In a few short hours, I will be flying off to Uganda. No one is more surprised about this than I am. I don’t just go to Uganda, or anywhere else (except maybe the supermarket when we’ve run out of milk). And yet here I am. ‘I can’t help with tuck shop for the first two weeks of June.’ ‘There won’t be a Booktime Brunch show next week.’ ‘I can’t help with that, I’m sorry, I’ll be away.’ I’m missing youngest’s concert and the finals of the Shakespeare speaking competition at the 10yo’s school, in which the 10 yo is performing as Launce the servant in Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is essential that you have seen a production, or at the very least are thoroughly familiar with the plot of the play from which your speech is taken. Two Gentlemen of Verona? No one knows the plot of Two Gentlemen of Verona. I bet the actors who have performed the entire thing aren’t thoroughly familiar with it either. But we do know that Launce is a loving and exasperated dog-owner who, when his naughty ungrateful dog Crab wees under the dining table, lets himself be whipped instead of allowing his dog to be punished. We love Launce. Launce is kind, even though it costs him dearly. My sister has a naughty ungrateful dog we all adore; it’s our first foray into method acting, and I’m so proud of my boy I could burst. But I won’t be there.
Ten years ago, my beloved friends Rose Mary and David set up a charity. They called it Third Hope, and their plan was to work with the local community in a small village in Northern Uganda to facilitate the return and rehabilitation of the children who had been abducted by Joseph Kony and forced to kill and torture and maim and fight. Not only strangers, but their own families, their own communities. The people who loved them, whom they loved. The war was over, Kony in hiding, the child soldiers grown into traumatised, haunted adults with no idea of their place or meaning in this new world where everyone wanted to just forgive and move on. Many had tiny children of their own.
Forgiveness is a complicated beast. If you abuse me, I can forgive you, but if your abuse of me is (as it surely must be) rooted in complex trauma in your own past, my forgiveness can only go so far. You need to engage with that trauma and forgive yourself. Because I tell you this from my heart – what happened to you wasn’t your fault. Any more that what you did to me was mine. But you still did it. However willing my heart is to let it go, my body can’t. It will never forget the marks you laid upon it, any more that yours can forget the marks laid upon yours. And the chances of us being able to heal and forgive on our own, with no expert help, no place of healing, are next to nothing.
Rose Mary and David dreamed of a place of safety, where the returned children could be welcomed, where expert counselling would help them understand themselves, where vocational training and basic education would be a part of a carefully and mindfully constructed programme of recovery. They didn’t just dream. They acted. And I was honoured to take on the role of trustee, and not only to donate means but to act as a sounding board for their ideas, and a consultant on the educational side of things, and a place of refuge for them as they wrestled, hand to hand, with the obstacles – physical, political, emotional, financial, personal – of bringing healing to the former child soldiers of Northern Uganda.
There is an embryonic village now, built by local people, using local materials and methods. There is no electricity, but there’s a water supply now, built for the village but shared with its neighbours. Groups of returnees participate in training, counselling, activities. After ten years of strife and failure, of progress and setbacks in almost equal measure, Third Hope is alive. New trees are literally binding together the dry earth and making it green. Beans ripen and feed the community. It is a work of constant challenge, and I am both nervous and thrilled at the thought of sharing in it for a short time, of meeting the people about whom I have heard so much, of discovering the truths of the trials which I suspect Rose Mary and David of underreporting, pillars of honesty and grace though they are. The project has grown such that the fundraising aspect of trusteeship, which I have largely ignored because it makes my skin crawl, and because white saviourship is a real thing from which Third Hope could not be further, and because it’s easier to stick my fingers in my ears and say lalala than ask for money, is one I must engage with if more returnees are to benefit.
And so I leave my family in the capable hands of their father and his parents, and I fly off to work and to listen and to learn. I don’t know the plot; I’m not sure I understand anything much except the need to be kind, even when it costs us.
Please be here when I get back x
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