Looking for People Behind the Headlines

With partner organization Carita Pader, UUSC is helping people from ten villages in northern Uganda return home and rebuild after a brutal 19-year war.

When armed men came at night to Mary's Nairobi neighborhood in January 2008, during Kenya's post-election violence, she grabbed her four children and ran out the back of her house.

She ended up in a camp in Nairobi, but the violence around the camp terrified her children. Relief workers told her she could get bus transport to Western Province, where many of Mary's ethnic group, the Luhya, live. With the violence at its height, Mary decided that it might be safer there, particularly since her grand aunt was living in a small village in the province, so she got on that bus.

Mary and the others were left on the fairgrounds of the city of Kakamega, with almost no shelter and little food. Volunteers sent her to her great aunt's village, where people welcomed her as well as they could, but had almost nothing to share with her.

At first she was just glad to be safe, but as the violence calmed throughout Kenya, she realized that she was far from home, without a house or a livelihood, and that leaving the camp had placed her out of the reach of aid workers. The villagers tried to help her, but there was little to spare.

Polycap Keta, of UUSC partner Kakamega Grassroots Initiative, found Mary looking after two of her children who had caught malaria because the family could not afford a mosquito net.

Keta found her because he was searching for her. Every week, Keta gets on his motorbike and visits villages around and beyond Kakamega, talking with village chiefs and elders to find the invisible displaced, those who left camps and fell off relief lists.

Kakamega Grassroots Initiative identifies displaced people living in the area, organizes them in a group, and provides them with training and small loans. With its help, Mary and 19 other displaced women have completed a poultry course, secured a loan in November 2008, and worked to fatten chickens to sell during the Christmas season. Mary can now buy medicine for her children. Even more important, she says, is the feeling that she is no longer invisible, that someone has recognized what she has suffered and lost.

Mary's experience is not unlike those of other people who have lost everything. As a man in a refugee camp in Thailand explained to a UUSC staff person, "Before the war, I had studied, I owned a shop, I was seen as a member of our community. Now I am just seen as a refugee, someone with their hand out. This war has erased who I was."

If you have not experienced war or violence, felt it in your body and bones, it is hard to understand how it devastates one's life, how deep is the chasm of experience between a person and a war-displaced person.

There are currently 6 major wars going on in the world and 22 smaller conflicts. Mainstream news media cover only a handful of these conflicts; but behind the scenes, in 38 countries, people are dying, orphaned children are trying to survive, women are struggling to protect their families, and millions of people are trying to find hope and meaning while living in refugee camps.

UUSC's Rights in Humanitarian Crises short-term disaster response program responds to natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, focusing on groups that are being left out of relief and recovery efforts.

UUSC's long-term program looks at whole conflicts, and marginalized groups in a conflict, that are invisible to the public eye — and to the private consciousness.

Over the past year and a half, UUSC has built a long-term program for people in forgotten conflicts. UUSC is helping people from ten villages in northern Uganda to go back home and rebuild after a brutal 19-year war. UUSC is working with partners in Kenya to identify and help some of the hundreds of thousands of invisible displaced. And it is reaching out to displaced and war-affected communities in northern Myanmar, particularly girls and women, whose safety is further threatened by rape and human trafficking.

It is difficult and challenging to work with people in invisible conflicts, but at UUSC, it is understood that what would be far more morally challenging is not to shine the light of recognition and solidarity on them.