The Acholi Inn

The chanting grew louder and pulled me from sleep as the rays of the early morning sun trickled in to my room. I pulled aside the mosquito net covering my bed and moved quietly to the nearby window, petrified. Peering out, I listened as the sound of the men’s voices, still chanting in unison, grew closer. The pounding of my heart intensified. It was the first time as an adult that I had felt pure fear.

It took some time to convince myself that I was not the target of the rebels’ anger. Yet, I could not ignore the fact that I was staying in the same hotel as their enemies. I was at the Acholi Inn, a storied hotel in Northern Uganda’s largest town of Gulu. The Acholi Inn had been bombed at some point during Uganda’s two decade conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army. The remains of the original wing of the hotel, built in the 30s under British rule, stood crumbling and the new wing was just behind it. I was in this wing. So too were scores of Ugandan government representatives, some of whom I had shared a dinner with the night before, and who were in town for peace talks with the rebels. The very rebels who did their work during the night and could be heard, as I heard them that morning, returning to the bush in the morning, chanting. Their work, of course, involved mutilation, rape, abduction, pillaging, slavery and other acts of terror against the Acholi people.

So there I hovered, peering out the window, wondering if perhaps the rebels would decide to greet the Ugandan government representatives earlier than scheduled and in not so friendly a manner. As the seconds ticked by, the voices began to fade into the distance and my heart began to calm down. They had passed the hotel and were indeed going back to the bush to rest.

As I sat on the edge of the bed processing the experience and my reaction to it, a truth came to me. The fear that I felt that morning, wondering if the rebels were coming to the hotel and if I was actually in harm’s way, gave my trip greater meaning and my professional aspirations increased clarity. In that moment, I recognized that my fear was minute compared to that instilled in the children who I had come to Northern Uganda to help. Unlike mine, their fear was a constant reality, and it was ingrained in every element of their lives, in every moment of their waking days and sleepless nights. They too lined up together once a day and walked in unison, like the rebels. Except they walked together at night, before sunset, gathering together along the roadsides and leaving their homes or IDP camps to settle into shelters in Gulu town, where their protection against kidnapping by the LRA during their nighttime raids was enhanced by international NGOs such as the one I was working with.

So there I was, newly calm from my abrupt wake-up call, preparing for my day reviewing our work on a food for education program. The program aimed to address the massive influx of children, both accompanied and orphaned, who had some in from the Acholiland countryside to Gulu town to seek relative safety. We were trying to both find ways to accommodate the number of school age children at host schools and also encourage them to stay in schools. Our goals involved infrastructure rehabilitation, the construction of dormitories and the provision of food, among other initiatives. And yet we couldn’t guarantee safety for our beneficiaries-at least three were abducted in the months after my departure.

I looked at the school children that day in a new light. What perhaps was once unacknowledged pity had become respect. These children more than half my age lived a life of fear, constantly under threat, and yet they came to school, did their studies and got on with the business of living. I came away from my time in Gulu knowing that I wanted to do more to help children find safe spaces in their schools-spaces where they could find protection from harm and fear and enhance their cognitive, social and emotional wellbeing.