BUDUDA LANDSLIDES UPDATE
More than 300,000 people are still inhabiting an area exceedingly vulnerable to more landslides. The destructive ones in March that destroyed the villages of Nametsi, Namakansa and Kuwembo about 30 kilometers from where Mike and I live in Mbale killed close to 400 people. Most of those people are still buried in ten feet of mud, with little hope that their bodies will ever be recovered for the burial their families want for them.
Kids caring for kids.
5,000 people, representing some 900 families are crammed into two IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps at the foot of the mountain. There are more than 80 pregnant women, at least 40 children orphaned after losing both their parents in the landslid, and fewer than 130 tents to house everyone.
Diseases, long wiped out in the West, have broken out due to the cramped conditions and poor hygiene. Early each morning, lines begin to wrap around our clinic of people with new cases of cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea and dysentery. HIV testing is still lacking, even though, statistically, one out of every ten people is infected.
Reading about IDP camps and experiencing life in an IDP camp are tremendously different. They’re nothing like the picture we conjure up in our minds when we think of "camp."
Bathing and laundry.
They are certainly not a new phenomena to the African people, especially in Uganda where nearly 2 million people had been packed into camps upcountry for more than 20 years, fleeing the effects and dangers of the Lord’s Resistance Army.
But this impermanent way of life has little to offer. While the villagers' livers were difficult before, they are far worse now. They cannot cultivate anything, raise anything, produce anything. They wait for the trucks to bring food; tankers to bring water. Without them, they will simply die. The children are malnourished and too tired and hungry to attend the one makeshift school in the camp.
By the time the teachers have made the 10km trek to the camp to bring some normalcy and education to the children, they are weary and strain to perform.
Firewood is scarce and families are given only a small ration of it to cook their one meal a day. Children especially have been susceptible to illnesses from eating foods like red beans and rice not cooked properly because the heat runs out long before they’re cooked through.
Psycho-social counseling is non-existent, and people are eft to their own devices to work through the grief of losing parents, children, and entire families.
Women and children are vulnerable and many arrests have been made for rape and defilement.
Scores of aid organizations have landed in Bududa: the UN, Shelter-in-a-Box, WFP and Save the Children, to name just a few. But the real help has come from the local Ugandan people.
It has been phenomenal to see. Churches uniting to collect food, clothing and dishes; Young Talent Uganda teaming up with a local radio station organizing a concert to collect funds, shoes, and household items; and recently some businesses in Kampala planned a 10km run, donating food and money to the victims and their families. Residents from neighboring communities have kicked in; people whose sole belonging is a jerry can to collect water or one cooking pot, have taken a large portion of their own harvest to share; Muslim groups and Christian groups have pulled together organizing distribution of food and medicine.
Churches united to send supplies.
And while this has been heartwarming, there is still much to do in Bududa, least of which is finding a new place for 300,000 people to live and farm. This is a serious challenge to the Ugandan government.
To understand this a little better, we need to understand what the land means to the people.
For people living in the village, there is nothing outside their calico curtained doorway than their piece of land. No one thinks about the big city 200km away, because it is impossible to get to anyway. Here, food is grown, water is fetched, firewood is collected. Women go into labor and deliver babies on the mud floors of their homes; the same mud floor serves as the hospital when someone falls ill, and generations of the family are buried on that same plot of land.
They consider their land the province of their ancestors; they bury their dead close to their homes, sometimes underneath the floors of the huts they live in. They believe their ancestors watch over them, counsel them, intervene for them.
In Africa, ones land is their source of life. It’s sacred. And it is really all they have.
Not only do families live close to one another, but tribes live in very close proximity to each other. They have the same customs, believe in the same culture and traditions, speak the same language.
Two sick babies and a tired mom.
So it is not that the government must now simply find a place for 300,000 people to live, but 900 families, all from the same tribe who need enough land to live close to one another, and have space to harvest enough food to feed their families. Sustenance farming is all they know.
Our fear is such a place does not exist in this small country brimming with 32 million people. And after tiring of the vile living conditions in the camps, and giving up on the government to realize any solutions, people will simply go back to their perilous land, waiting for the next catastrophic landslide.
But there’s hope. We are holding on to the vision that God has given us for the Light Village. We believe it will model a new, sustainable way of life in Africa. Alternative cooking fuels, economic development training and unconventional farming approaches to raising Tilapia are at the top of the list of programs we will be launching first at the Light Village.
One City Ministries is continuing to make advances in creating a sustainable difference in the villages we work in: Mbale District, Manafwa District and Bududa District. The value of sustainable projects is that they empower communities to work out solutions to their own problems. We believe that 'charity is not always the answer,' and, as such, the importance and success of partnering with the local community is critical. When we merely go into a community and hand out aid, we encourage reliance on us as a charity. Instead, we teach the community leaders with whom we work to focus their energy on what they can accomplish with community-initiated goals.
Want to be part of making a difference in the future of Uganda? Contributions are needed for the next two months in our Bududa clinic, and ongoing contributions are needed for the construction of the Light Village. Have questions about the programs? Email us at deb@onecity.ws or mike@onecity.ws
With love from Uganda,
Mike and Deb
"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." Edmund Burke Make a difference.
