XV. Connecting in Uganda

Despite that I was not quite done with my doctoral program at the time, when Cole P. Dodge called to see if I would come to work for the UN in Uganda for a few months in 1983, I jumped at the chance. True to form, he assigned me the toughest place in the country in which to work on the cleanup after the coup that deposed Idi Amin. Karamoja was an exciting, incredibly beautiful, exotic, and lawless place that would teach me many good lessons. It was the part of the country through which Idi Amin’s army retreated before entering Sudan and leaving Uganda forever. Idi Amin died in Saudi Arabia, the "great" ally of the U.S. in the Middle East, in 2003.

The Karamajong, are a nomadic population of herdsman who were the “beneficiaries” of the looting of the Moroto Armory from which thousands of AK47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition were “liberated” by Amin’s army. About the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, in the early 1980s Karamoja (on the map it consists of Kotido and Moroto Districts in Northeastern Uganda) had a population of under 100,000, the highest infant mortality rate ever recorded on earth (>600/1000 live births); the highest proportion of children under 5 years old in its population, kids less than twice this age toting AK47s, and severe proneness to famine and malnutrition on a scale unknown in its history.

Welcome James! Cole said with a broad grin after assigning me a Baganda driver (also named James), a Land Rover, enough fuel to last a couple of months, and so much cash that it took what seemed like several hours to stuff it into every crevice of the vehicle. I got to be very good friends with James over this time and in the next year, too. However, I still feel a bit of guilt in my complicity (more like acquiescence, perhaps) in the adventure on which I agreed to go and Cole had so elegantly planned.

My job was to assess the situation; including weighing and measuring thousands of children and working with the World Food Programme to get food to feeding centers in the region over roads that were so bad that it might take 2 hours to go 10 kilometers and where, only half facetiously, we would say that you could tell a drunk driver because he would drive (or at least try to drive!) in a straight line. We maintained a small fleet of Bedford Lorries with which to move the food around and a huge inventory of spare parts as we were constantly breaking major suspension parts (especially springs), wheel bearings and parts of the drive trains (usually drive shafts and differentials). Looting was common and there was a constant sense of excitement in the air. I have many tales to tell of that time, but I do not want to get too far off course from my theme of famine and drawing connections from local experience to world events.

I had lots of time on those long African nights to reflect on the situation of famine, violence, and the oppression of poverty and its twin sister, ignorance. There were a few foreigners working in the region and they were generally very colorful figures – ranging from Catholic Priests and Nuns, a couple of Italian doctors, Medicin sans Frontieres volunteers, and the UN staffers who were usually Irish, Scandinavian, French, or Australian. I would go to Kidepo to spend the warm days and cool nights of these tropical highlands writing my reports and thinking about the things I had seen. Kidepo was just south of the Sudan frontier and it had been crown jewel of the East African Game Parks before it fell victim to civil war. I could hear large gun fire on some of the nights, but for the most part it was remote and a relatively peaceful place to collect my thoughts.