Grim Future for War Orphans

Although optimism has spread across northern Uganda after more than a year of relative peace, prospects for hundreds of war orphans seem miserable.



Amid growing confidence in the peace process, refugee camps in the north of the country are being dismantled, with tens of thousands of displaced Ugandans free to return home.



Orphans still living in refugee camps, where they often struggle to get by, are worried about what will happen to them when they eventually have to leave.



Scovia Akello, 16, sitting in front of her dingy hut at Koch Goma refugee camp in Amuru, said she was concerned about what she could feed her hungry brothers and sisters.



“My mother was killed three years ago when she had gone to [look for food],” recalled Akello. “She was deaf, so she couldn't hear gun shots as people took off for their lives. My father also passed away this year, so I am the only 'mature' person in this house.



"There is no food and I don't have money. I don't know what we shall eat today. I have four other sisters, and seeing them hungry [plays on] my nerves even more."



Akello does not know where she and her sisters will go once the refugee camp where she lives finally closes. She knows little about her home village or her relatives.



"My mother once said our village is in Olwiyo, but I don't know where the village is. I don't even know anyone there, not even where our home was once located,” said Akello.



Close by her hut, fourteen-year-old Everlyn Apiyo watched over her three younger sisters.



"We can't go to school because there is no money for books, yet there is free primary education," said Apiyo, as tears filled her eyes.



Like Akello, Apiyo also does not know her home village. “My father was abducted by the rebels in 2003,” she said. “My mother died of AIDS this year.”



During the peak of the insurgency, as many as 30,000 children, known as “night commuters”, would trek from their villages every day to shelters in local towns because of fears that they would be abducted in nighttime raids by the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA.



The night commuter shelters - there were 21 in the Gulu area alone - functioned as homes for many orphans, but as fighting died down and security improved, the centres have closed, leaving them with nowhere to go.



Denis Olanya, 11, once sought refuge in one of these shelters, and now depends on a relative who, he says, mistreats him.



“My mother died of Ebola in 2000. My father was a soldier; he killed himself after a fight over money. We were three children, but two died of measles. I am now alone," said Olanya.



Olanya spends his days on the street with other boys gathering empty plastic water bottles in and around Gulu.



"Some elderly people bully us at night,” he said. “Thieves also disturb us. They grope at us in the dark and check our pockets, and take away any little money we have raised.



"I sleep under the veranda with my friends because my aunt mistreats me at home. If I don't take money home, I am not given food. Even when I take money home, I am only given food, not bed sheets.”



Many orphaned girls whose refugee camps and night commuter shelters have closed have ended up in towns where they resort to prostitution in order to survive.



An August 2007 survey by the ministry of health and the World Health Organisation in the northern districts of Apac, Gulu, Kitgum, Lira and Pader, revealed that girls as young as 11 years old are in the sex trade.



"I would rather die of HIV/AIDS, because through sex I can at least buy basic commodities like salt, soap and sanitary pads," a 17-year-old girl in Lira told the New Vision newspaper.



Others said they offered sex for as little as 200 Uganda shillings (11 US cents).



Drug addiction among war orphans forced onto the street is also a growing problem.



A month ago, some 30 street children went on the rampage, throwing stones and debris. Officials said later the children were high on drugs.



Immaculate Akello, a psychiatrist at Gulu mental health unit, told IWPR, “Four of the children were brought here and we diagnosed that they had taken some mirungi [a plant that contains some quantity of cocaine]."



Akello said such children often develop behavioural and emotional problems that turn into mental illness if not properly handled.



"The children … might end up as law breakers, drug addicts, become depressed and fail to adjust with normal life,” she said.



Gulu town officials say that about 200 orphaned children are now on the streets and in the area’s refugee camps. Unlike most others in the north, the prospects of peace have brought them little hope for the future.



Caroline Ayugi is an IWPR journalist in Uganda.