed Bosmic last week, as we sat in front of the church where he sang as a boy, looking out onto the field of his alma mater, Gulu High School, as his two-year-old Jeremiah sat in his lap. He is lean and intense, and his facial features are smooth. He was wearing a grey camo jacket and green, designer camo pants. He did not talk about music or dancing. He started singing the songs he sings, he told me, because he got sick of songs about love. He talked to me about the war. After twenty-two years of war, he said, "We have no legs."

Some reggae comes on and I am disappointed that Bosmic has left Havana. But I've been drinking Nile Special tonight and I want to dance. I groove to the swaying beat. Sam, a computer-science student at Gulu University, a gaunt man with pronounced jowls and a big smile, leans into me. We enjoy dancing, we agree. He asks me where I've been in Uganda so far. "I've been in Kampala. Jinja. Gulu," I say.

In Gulu, many times people have told me grim and deeply personal things without provocation, without my asking, without any reason at all, it seems. Sam's eyes bulge and his expression turns grave. He tells me that Northern Uganda is not the only place that has been affected by the war. He is from Eastern Uganda, east of Jinja, the source of the Nile. Over the blaring of Gulu's ubiquitous dance music, he says that LRA rebels killed both of his parents.

I want to talk to him more, but not here. We grab two plastic chairs from the outside patio area and sit down. Niles are gone, so I buy us both Bell beers. We yell into each other's faces over the music. Madonna is playing when he says that he once prayed to God. "God," he said, "please, save my soul."

He was living in a hut by himself when the rebels came to his village at four o'clock in the morning. They killed his parents in the hut ahead of him. They passed his. Then they burst into the hut of his uncles and cousins. They killed his uncles, he yells at me, and abducted his cousins.

Sam's brother sold cows so that he could attend university. Now, Sam is thankful. Sam puts his trust in God.

I am swaying. I am about to burst. I am drunk and I am in a state of overwhelmed horror. It dawns on me that this moment is special. Something has crystallized. A gravity has hit me. The NGO people have jobs, and the work their jobs. The journalists collect facts, anecdotes and quotes, and write articles. The people who have been hit by this war have lost everything - everything. So many of them still get by, and do what they need to do, regardless. And in the off hours, just like the NGO people and the journalists, they smile, drink and dance.

That's why Sam came to Havana, after all: To wash his body and brain with beer. To let all of his scars seep from him in the ritual of dancing. To forget that his memory contains the sight of killing, a life of struggle, and every other thing that people like me would never understand.

For the moment, I don't desire a place where people get drunk and have insignificant conversations about movies, but I still need to escape. I go to the bathroom. I return to the dance hall and talk with Hannah and Gary, a new friend and a former Marine. Gary tells me that he traveled through "ambush alley" in An Nasiriyah during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It's a historic battle. He says that he'll be happy to talk about it if I get him extremely drunk some time. I give him a hug.

The newspaper once reported that 95% of the people in Gulu drink alcohol. That's probably not true - the women, after all, take care of everything in Northern Uganda, which I will be sure to discuss in depth later - but Gulu is indeed full of bars and clubs. And at night on a Friday, it's not odd to see two men dancing to a radio in the street.

In Gulu, even dancing and drinking is a war story. The fun is too much to bear.

Correction: This entry originally titled Bosmic's song "Peace Return." The title, as it is printed on the cassette I bought in the market, is actually "Peace Return Northern Uganda."

10 mins 20 secs left

That's how much time I have to tell you what's been going on in Gulu and elsewhere since the previous dispatch.

Gulu is boring. There are lots of banks, plenty of general stores and market stands and dozens of bars and clubs. At night the town is dark and all there is to do is drink. Needless to say, we've been drinking and watching soccer a lot lately. There are countless expats here and they are good people to pass the time with.

[30/6/08 I absentmindedly failed to include an important component of the Gulu town late-night lifestyle: dancing. The other night I met Stella, a student at Makerere University, and we danced late into the night. All of the negative energy and stress boiling inside of me seeped out out of me, like rum escaping the skin of an alcoholic. Acholi music at breakneck speed is ideal, but I also loved the dancehall cover of "Fast Car." You win 500 shillings if you can guess why.]

I'm getting used to taking bucket showers.

The other day a team from a local NGO called Caritas took us out to the Olwal IDP camp in Amuru district. The Olwal camp is composed of mud-brick huts with doors bearing the USAID logo. We interviewed about a dozen people who lived in the camp. Their faces and bodies are worn, their skin thick, their features pronounced. An 11-year old boy, his eyes soft and his expression vulnerable, sat with his arms limply hanging between his legs. None of them smiled.

Only when I asked about Joseph Kony did a few of them chuckle, because it is so difficult and disturbing to talk about Joseph Kony that asking about him is almost ridiculous.

There are so many reasons that the residents of Olwal will not or cannot return home - conflicts over land ownership, lack of money and food, lack of infrastructure in their old villages, the carnage that these places have seen, the fear of Joseph Kony and the LRA's return.

Problems of alcohol abuse and domestic violence also haunt the camp. "The ladies have become now the breadwinners," explained Aciro Agnes, a counselor for the Psychosocial Support Progrm of Caritas. "The men have become helpless."

[A man with a thick film of sweat on his face, wearing a sportcoat over his bare chest, walked up to me and gestured at his hungry stomach. The driver of the Caritas truck sauntered over, eating from a bag of tiny sesame seeds, nearly smirking. I assumed that he would pour the man some seeds, but he just kept on eating. You see, the driver explained, this man spent the whole morning drinking alcohol - and now he is hungry. Two Caritas counsellors walked over. This happens all the time, they told me, gesturing at the man. Speaking in Luo, the three of them told the hungry man off. He ambled away.]

All of this is very difficult and complicated to explain. I'm not taking anything for granted anymore. Hannah and I have got some articles in the works, though, so keep your eyes peeled.

Our Silence in the North

Gulu, Uganda. Yesterday:

Gulu is a chill town. The streets are a dusty red-orange, the surrounding bush thick and green. It's sleepy here and easy smiles are everywhere. By all accounts the Acholis love the huge population of ex-pats, who work for NGOs from across the globe. As a matter of fact, things are so very chill here that, if it wasn't for the white Land Cruisers everywhere, bearing labels like "UN" and "Save the Children," you would swear that a war never happened.

It's a whisper sometimes: a man might have a damaged eyeball; soldiers in camo fatigues wait in line at the bank; hordes of songs in Luo speak of peace and reconciliation, but I don't speak Luo. Then there are the screams. On our first night here, the night-time security guard at the Respond ReNUH guest-house mentioned to me that he had spent six years in the bush. He showed me his elbow, frozen in place. "It has no power," he said. He pointed to the scar from a bullet hole in his left shoulder. He showed me the one in his leg. He lifted up his shirt and gestured at the one in his back. Then, he pointed to a few more.

A tank rolled by the house this morning, but, for some reason, I managed to sleep through it. A roommate told me that, should the savage Lord's Resistance Army return to Gulu, then it will be this road which it will pass down.

I'm sitting in a small computer shop, picking out Acholi hits for a mix CD. Local Acholi music - and there is a lot of it - is mostly made on the computer, and it all has a message. For these reasons, I love Acholi music. Best of all, it bears a striking resemblance to the reggaeton that is ubiquitous in Brooklyn. Ken, who is making the mix for me with some of his friends, loves dancehall and reggaeton. "Puerto Ricoooo!" he says. He puts on "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee and the three of us all burst into laughter, then bob our heads.

Hannah has been sitting outside at the curb, chatting. I check on her. She is now sitting in a plastic chair on the corner. She is alone, watching the passerby go about their business.

I know her expression. Every day, the two of us share long bouts of silence. Usually one of us kills it when we look at the other, smile and tell some joke. That or start the first volley of an intense conversation. The silences are getting longer and harder to break. At this moment, Hannah's silence is not composed of boredom or sickness. It is enigmatic and pitch black. I ask her what's wrong and she tells me that things are unbearably sad. She begins to cry.

Within the past half hour, the gravity hit her, in whatever way. Now I am standing here. And I wonder, how do you medicate the impact of an immense sadness? In this circumstance, I can put on a smile and say that things have been OK in Northern Uganda for the past two years, they are OK now, they will probably be OK. I can speak of the positive energy here. Or the two of us can extricate ourselves from the situation and talk, the best option. I say nothing but I stand there, in case I am needed.

I return to get my mix CDs and then return to the corner, where I sit down next to Hannah and an older man. He talks about the instability, uncertainty and fear that permeates Northern Uganda. The thousands of internally displaced peoples around the region were kicked out of their villages and moved into makeshift cities, commonly referred to as "IDP camps," over a decade ago. The people want to go back home, he tells us, and many have already. The NGOs are working hard, but Uganda's government is leaving it to the NGOs, the complications are vast and too many people have no means.

Then there is the fear. The peace talks have fallen apart. The government is calling for a military campaign to get rid of the LRA, now holed up in the Central African Republic and the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Everyone fears the return of the perplexing and maniacal Joseph Kony and his band of child soldiers.

Rumors abound these days. On Monday, the New Vision carried the Page One headline, "SPLA TO ATTACK KONY HIDEOUT." There was a report that the Sudanese People's Liberation Army got in a skirmish with a band of LRA some 40 kilometers from the Sudan-Uganda border. The day after we arrived in Gulu, the logistics manager of the American Refugee Committee told us that one LRA was killed, another injured, and another captured, or something like that, in Okidi. But who knows who is who, he added, since the LRA and the UPDF basically wear the same uniforms? At Da Pub, over Nile Special beers, a man who works at a military hospital said that the 1,000 or so remnants of the LRA break into tiny cells, that they can easily slip past a battalion, and that they are basically invisible. Earlier today, a Gulu local named Anthony, twenty years old, told me that Joseph Kony knows all. He can read your thoughts and anticipate your movements.

Hannah and I go back to the guest house. We take a seat on the porch and I say that we can talk, if she wants. She is about to say something, it seems, when a roommate comes by to chat. Neither of us pay much attention to what she says. She walks off to get her phone. Hannah goes to lie down. Sitting at the porch, I feel the same urge. I then wonder what makes me so exhausted. Yesterday I blamed the sun. Before that I blamed my growing insomnia. But I can no longer explain this exhaustion.

I am alone now with my thoughts, so I get my notebook and write.

First Impressions of Kampala

We land in Entebbe airport and hire a car service to bring us to the International Youth Hostel, right next door to the American Embassy in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

The driver silently mans the wheel while I make conversation with our guide and Hannah gazes out the rolled-down window of our silver minivan. There are wide swaths of green in this hilly landscape. Amidst the lush there are some paved roads, but many are composed of a distinct, dusty, red-orange soil - vibrant even from the plane. Along the roadsides, between conversation, I watch as we make our way past the mish-mash of lean-tos, shacks, and single-story concrete buildings with storefronts selling phone service, Coca Cola, many plastered with Visa card ads. Men and women are going about their business and, as we pass by, children stare at us. We wave and they smile in delight. Here's an interaction that, we can tell already, will prove common in our two months traversing East Africa.

Just before hitting Entebbe, we pass a white mansion at the top of a hill: the palace of President Yoweri Museveni. He is a popular president, our guide says. His claim to fame, she continues, is the creation of a free public education system - which the economist Joseph Stiglitz lauds in Globalization and its Discontents. The system is not perfect, I've read, but at least Uganda's more impovershed folks are able to get some education.

"I'm pretty sure that Museveni has been President longer than I've been alive," I say.

"How old are you?" our guide, riding shotgun, asks.

"Twenty-two."

"Yeah," she says, nodding, then shrugging.

Lately, I've been reading The Daily Monitor online, Uganda's most prominent opposition newspaper. In its op-ed pages, The Monitor never fails to offer explosive critiques of the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement - a title modified from its original name, the National Resistance Army.

"People are tired," our guide says, matter of factly. "They want a change."

As we reach the towns outside Kampala, we pass a military police barracks. Nothing special, just a cluster of dormitories surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, with a gate at the entrance manned by guards. These are the forces called in to put down demonstrations, she says, led by the opposition parties, the most major movement being the Forum for Democratic Change.

You can see the MPs coming from blocks away, because they were unmistakable red head-gear and they wield long batons. Once they reach the crowds, as you can expect, the MPs start swinging indiscriminately. "They don't care who you are," our guide says. Then you're thrown into paddy wagons and dragged off to jail. FDC and other parties have demonstrated in Kampala a lot lately, she continues, and this is usually how things turn out for them.

We are getting closer to the International Youth Hostel. In the city center, we pass a length of wall neatly covered with pro-democracy slogans. "We Are All Ugandans," one says. "Voting Should Not Divide Us."

The van kicks up some serious red-orange dust as we pass down a road that leads us ever closer to the American Embassy and our hostel. "Somewhere, Out There," plays on the radio. We are surrounded by heavy duty trucks of all shapes and sizes - which brings to mind the Amadou and Mariam song "Camions Sauvages" - rickety bodaboda taxi motor-bikes, white matatu vans lined by blue stripes, their conductors hanging out the windows and calling out their destinations, all weaving through traffic in a mad dash towards wherever. Let's just say that the traffic in Kampala is reminiscent of the old cliche "every man for himself."

On the roadside, a man nurses a stove of meat kebabs. Women sit and hawk baked ears of corn. A team of young men lift up a shack and move it closer to the street corner.

Finally, we pass the American Embassy, which looks heavily defended. A man is sitting in the grass along the road, eating porridge and chatting with a woman in a long headscarf. We ask him where we might find the International Youth Hostel. He sort of shakes his head, then walks off and returns with a companion, who instructs us to head up the hill to our left. Further up the hill, we encounter some guys who, asked about the location of our hostel, appear rather perplexed. Maybe it's up there...? But then again, that way, it's just some modest houses. Then, one of them remembers - that hostel, the one we could've booked rooms for online during our hellish 25-hour stay in the Dubai International Airport, closed three years ago. It's just a bunch of new houses now.

Graciously, the driver and our guide bring us to another suburb, up another hill, and into another hostel - this one a bit more famous, listed in the Lonely Planet East Africa guide. Hannah and I check in, set up our little tent and - as we had done during our 12-hour flight to Dubai, and at the airport, and then on our connecting flight, first to Addis Ababa then finally to Entebbe - we pine for sleep.

With all these awkward sleeping arrangements to depend on, sleep has been hard to come by. Something tells me that it will be for the rest of our trip, as well...

Photo: the dogs of Red Chili Hideaway, by Hannah Rappleye

To East Africa We Go!

Hannah Rappleye and I have been showered with love for the past few days, bidding farewell to all of our friends and family. Now, this morning, we're finally off to East Africa. The first stop is Dubai for a day. Then we'll be in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. We'll be checking out Gulu and other parts of Northern Uganda. We're staying with a friend of Rob Buchanan's near Nairobi, Kenya's capital. And of course, we're going to be in Kigali and Gitarama in Rwanda.

We're setting up a blog - haven't gotten around to naming it yet - so I'll post a link once that's up and running. Keep abreast of the latest updates. For words of support, advice, donations, etc., e-mail me at peter.holslin@gmail.com, and Hannah at hannah.rappleye@gmail.com.

We'll miss you all. It's our first time in Africa, but not our last, so wish us two a safe trip, wonderful experiences, and good luck!