I didn't want to be the first ever patient at the new Health Center at Oberabic (trans. 'Five Mosquitoes') in Amuru District. The focus should be on the community that came together to voice their needs, the Diocese for helping organize and mobilize the idea, and MAP Int'l., based in Georgia, for funding constuction. It was a day of celebration, full of music, dancing, soda, visiting foreigners; it was a day for standing up! All I wanted was to lay down...
Bishop Nelson told the story of his trip here just a few years ago, maybe 2004, to the attendees. The car got them only as far as the site we were at today. To get to the village further up the road, they had to walk with Army escorts a further 5 miles up the road. LRA soldiers were in the village when they arrived, but that night they shared the village, all resting peacefully. This story illustrates just how fresh the reality of conflict is in the collective memory. The health clinic, in a way, is born of that conflict, since it serves the surrounding camps of displaced people. The clinic is a permanent presence to people for whom even the temporary has become permenant. I don't know how the health clinic will fit in to their future given the need to move out of the camps, where sustenance comes from relief, back home, or whatever that once meant to someone.
The back seat of the Toyota LandCruiser is a cramped place, not the second row with doors and leg room, but the cargo area, the very back, with the fold down seats for children, the one you enter through the rear hatch. This, combined with the predictably poor roads, the constant acceleration, braking, pothole dipping, then again accelerating, created some unpleasantly funny tummy feelings. By the time we arrived to the procession, lined with dancers, proud mothers, and soldiers (marching along by coincidence), I was definitely not feeling so hot.
I didn't lose my cookies. I wasn't the first patient of Oberabic, but I couldn't resist the hook line. I did have a wonderful time though. Among the diocesan staff riding with me (in more comfortable seats): Bishop Nelson; the Diocesan Secretary, Rev. David Onyach; Information Officer, Rev. Willy Akena; and a journalist from Gulu, I was just along for the ride. Rev. David was the MC, Bishope Nelson shared special-guest honors with the president of MAP Int'l, and we were treated to traditional Acholi song and dance groups, whose songs celebrated the day and the promise a health clinic within a day's walk would provide to these people.
Bishop Nelson told the story of his trip here just a few years ago, maybe 2004, to the attendees. The car got them only as far as the site we were at today. To get to the village further up the road, they had to walk with Army escorts a further 5 miles up the road. LRA soldiers were in the village when they arrived, but that night they shared the village, all resting peacefully. This story illustrates just how fresh the reality of conflict is in the collective memory. The health clinic, in a way, is born of that conflict, since it serves the surrounding camps of displaced people. The clinic is a permanent presence to people for whom even the temporary has become permenant. I don't know how the health clinic will fit in to their future given the need to move out of the camps, where sustenance comes from relief, back home, or whatever that once meant to someone.
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