This is Barlonyo, the village that the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked in 2004, massacring around 300 people. There are a few straw huts and an open field with a headstone, memorializing the atrocity that you have a hard time believing could have happened, under this serenely blue sky.
It’s less remote when you talk to the women here. Their eyes permanently injured in expression, they tell you about how the LRA killed their husbands, how the Uganda army came and buried all the bodies in the latrines, how President Yoweri Museveni later consecrated these graves by implying that Barlonyo had it coming.
You’re relieved that they don’t ask you for anything. Other interviews you’ve conducted, the women ask for seeds, farming materials, agricultural advice. You’ve never even gardened, nor do you have any contacts. You always say that you’ll ask around and then leave, feeling like an interloper.
You meet up with a field officer who works in Barlonyo for an organization founded by the local youth. He shows you his office, his sign-in book for survivors who come in for counseling. You ask him if a lot seek him out, and he says no, most people don’t want to talk. “Still,” you reason, “People have you as a resource.”
Which gives you an idea, because you dragged two heavy cardboard boxes full of booklets, “The Barlonyo Remembrance Book.” The two girls you interned for made these, and asked you to find an organization to give them to. Finally, you’ve found somebody to do it.
You think about that memorial, the plaque that says, “Here lie with the 121 remains of 121 Ugandans Massacred...” That’s lower than the amount that people actually counted, and is emblematic of how lightly the government has treated this whole ordeal. What they need is to know that at the very least, somebody from the outside world acknowledges what has truly happened here.
At the end of the day, when you get back on the motorcycle home, you feel a little better You'll return with something to offer, no matter how little. You won’t be empty-handed.
