Orange Dust. That is all I could see through those dirt streaked windows of the small truck five of us were stuffed in. The thick, orange dust that hung over that anonymous African highway dimmed the light of the setting sun. Our only company was the dark shadows of bodies and trucks moving down that endless road. The sweat droplets hung on my forehead as I stared blankly forward into that orange dust. The faces of the people I met past through my mind, their very existence corrupted everything I believed about this world. Children giggling and smiling as they played soccer with empty stomachs. Mothers silently mourning the war that destroyed their lives as they kissed their smiling babies. Their stories echoed through the very pit of my soul.
I distinctly remember one mother, Chol. I spoke to her for only 15 minutes. When she left I was not the same. My interpreter and I sat in plastic chairs waiting for the next mother to be interviewed. We sat in a dark church made of dust and sticks in the middle of the refugee camp on a humid day. The first thing I remember when Chol sat down was her 7-month-old baby. Chol’s baby must have been one of the happiest babies I’ve ever seen. He was smiling, laughing, and bouncing in his mother’s lap as she gave him kisses all over his chubby face. When I looked at Chol, as she kissed her happy child’s face, she had this blank expression. As we progressed through the interview we came to the section about the war. She still had all her attention on her smiling baby. She had these tears sitting on the edge of her eyes as she bounced her little boy in that hot, dark church. After writing a note I looked up to see two streams of tears cutting through the dust on her cheeks. Not a sound besides the happy chatter of her baby and her kisses on his cheeks. I set my pen down and said she was free to go. She got up and was gone.
As we began our first day in the camp we were led through the settlements by the Dinka leaders to witness their living conditions. There was this thin, sickly looking tree providing shelter to an elderly man resting at its trunk. Looking at him you knew he was dying of starvation. You could see the cartilage between his bones and every tarsal in his fingers. He was sitting under that fragile tree, withering away, his cloths stained in orange. When I came to him I knelt down to shake his hand and say hello. He took my hand in a firm grasp, looked me right in the eyes and smiled. He had the most beautiful eyes. He had these light brown eyes with dark stripes cutting down to his pupil as the light blue color of cataracts made its slow descend. As we stayed to speak with him I couldn’t understand how or why he smiled at me while he sat there dying in the dust. In the mist of dying he had joy.
I was working with a small NGO, ChildVoice, to interview young mothers in the South Sudanese refugee camp in Adjumani, Uganda. We were there to interview these women about their experiences in the war and services they needed to improve their living conditions. The strangeness of this space was so unsettling, as the silence of their suffering hung in the humid air. We sat together with these women asking questions about war and disease in homes made of dust as children played and laughed outside. Every woman we interviewed stated that she and her children were sick, and had limited food and shelter. The sole purpose of being there was to listen to the voices of these women, and bring their voices to ChildVoice. The hope was to develop sustainable assistance to help them rebuild their community.
I wanted to encounter social justice by physically moving out to meet the people suffering from diseases and corruption. That was why I was sitting in that cramped truck on that dusty road. To find hope in forlorn regions is remarkable and countercultural to all the fear we are told to believe. I left northern Uganda with a different worldview that did not match the view I was told to believe. I was introduced to mass starvation, displacement by war, war trauma, and terrorism during this trip. However, I experienced the power of hope that exists in all this suffering. The chaos of war and violence is silently combated by the hope these people have for their futures and their children.
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