Lauren and Erin's Blog

The last letter came in September, four months after I'd returned from Uganda for the second time. She wrote about her two year-old daughter who was about to begin school. To give her daughter an education, she told me, was all that she could ever ask for.

Agnes is my 18 year-old Ugandan sister. I met her in an internally displaced persons camp (IDP camp) in July 2007 when I traveled to Uganda for the first time under the auspices of the Jazz for Justice Project (JfJ), which, founded by UT Professor Rosalind Hackett, seeks to use music and the arts as healing and peacebuilding in northern Uganda.

In 2006, a ceasefire halted the hostilities of northern Uganda's 21 year-old civil war between the government and a rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony. The rebel movement began in 1986 in response to President Yoweri Museveni's rise to power by coup and alienation of northerners--more specifically, an ethnic group called the Acholi.

When Kony began to lose civilian support in the mid-90s, he resorted to abducting Acholi children from their homes and schools, brainwashing them, and forcing them to kill as soldiers. In addition, the government forced almost two million northern Ugandans from their homes into IDP camps, where most people still live and where, at the height of the war, a thousand people died every week of disease, violence, lack of clean water, and so forth.

Peace talks failed during my spring 2008 semester in Uganda, but the battle for justice between the Acholi and the Ugandan government still rages. Both the government and the rebels are to blame in the suffering the Acholi have lived with and died of over the past 21 years, but while the two sides toss responsibility back and forth, the suffering in northern Uganda continues. The Acholi are still struggling with trauma. They are still trying to survive in the camps. They are still seen as inferior.

During the spring of 2008, I lived in Uganda, interning at Parliament in the capital before moving up to the northern region, where I lived for the majority of my semester. I connected with the Ministry of Education and spent my time meeting with nongovernmental organization workers and joining school inspectors on their trips to rural schools outside of town. I met up with Agnes the day before I returned to the U.S. in May. It was the first time I had seen her in almost a year.

When I returned home, I jumped right in to planning for our third annual Jazz for Justice Concert, which is held in Knoxville and raises money for our partners, the Northern Uganda Girls Education Network. Since 2006, JfJ has raised over $15,000 for NUGEN.

I leave today for my third trip to Uganda, this time with 10 other UT students. We will spend all of Christmas break there, splitting half the time in Gulu Town (in the north) and half the time in Kampala (the capital). Before returning to the States, we will travel to Rwanda for a few days to visit the genocide memorials.

While the focus of the trip is to further the partnership with the Northern Uganda Girls Education Network, each student will pursue his or her own academic interests by meeting with nongovernmental organizations, hospital workers, educators, politicians, religious leaders, etc.

The University of Tennessee has recently established the Center for Civic Engagement at the newly opened Howard Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy. This trip is intended to jumpstart international service-learning at UT.

My experiences in Uganda have shaped my academic and future professional careers, but more importantly, they've molded my human relationships and the way I see the world and my place in it. Agnes and I have written each other since I first met her back in July 2007. I wrote from my dorm room at the University of Tennessee and she from the nearest post office, since mail could not be delivered to the IDP camp. I wrote about my family and she about hers. We talked about life, education, our futures. I often question how much I, as a young college student, can help support her, her education, her daughter, and her education. I do know, however, that we share our humanity. We share our womanhood. We share a beautiful friendship.

And this is why I keep going back. It's not for the research. It's not for the course credits.

It's for the people.

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I return to my second home today. A home that awaits me with open arms, ready to greet me with warm breezes, the sweet smell of flowers, and the chaos of motorcycle taxi drivers.


Emirembe ("Peace" in Luganda),
Erin