Deep into Africa
Two Hillsdale students spend six weeks in Gulu, Uganda, uplifting and teaching children who live in dangerous times.
Chase Purdy
Issue date: 9/11/08 Section: News
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Sometimes at night, bands of young boys, some only 10 years old, entered the villages with intentions to murder, rape, and pillage. They belonged to the Lord's Resistance Army, a political group rebelling against the Ugandan government.
Any children left standing were swept off to rebel encampments where they learned violence through exposure to the same aggression that ripped them from their families just days before.
Roy Okot sat in the middle of a bedroom, and he looked to the ground, like he always did when a situation grew serious.
"They want boys my age," he said.
Senior Heidi Schroeder sat on the edge of her bed, listening. Junior Katie Hunt showered in a nearby room. Both of them, thousands of miles from home, worked to relate to a culture very different from their own.
They flew into Africa this past summer with different missions. Schroeder hoped to find direction for her life after college; Hunt finally made it to a continent she'd studied since high school. They met Jolly Okot, the woman who created a play-therapy day-school in an effort to educate children and keep them from turning toward violent lifestyles. They spent six weeks with Okot in her school, working in the Health, Education, Art, Literacy and Sports program.
Heidi Schroeder said children were often forced to watch murders, rapes and physical abuse, an activity that ultimately left them desensitized to the crimes.
She explained what would happen if a rebel soldier entered the room.
"A soldier would come in and he'd say, 'OK, you take this knife and cut her lips off,'" she said. "And then the soldier might kill you, but leave me alive to bury you."
It distorts the children's perspective of right and wrong, she said, just one of the reasons people like she and Hunt travel to Africa to help.
On a daily basis they taught in the day school. Schroeder taught math, Hunt chose physical education. Many of the students were past members of the LRA and yearned for positive attention, Schroeder said.
"Just living in that society, they have to build up a wall," she said. "Every one of those kids there has a story. Every one has been through something."
Introducing hope to the children's lives became the goal, and they succeeded by playing games and expressing day-to-day kindness to their students.
Over time, they built friendships, even visited the students' homes.
Hunt remembers visiting the house of one young boy. It was just a small, one-room home, with siblings running all around. She remembers meeting his mother.
"The moment we saw her she was nursing her baby," she said. "She looked worn down, like a lot of the people do, but her eyes were still bright. And she was smiling."
Jolly Okot built the school, but years before she and her father were captured by members of the LRA. She managed to escape after two years of imprisonment, but intimately knows the dangers Ugandan children face first-hand.
Uganda does look to the future, Schroeder said. The president of the country called upon Colonel Walter Ochora, a landowner, to use his 200-acre property to develop a model farm for the country. Ochora then contacted Jolly, who put the colonel in touch with Schroeder. Knowing farmers in the United States, she connected them with Ochora.
He is currently visiting the U.S. to learn farming techniques from American farmers. Ochora also intends to visit the college today and deliver a speech about the state of Uganda.
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