Pabbo IDP Camp/Bakers Fort

This is the Rotary GSE team from MN at Pabbo.

This week the Rotary Group Study Exchange team has arrived in Gulu. The team is led by Rotarian Tim Murphy of Minnesota. He is leading 5 young adult professionals on an educational trip around Uganda. The team will do some touring, but they are mainly here to exchange ideas with other professionals in their profession and to experience how professionals like themselves do things in a foreign country. They are in Gulu for seven days.

The huts are built very close to each other with no room for gardens.

It's mango season, and this little tyke is taking advantage of it with one in each hand!

I accompanied the group on Tuesday to Pabbo. Pabbo is the largest IDP camp in Northern Uganda. IDP means individually displaced persons. It is similar to a refugee camp, but people from their own country are not called refugees; they are displaced because of the war. At its peak, 75,000 people lived in Pabbo; there is still about 27,500 people living here. They came from far away villages and farms in the country to be safe from the rebels. They had no choice, because if they stayed out there, they would be killed. But life in the IDP camps was very difficult. They were very over crowded, no sanitation, not enough food or water, no opportunity for employment. Life was dark and dreary. Most existed only on free aid and food handed out to them; it was not the way they wanted to live. These conditions lasted about 25 years. Even when food was given to them, about 2 or 3 days later the rebels would attack the IDP camp to get some of the food. The villagers would always have part of their food hidden out in the bush so that the rebels couldn’t take it all at one time. Another sad fact is that the Ugandan Army would settle in the middle of the camp rather than the edges to protect the village. The Ugandan Army used the village as a shield. The rebels would have to swath through the village killing as they went to get to the Ugandan Army. The whole situation was very dark; both the rebels and the Ugandan army were treating the villagers bad, even raping and killing them at will. Who is the bad guy in a situation like this? Can the bad guys (rebels) actually be the good guys? How horrible is it when both of the conflicting parties are preying on the people? They were in a difficult position to say the least….

Two of the young residents of Pabbo.

Kayla and I are in Baker's home.

Bakers Fort was our adventure this morning. It, too, has a sad story. This is the place that the Arabs kept the slaves they had captured and they would sell them to different countries, or even their own. It was surrounded by an 18 foot mote so that there was no escape. We saw the cave that they kept the women in and the cave they kept the men in. We were shown how a slave was proven to be strong so that he would catch a good price. When a slave got sick or weak, we were shown the place where their head was cut off by the Arabs and the body rolled down the rock into the bush where the wild animals would eat it. The sloped rock really looked like it had blood stains running down it. It was a very touching scene. You could see the marks made into the stone from the sharp blade that cut the heads off. Many, many cut marks were in the stone. Finally, in 1882, a man named Baker rescued the slaves and he became famous. He built a stone house there that we were able to go into. The place became Bakers Fort. It was just a beautiful day.

This is the cave that the women slaves were kept.

The sloping rock where they would cut off the heads of the weak slaves. Blade marks are still visible.

I am very tired today. I was up until 3:30 this morning on the internet, but first I was trying to contact Kayla and get her home at midnight, but I ran out of airtime. She loves the Acholi Pool, and I have a hard time getting her to come home! I was out of airtime, so alone, cold, late, and in the dark, I had to search for a place that was selling airtime for my phone so that I could contact Kayla. It is times like this that I would love a man around the house to send him out into the dark to do errands like this for me. I just don’t like being out after dark in my neighborhood; it is a bit scary…

Frederick is narrarating the story of Bakers Fort.  This is the security check; the entrance.