Karamoja: where people meet but mountains do not

One thing we have observed in our time in Uganda is how real life is here.  In the United States, we live a pretty sheltered life.  News of births usually arrive in our Facebook newsfeeds and deaths on the evening news or, rarely, in our own lives when elderly family members pass away. Conversely, in Uganda, life and death are near daily occurrences with newborn goats and calves everywhere (literally on and beside every road and napping in the shade of each hut) and breastfeeding moms in almost every meeting.   Death also takes on a certain omnipresence in everyday life here.  Hand-carved caskets are sold alongside the roads near health centers.  Carcasses of freshly slaughtered animals hang from stalls in roadside markets.  Our new friends have shared painful stories of young children recently dying in their families.  In the States, such death is an unimaginable tragedy.  Here, it is a daily tragedy.  Having a child die before their fifth birthday is shockingly common.  Uganda has the highest under 5 mortality rate in East Africa with 131 children dying before the age of 5 out of every 1,000 live births.

Nowhere is this reality more striking than in Karamoja, the region in northeastern Uganda that we will be calling home for the next three months, where the under 5 mortality rate is 174 and the poverty rate is 75%, three times the national average. Hunger is pervasive with approximately one in three people not having enough to eat in the districts where we work, five times higher than the national rate.  More than four in ten children are stunted by malnutrition.  The region suffers from chronic and cyclical drought thus receiving international food assistance for over forty years.  The 1980 famine was one of the worst on record with approximately 21% of the population dying, including 60% of all infants.  There have been four major droughts in the last ten years alone, resulting in massive crop failure and loss of livelihoods as animals suffered. Drought has combined with climate anomalies, insecurity, civil unrest, high animal mortality, poor market conditions, a 67% illiteracy rate and many other factors to paint the heartbreaking picture of the Karamoja we live in.
      

A sad history of hunger and suffering is actually embodied in the name of the people who inhabit Karamoja.  Karimojong translates as old thin men who cannot continue on.  The Karimojong are a fierce and proud people with incredibly unique traditions, beliefs and lifestyles.  Traditionally dependent on cattle for their livelihood, much of the population lives a semi-nomadic, pastoralist lifestyle, ushering their cattle across the arid landscape in search of fertile pasture for grazing.  When settled, they often live in villages composed of a few manyattas, communities of huts encircled by a fence of sticks with a very small entrance to protect against bands of cattle raiders from other villages.  While Ugandans in the rest of the country are effusively warm and friendly, the Karimojong are more staid in their demeanor.  However, we’ve found many of them to be pleasant in contrast to reports of a very hostile and abrasive people.  A US Army soldier stationed in Karamoja observed that the Karimojong will offer a friendly greeting, similar to that of other Ugandans, but that a Karimojong will inevitably follow that greeting with an open palm asking what you are going to give him.  This pervasive and deeply ingrained culture of dependency, instilled by generations of outside aid, is one of the greatest hindrances to sustainability and self-sufficiency in Karamoja.  Men are more likely to be seen lounging on their traditional stools, which double as headrests, while their women labor than demonstrating initiative in working to improve their circumstances and enhance their future.

Pearce is grateful for the opportunity to be working on a project that targets this plague of dependency and aims to steadily transform such an unproductive and deleterious mindset.  After decades of free handouts, which have contributed little to nothing towards sustainable or enduring progress in Karamoja, the Ugandan government, in partnership with the World Food Program and implementing NGOs such as Samaritan’s Purse, has moved to a system of conditional food transfer, dependent on productive work.  This Food for Work program not only seeks to instill the dignity and ethic of working to provide for your family but also massively benefits the community as food beneficiaries contribute to public works projects such as building roads, digging ponds and improving agriculture productivity through soil management and conservation.  The project also has a household income support component designed to enhance and diversify livelihoods for food-insecure families.  This includes the provision of drought-resistant crop seeds, promoting the growing of vegetables for both income and dietary diversity, and further diversifying livelihoods by introducing apiary and bio-gas.

Chrissy will be pursuing her passion for maternal child health by working on SP’s MCH project.  As mentioned above, Karamoja has notoriously poor health outcomes for mothers, babies, and children under five years of age with many of the deaths resulting from preventable illnesses, such as diarrhea, malnutrition, and malaria.  The MCH project utilizes the “Care Group Model” of having staff train “health promoters” in the various communities who then each train several groups of “leader mothers” in the villages who in turn teach the other women in their villages about good maternal and child health practices.  Through this model, the project reaches over 35,000 women (virtually all of the women in Napak District) with information on breastfeeding, nutrition, and how to prevent and treat common illnesses.  It’s amazing to see how enthusiastic the women are to learn this vital information for the first time and truly be empowered to take charge of their own health and the health of their babies.  Indeed, even many men and male community leaders are eager to participate in the project, despite the fact that it aims to disseminate knowledge rather than material goods—a novelty for development projects in this region.

Both of these projects seek to instill dignity, self-worth and hope in a people that have been spiritually and economically depressed in a broken society for generations.  Beneficiaries are encouraged and empowered to see themselves as God sees them, as capable and worthy, not trapped and hopeless.

Karamoja has long been infamous for its insecurity and considered forbidden land for travelers.  Road ambushes and armed cattle raids were once extremely common and characterized by indiscriminate killing.  In those days, a warrior might meet a stranger on the road and murder them without cause or provocation, even leaving the victim’s money and other valuables behind, taking only the satisfaction of a kill back to the village.  The common, historical practice of raiding cattle from neighboring villages as a means of survival in a pastoralist culture had become violently enflamed by the introduction of modern weaponry such as AK-47s.  We traveled a beautiful, pristine stretch of road on our way from Kampala that was once the epicenter of frequent killings, of locals and foreigners alike, but today is quiet and secure, a microcosm of progress in the region.

Karamoja has seen a dramatic improvement in safety and security over the last several years, in large part due to a government-led disarmament campaign in 2006 that methodically and forcefully confiscated guns from warriors and villages.  Today, cattle raids between communities still happen regularly but, without the same firepower, are less deadly and more contained.  Without question, prudence and vigilance are still called for, but the acute and once ever-present risks that long plagued Karamoja have been greatly diminished. We do not travel beyond town at night and also live and work within walled compounds with guards present at all times.  We are safe here.

On our first day here, as we marveled at the sporadic mountains towering above an otherwise flat landscape, we were told Karamoja is “where people meet but the mountains do not.”   This gorgeous land that wows and inspires us each day epitomizes the paradox of Uganda observed in the must-read book “Kisses from Katie.”  Karamoja is a place of enormous, breathtaking beauty juxtaposed against immense poverty and desolation.  We love Karamoja.  We love its beauty, its people, its opportunity.  By God’s grace and the mighty transformative power of His love, Karamoja can have a brighter future.  We pray we can be a small part of what He is doing here.  Now, it’s time to get to work.