KOSHGOMA, UGANDA - All that separates Odong Harrington from his new life is one kilometre, but he may never make it there. Like tens of thousands of Ugandans injured in the two decade-long conflict against the Lord's Resistance Army, Harrington found himself living in a displaced persons camp. The camp is a temporary one for most, but because of his disabilities, it's unlikely Harrington will ever leave.
Speaking to the father of five outside his convenience store in Koshgoma, Uganda, a dusty two-hour drive from the nearest city, I did not immediately see his disability. Because he walks with only a slight limp, the prosthetic leg he wears is not visible under his dusty brown trousers. What you do notice are his glasses. Thick, like Coke bottles, the frames are vaguely reminiscent of a long-past era, and his eyes are barely visible beneath them.
When he lowers the frames to speak, his large brown eyes are cloudy -- milky white in some places. He brings down the frames to tell the story of why they became that way -- the day his entire life changed.
Harrington was happily married with three children when he took a job as a private driver during the civil war in 2000. His homeland, Amuru District in northern Uganda, was among the hardest hit by LRA rebels -- he himself at one time was abducted with hundreds of his fellow villagers near the Sudan border but he managed to escape. His family farm, where he grew cassava and groundnuts and maize, was devastated by the fighting, mostly by the opportunistic soldiers who raided the villagers' homes for crops, money and, more recently, their women and children.
In Pictures: Injured left destitute after war
Harrington, who always prided himself on his hard work ethic, saw an opportunity in driving aid workers through the war-torn area, where traditional mud huts were now crudely painted with black numbers so Western non-profit agencies knew how many food parcels to deliver to the starving citizens. So he took a job driving.
But it was his newfound livelihood that ended up being his downfall. On a routine trip though a forest near his home, his vehicle was attacked. Rebels shot up the car with AK-47s. Harrington was hit three times -- the first bullet striking him in the arm, the second piercing his neck and the last lodging into his foot.
In immense pain, the 23-year-old nearly blacked out but knew he must keep driving or everyone in his vehicle would be killed. And then the unthinkable -- his vehicle drove over a hidden landmine. The bomb blast shattered all the vehicle's windows, the force blowing up his leg, splinters hitting his hands and, lastly, his eyes. His leg, "looking like ribbons," was losing blood by the minute. He lost his sight immediately.
"I was scared," he says, rubbing his hands together. "I knew it was all over. My life...was all over."
A long recovery
In the decade since the accident, Odong Harrington has watched the world around him change dramatically. Refugee camps sprung up in droves around Koshgoma. Once a vibrant farming area, at the height of the civil war 20 large settlement camps were clustered along the red roads, the white SUVs of aid agencies and military vehicles the only traffic in the rural area. His leg was amputated above the knee and he was fitted with a crude prosthetic leg. With a bullet lodged into the instep of his other foot, Harrington, always dependable, found himself unable to work, and was utterly useless to his family and village.
"I had pain for eight years so bad I could barely stand," he says.
Unable to walk, he stopped farming, instead relying on his wife to care for both the children and tend the crops needed to maintain their meager existence. But those days were short lived.
"I couldn't support my children," he tells me. "My wife left and another man took her."
Harrington recalls life in the refugee camp as hard, thankless and humiliating.
"In camps you can't be productive. You are hardly a man. You can't pay for school, for kids, to cultivate crops."
Or for medical care. Any money Harrington made went towards paying for the 20 surgeries he needed to remove the bomb shrapnel from his eyes.
"They have to remove the splinters one by one," he said. "You don't have access to medical care. You are all alone."
Reality
As the majority of aid agencies and healthy people moved out of the northern Ugandan refugee camps and back to their homeland around five years ago, only the sick and disabled remain behind.
Harrington found himself a single father, caring for two children with little to no income, living amongst landmine survivors and disabled people with nowhere to go. A small loan from World Vision Canada allowed him to open a small store, selling things like soap, candy and maize to the remaining villagers.
"I would have been dead without support," he says, adding that he barely ekes out a living selling goods to people he says have also been left despondent by two decades of war.
A short walk from his store, along a dirt path, you can find Harrington's tiny home. Inside the 200-square-foot packed-mud hut are his 13-year-old daughter and his sister. There are also two of her children living here. The doorway is quite low, so the lanky and tall man must always duck before entering, lest he hit his head. There are three wooden chairs inside and a dirty rug on the ground. A tiny sideboard with two pots sits at the far end of the room. A curtain drawn down the centre hides a single bed, where Harrington sleeps, often with two other people. The only light is a kerosene lantern hanging from the centre of the room. The thatch roof leaks, he tells me, and points up to a spot patched with sticks.
Harrington is close to crisis. In two months he must start paying rent to the man who owns the land his hut is on -- 30,000 Ugandan Shillings, or about $15.
What makes the situation so frustrating is that only a kilometre away is a plot of his father's land he could build on. But Harrington's legs will not allow him to climb a ladder, or do the manual labour required to build the home. It is not acceptable for his sisters and children to build a home, so he is forced to stay in this hut -- only one small kilometre from a potential new life but a distance he says feels more like a million miles.
"I just don't know what to do," he says. "What can a man like me do?"
Returning home
In a country with no safety net for the poor, sick or handicapped, the effects of the two-decade Ugandan war will equal a death march for hundreds of thousands of citizens left without the ability to be self-sufficient.
According to a recent census, 838,000 Ugandans identify as having physical or mental disabilities out of 24.2 million people in the country – a total of 3.5 per cent of the population.
The majority of disabled Africans are excluded from schools and opportunities for work, virtually guaranteeing a life sentence of extreme poverty. According to the American government's international development agency USAID, as much as 80 per cent of working age people with disabilities are unemployed. Only one per cent are literate.
Formerly Abducted Persons forced to fight for the LRA and injured in the war, first saddled with the challenges of returning home to communities that may fear them for their involvement with rebel soldiers, must also face limited access to quality health care, education, shelter and food shortages. Many must rely on their family members, already struggling, to help them survive.
Dora
From Koshgoma I travel to the village of Dora in Lalogi. Positioned close to the highway near Sudan, a main trucking route, the village has been hard hit by the insurgency in northern Uganda. Many of its citizens are still in captivity, many others are dead. Everyone here has been touched by the hands of war.
In contrast to Koshgoma's hard sandy ground, Dora is lush, the village made up of around two dozen mud and thatch huts surrounded by tall fields of golden grass and flowers. Its citizens survive primarily through the subsistence farming of corn and sunflowers, though a recent organic honey project has done much to improve their circumstances.
When I enter the village I am greeted by a semi-circle of older men sitting on crude wooden benches in the shade. They go to great lengths to explain to me how, unlike other villages, Dora has welcomed formerly abducted persons home with open arms. The village pays the school fees of more than 30 vulnerable children of the war and also has helped one of their own, Michael Labongo, for almost 11 years since he was almost killed during an insurgent gunfight in the jungle.
Meeting the 26-year-old Labongo, I am first struck by his smile. He walks slowly towards the shade of a tree to speak with me, pausing occasionally to rest the heel of his hand over the middle of his chest. He is visibly tired.
Labongo lifts up the back of his shirt to show me the spot where the bullet ripped through his left shoulder blade and came to rest in between his lungs. He still has trouble breathing. At night, he must sleep on his stomach and he has a constant pain in his chest.
Speaking Luganda through a translator, Michael tells me about his five years fighting as a rebel soldier for the LRA. He was the 90th person abducted from his village. At only 13, he said he knew it was inevitable he was next.
"I felt sad. I knew I was already abducted."
Labongo lived every day in fear during his five years in the jungle. He was forced to abduct other children from neighbouring villages and taught them how to steal and fight -- and kill.
"Within you, you don't want to but you have to. They create fear," he said. "I knew I had to escape."
It was during an escape attempt with other rebels that he was shot. He was running from soldiers that were throwing bombs at them when he was hit several times.
Since returning home in 1999, life has not been easy. With counselling not an option for traumatized soldiers, he began suffered paralyzing nightmares and grappled with depression for the better part of a decade.
"No one can help you," he said. "Not your family, your friends, your elders. It's just you."
While Labongo used to run through the grassy fields for hours to blow off steam, his injury forced him to lie listless for hours, left behind with the women and children while the men worked the farmlands and provided for the village.
He says the accident has shattered his confidence. In a society where your worth and position is defined solely by what you earn, he believes he is a burden to the people around him and is deeply shamed by the support he receives.
"If you don't work you are not productive. You are worthless to your family -- your village."
Doctors say Labongo should not work hard, even ride a bicycle. He's been told even the easiest cardio exercise could cause a shift in the bullet that could puncture his lung and kill him. He says it is unlikely a woman would ever choose to be with him and he doubts he will ever have the chance to be a father.
"In the jungle I was a prisoner," he says. "It is no different now that I am home."
At the end of our interview, Labongo's mother, Auma Angelina, a tiny woman clad in traditional wraps, puts an arm around him as we walk out of the field. She wants to show me the new hut the village is building her for the pair to live in. With her husband killed 15 years ago, she tells me her son is her sole reason for living. But in his eyes, she is the reason he is still here.
"I'm one of the lucky ones," he says. "Without her support I would die."
Darcy Wintonyk travelled to Uganda on a fellowship funded by the Canadian International Development Agency and administered through the Jack Webster Foundation.
