They are interconnected in a most beautiful way…it is the connection between a proud and dynamic people group, and the woman who tirelessly served them with her life. One I met, the other we memorialized, and it all happened in July up in Kitgum, Uganda.
The Acholi are a people group in northern Uganda. They are a proud people; one does not see the same street-side chapati vendors lining the streets of Gulu as they do in Kampala, for it is said the Acholi are too proud to condone such a livelihood as selling food on the side of the road.
Northern Uganda is quite separate from the area around Kampala and central Uganda, which is populated by the Buganda tribe, coated in cherry red earth, and full of hills of lush green. The further north you travel, however, the land becomes flatter and browner, and seas of tall elephant grass replace the towering jungle trees of the rest of Uganda. This is the bush. It spans in all directions, as far as the eye can see.
My first experience with this landscape occurred in the middle of the night under a full moon in July. The moonlight illuminated the vast expanse of grasslands and bushes…it seemed to stretch on forever in a state of eerie mystery. What was out there?
I had heard stories, read books, and watched internet videos concerning the infamous LRA, or Lord’s Resistance Army. For decades, leader Joseph Kony and his rebels scoured the north. They ransacked villages, aimlessly looting and killing. They kidnapped thousands of young boys and girls. The boys were often made to kill their families on the spot before being abducted, and the girls were taken as sex slaves for the rebels. Many lived for years in captivity, giving birth to children at ages as young as 12 and 13.
This isn’t a pretty narrative. I don’t know if you’ve heard it before…Kony has had his day in the media within the last few years, and the plight of child soldiers has become something of a buzz topic among humanitarians. And all this I knew. In fact, it was a large reason I had become interested in Uganda in the first place. I scoured books, magazine articles, personal accounts, YouTube videos, and more, all in the hopes of wrapping my mind around the decades-long horror that has only recently calmed down in northern Uganda. That very day we drove up to Kitgum, I had even just finished yet another book on the subject.
Yet, somehow, nothing prepared me for my night drive through the bush. We passed through ghost towns, once bustling centers of oasis on the road north, now rendered empty and abandoned after rebel attacks. I had never been through so recent a war zone.
Though some people question the language we should use to refer to what went on in northern Uganda for the past few decades (indeed, most people from Kampala who I brought up the subject with used the words “no big deal” to refer to the past LRA activity in the north), as we drove from Gulu to Kitgum, the epicenters of the action, I considered it an unquestionable war zone.
It might’ve been my imagination. It might’ve been the moonlight. It might’ve been the way that I grabbed snacks out of my backpack to “eat my feelings,” but, in short, I was afraid.
I looked out into the bush and the expanse of elephant grass and shadow and I saw the ghosts of groups of boys clinging to life, carried so far from their home villages and in such a tireless, confusing manner that they couldn’t possibly find their way home again. I saw young girls nursing babies fathered by cruel, drunken rapists, dreaming of the possibility of escape, but knowing it would put the newborn life of their baby in serious peril. I saw terror, coming from the human capacity for evil and the unforgiving conditions of the African landscape.
If I had had a different experience when we finally got to Kitgum, I might still feel that terror.
By God’s hand, however, the sun rose that morning. It rose on my fears. It rose on my doubts. And it rose on the lump in my throat and the rock in my stomach that reminded me of the power of evil.
The week we spent in Kitgum was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. And it all had to do with people.
As I’ve mentioned, Acholiland has been ravaged by savage war (some say, even approaching genocide) for decades. However, more than any people group in Uganda, they are also crippled by the other side of the African double-helix of suffering: HIV/AIDS.
It is for these reasons, the devastation of war and AIDS, that has been the genesis of a popular saying about the Acholi people: “Acholiland is the land of the invisible children.”
Children who are invisible because they were born to parents with AIDS, or orphaned by them. Children who are invisible because they were stolen from their villages and forced to kill and be killed for no reason.
It’s an incredibly tragic saying, and even that is an understatement.
However, I was more impressed with what I saw from the Acholi people than what I couldn’t see. Every night of the crusade, I saw Acholis show up by the tens of thousands for a touch from Jesus Christ. I saw students in pressed red uniforms, and mamas carrying their babies tied on their backs, and young men eager to help out with anything our crew needed.
I got the chance to make friends with one of those young men. On the first night of the crusade, I was passing a group of university-aged boys, and something told me to go over and shake their hands. I struck up a conversation with one of them, who had an infectious smile and an impossibly kind face. We got to talking and I ventured to ask if he saw any LRA conflict during his life. It was a journalistic impulse, and I almost talked myself out of asking such a forward question, but in the end I’m glad I did.
My question warranted a sad smile. My new friend proceeded to tell me that he and several other family members were kidnapped by the LRA almost a decade ago. His mother was used as a cook, and he and his father carried supplies for the rebels. He described some of what he saw during that time.
The memories of mutilation, barbarity, and death were fresh in his memory and he struggled to share it (as I will refrain from sharing here).
His story is hopeful, however, as he and his parents managed to escape into the bush and flee the army. They lived of the land for weeks; his mother conjuring whatever sustenance she could glean from the land. They found a main road and followed unfamiliar signs and billboards until they recognized one, and followed it home.
Now my friend is in technical school. The abducted years of his life have stunted his education, as was the case with the friends he also introduced me to, but he was optimistic about the future. When he shared some of the particularly horrifying parts of his story with me, though I could see the pain straining his eyes, he wanted to offer comfort to me, of all people. Joy radiated from a face that only seconds ago was haggard and weary as he told me “Don’t worry! I am born again!”
He clung to unwavering hope in Jesus Christ. Every twist and turn of his remarkable story involved a comment of the goodness of God. He was impatient to begin worshipping at the crusade that night…his joy was too much to keep inside.
Unfathomable joy in painful circumstances. It makes me choke up to just remember my interactions with my friend every night. Here was a young man whose family and people had been terrorized his whole life…for no reason. He survived being abducted, but with deep, throbbing emotional scars and trauma. But Jesus was restoring him every day. And the crazy thing is that he knew it. He knew it and to him, that was all that mattered in the story of his life. He is unashamed of the evil in his past, because he knew that Christ has already defeated evil, already defeated death.
I think all you or I can say is “wow.”
But his is not nearly the only hopeful story I have to share from Kitgum. The other is the reason we were there in the first place…the story of Mama Irene Gleeson.
As a young girl growing up in Australia, Irene Gleeson was obsessed with Jesus. However, her painful upbringing of poverty and loss brought disillusionment that caused her to abandon her faith. It wasn’t until many years later, after a time of desperation and seeking, that she actually picked up a Bible and gave God a second chance in her life.
That chance became the key to the well-being of thousands of Acholi children. Irene felt God calling her to move to northern Uganda, and in 1991, she obeyed. She packed up a little trailer camper and drove to Kitgum, just 40 kilometers from the Sudanese border.
And she began life.
| Mama Irene's Camper |
Not knowing exactly what to do or where to start, she began gathering the aimless street children under a mango tree every evening to teach them songs. The small but powerful voices of the little ones filled the night air, and Irene felt the peace of God. This is where she was supposed to be. Next, she started to teach them to write their names…
…and decades later, by the miraculous provision of the Lord and generous outside donations, the Irene Gleeson Foundation has helped house, clothe, feed, educate, and treat over 8,000 youth, many of whom were child soldiers or abductees themselves.
Mama Irene was alone when she moved to Uganda. Her husband had left her, and she left the only place she knew as home to start a life without running water, without electricity, without any human comfort except the presence of Jesus.
And that lonely, determined woman ended up with thousands of children, and tens of thousands of people who have been touched by her obedience, courage, and unfathomable strength.
I can’t imagine the kind of faith it took for Irene to say “yes” to such a call. Sometimes, God expands our hearts so big that when we see the suffering of His little ones, it breaks almost as much as His does. We begin to see visions of ravaged families and babies with the protruding bellies of malnutrition and flies crawling on them. We see people without a concept of hope, whose emptiness gnaws at them like the rats that live in their makeshift hut. Like millions of us, Irene saw these things. But unlike most of us, she decided to do something about it. And that something involved all of her resources, and the rest of her life.
Irene died from cancer last year. The crusade was thus a memorial to her, and will be continued every summer.
Touring the campus of the Irene Gleeson Foundation, attending service at her church, and meeting the scores of people whose very lives she saved was humbling and so hopeful. It reminds me that small acts of obedience to the will of God can turn into something monumentally large and impactful.
The Irene Gleeson Foundation has utterly transformed the city of Kitgum, bringing heath care, education, provision, and the Gospel to a hopeless Acholi people.
And the best part is, Irene didn’t bring all those things with her from Australia. It wasn’t like she could stow them in her pop-up camper and tow it up from Kampala. No. The seeds and the potential for that sort of revolutionary hope were already scattered through Acholiland. Irene just met God there and started helping Him cultivate.
Jesus talked about how the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. It’s as true today (maybe even more true) as the day He said it. But I am so glad of one thing…Irene Gleeson answered that call to the harvest. It took excruciating strength and fortitude and immeasurable courage, but I’m so glad she did.
It makes me think of my own life…is there anyone I’ve come into contact with who can say the same about me? That they’re glad I was obedient to God’s call, because if I wasn’t their life would be drastically different? I can’t say for certain that I know, but that’s what I want to strive for. When I reflect often on my life, I don’t want to ask myself “how’s my faith working for me?” I want to ask “how is my faith working for other people?”
Irene’s faith worked for other people. For thousands of other people.
And those people have changed my life. In hearing stories of their tireless devastation, and seeing people with missing limbs and dismembered hands and feet because of the brutality of the rebels, the last thing I expected was joy. But there was an abundance of it, more than I’ve ever felt in my life.
One afternoon, after the crusade had just started for the night, it began to rain. This was a true African rainstorm; the kind where Mufasa rolls in with the dark clouds and lets out a torrent of thunder and buckets of violent rain. People fled for cover under anything they could find. But the majority of the thousands who were there that day did not flee.
The rain soaked the earth and everything on it, and the Acholi people danced.
I ran to join them, mud soaking my shoes and water gushing down my hair into my eyes. And two young women took my hand and we danced, and sang, and jumped, and laughed and ran and danced and danced. The mud was getting deeper and the thunder louder, but the joyful cries of the Acholi rang out in the air.
They were praising Jesus.
| A small portion of the Kitgum crowd that showed up every night! |
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