I am in danger of being sent home if I don’t get another $700 in my support account by Oct 31st, please consider supporting y mission. God bless you!
Today we were driven up north, deep into the mountains past where the paved roads end. The crops are failing this year because there has been too much rain, so you can imagine the state of the dirt/mud roads. As we went we saw sporadic thatch roofed huts and people in their fields, up until 2007 about 10 square miles worth of families lived in a camp about the size of A high school football stadium. They were sent to live in the camp by the Ugandan government because the LRA, a religious cult/ rebel group were a great danger, and the people lived too far apart for the government troops to protect them effectively.
The LRA, Lord’s Resistance Army, terrorized the people of Uganda for over 20 years. They were notoriously brutal, using a mixture of witchcraft, Satanism and Christianity to gain followers initially. They would rape, pillage and murder whole families and villages, and abduct the children, after forcing them to murder their own parents or siblings, to use them as soldiers. Kidnapped soldiers as young as 7 years old would be carried off into the African bush, frequently to the neighboring country of Sudan to make escape nearly impossible, those who tried to escape were beaten severely if the were lucky, if they were not lucky they were tied up and chopped piece by piece until they died in front of their friends.
The people living in the camps were unable to work their land because of the constant threat they faced from the LRA if they left the camp, so that sat concentrated in extreme poverty subsisting on handouts from the UN and other world welfare organizations. On Feb 21st 2004 LRA rebels attacked the camp and in under 2 hours killed over 370 men, women and children. The official stated number is only 121 but in the months and years after the massacre, bodies and skeletons were found in the surrounding fields bringing actual estimates closer to 400 people. Women were widowed, children orphaned, a lot of the orphaned girls ended up either raped and pregnant or becoming prostitutes because there was no one to care for them so men would just follow them home and attack them knowing there was no one there to protect them. This place was hell for so many people any yet standing there I can’t believe that the lush green overgrown fields we stand in have ever contained anything but cotton and beauty.
Its strange to me but life seldom truly makes sense to the world, the people who have been through these things, who have spent the last 20 years living in a war torn country, who are struggling to get their land back, who are scraping to feed their families, who can’t afford to send their children to school are most giving and grateful people I have ever met. They worship the Lord with fervor that I can’t imagine Americans, myself included, capable of. They aren’t miserable, they don’t feel sorry for themselves, they are happy and loving, they don’t want a handout they want empowerment.
