I went out to visit some former child soldiers in their homes in Obalanga. It's so easy to say that sentence, but what's involved in it all is so hard to explain. The roads, or lack there of, the heat, the distances, the sights, the poverty, the cooking etc...each thing could be described in so many words, but let me just leave it like that. So we were driving down one of those "roads" that an american would call a foot path and we had just finished eating chicken and eggs and atapa and chai and other things which resulted in very full stomachs. I say we because I was with a local pastor called Samson and a youth leader called Thomas. We had bounced down the foot path for a short distance, when I hear from the back seat, "Remember there is someone in the back seat who has had his large intestine operated on." Granted the man had had a major surgery on his intestine, but a simple, "could you slow down please" would have worked just as well, or maybe even better as it would have taken less time to figure out what he meant by the statement. It's probably one of those had to be there kind of things, but it made me laugh. And laughing here is a necessity of survival.
If I think of the previous conversation that we were having in the hut before bouncing down the footpath, maybe I was ready for some laughter. The father of the former child soldier we were visiting was named Ameru. Yet his son's name was also Ameru. Usually here you find that the child is named after someone that is dead or another relative but not the father if he is still alive. Ameru Sr. explained the name of the son like this, "I named my son Ameru after myself because he was born during the time of the Karamojong cattle raiding attacks and the rebel insurgency so I thought I would die and I wanted him to carry on the name."
The Amerus' family:
No comments:
Post a Comment