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From:
ACET Newsletter, October 1999
Robert Mortimer, General Secretary
of ACET International, visits a rebel area of Uganda and finds ACET
at work there. |
| Kitgum lies in the
north of Uganda between the Albert Nile and the Sudanese border.
Until recently it has been unsafe to travel there because of rebel
fighters, but ACET has a small team working in Kitgum and my recent
visit enabled me to meet them and to experience, first hand, some
of their work. About 500,000 people live in this region the size
of Wales where one in ten is HIV positive.
Flying in with MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) pilot Brian in
a six-seater Cessna, we landed on a mud and grass strip to be greeted
by a group of the locals collecting mail and supplies. Kitgum is
a small town that has all the appearance of once being thriving;
but now run down. In 1996 ACET was asked by UNDP and the Ugandan
Government to work in Kitgum on an AIDS Prevention and Poverty Reduction
Programme and initially two hundred community workers were trained.
The work now is in schools, with women's groups, men's drinking
clubs and in the community. I visited one primary school at a village
called Opette where there are 20 teachers for 1438 pupils. Although
most of the pupils seemed to know that HIV and AIDS is a problem
there was little comprehension about its effect, but by the end
of the lesson there was a reasonable grasp of the key issues.
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| Close
to Kitgum lies the Palabek Internally Displaced Peoples' Camp (IDPC).
Prior to 1997 rebels near to the Sudanese border killed some villagers
and burnt their homes. Many fled and set up new homes near to garrisons
of the Ugandan army. There are seven such camps across the region,
some occupied by 15 - 20,000 people - at Palabek there are 11,000.
Some of the women leave the camp for the day and go to their home
village to tend the land, returning to the security of the camp at
night. The camp is divided into blocks; each block creating
a village with 900 - 1,000 inhabitants who have built their
own traditional houses. There are six primary schools and a medical
centre. There is an organised administrative leadership structure
with the camp run by the Directorate District Health Service. There
is some free food distributed by Oxfam, who are also involved with
sanitation, water supplies and clinical/health services. However this
is subsistence living presenting problems with sanitation, sexually
transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies - ten in school so far
this year.
For the young people the main entertainment is the disco, which
arrives twice weekly from Kitgum 20 miles away. The cost of going
to the disco is 200 shillings (about 10p) and as the a condom costs
500 shillings (25p) it is hardly surprising that the use of condoms
is not an acceptable practise and there is very little safe sex.
When I left we arranged for the ACET manager and field trainer
to meet with the camp leaders to discuss an HIV/AIDS awareness programme.
Our final morning was spent discussing the design of an intervention
programme targeted at the young people and the women with the aim
of reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Our flight back to Entebbe from Kitgum was in a slightly larger
ten seater MAF Cessna Caravan and the presence of a nun behind me
was a source of comfort as we flew through the edge of a storm!
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Uganda > Kitgum