Many Saw Parents Slain, Made Miraculous Escapes : Uganda Copes With Most Abundant Crop--Orphans

Ronald Kyeyune’s odyssey started when the soldiers shot his father.

With so many soldiers milling about, “we didn’t even bury him,” Ronald, 15, recalled the other day. “We just ran away.”

That was the last he saw of any of his family, and the first step in a sequence of hairbreadth escapes. There were times when trucks crowded with children were halted by rebel-hunting soldiers who wanted to shoot them all on the spot. There were officers who ordered their execution and sergeants who helped spirit them to safety. There were government camps and relief camps.

After several years, Ronald arrived at the camp here, a placid place of safety where he was given a sewing machine like his father’s. On it he sewed the curtains that decorate the windows.

Thousands of Stories

There are thousands of children in Uganda with stories at least as horrifying as Ronald’s. They saw their parents slain, were chased through the forests, spent months or years being trucked about the countryside in search of shelter.

During the 15 years of Uganda’s civil war, coffee production dropped by two-thirds, cotton exports evaporated, production of manufactured goods ceased. There was only one growth industry: orphans.

The orphans are one of the defining features of Ugandan demography, so important that their care has become the personal cause of the country’s first lady, Janet Museveni.

Week after week she can be heard on radio or seen on television exhorting the women of one village or another to “take care of these orphans.” She is honorary chairwoman of an organization known as UWESO, for Ugandan Women’s Effort to Save the Orphans, which operates out of the president’s office.

Yet saving these children will take more than exhortations. Today the number of orphans is not known, but estimates range from 1 million to 3 million--the latter figure equaling the number of all Ugandan children under the age of 5.

Now, peace has come to most of the country as the reconciliation government of President Yoweri Museveni fights rebel bands only in the north and northeast.

But the machine keeps spewing out orphans--today as a result of an assault on the country by AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome. In the Rakai district, a western region particularly hard-hit by AIDS, as many as 120,000 children have lost both their parents. Uganda is very much a society of children anyway, with roughly half the population of 16 million under the age of 16. So the orphans are a particular burden on communities already hard-pressed to provide children with clothing and food and to pay their school fees.

Growing More Difficult

“It used to be that the extended families would help,” said Joyce R. Mpanga, minister of state for women’s development and the head of UWESO, “but with the economic crisis that is becoming very difficult.”

Most Ugandan families find it close to impossible to provide even for their own offspring. As in many African countries, public schools in Uganda are not free, and primary school fees here run to more than $100 a year. This is a considerable sum in a country where a professional salary might be $20 a month.

Mpanga, a veteran of government service with a no-nonsense air, spends many of her days touring orphanages, collecting donations, and “raising the country’s consciousness,” as she puts it.

“When we first came here there were no windows or doors,” she recalled recently on a visit to the orphanage at Nuluvule, which is a collection of squat concrete houses around a courtyard and adjoining a small farm. In one corner is a white tent designed to house pubescent boys who might otherwise get into trouble with the girls.

She remembers the sight that greeted her and Janet Museveni as they arrived for the first time at Nuluvule.

“They collected the children and marched them past us, 85 of them,” she says. “It was really pathetic.”

In the course of assisting its orphans, Uganda has learned a number of lessons. One is the inadvisability of allowing children to be moved out of their communities and dispersed across the landscape.

During the fiercest fighting in the central Luwero District, where the troops of President Milton Obote unleashed some historic atrocities in search of Museveni’s National Resistance Army, thousands of children were trucked away to remote camps or gathered in Kampala, the capital.

They piled up like spent cartridges in a place known as the Yellow House, an outbuilding on the grounds of Kampala’s Mulago Hospital. At times, more than 1,000 children lived in the Yellow House, eventually to be moved to camps in Jinja or other large towns.

When peace finally came, as long as three years after some of the children had first been moved, the youngest could no longer say where they were from. Even some of the oldest could scarcely retrace their steps.

“The lesson of Luwero,” said Andrew Dunn, an official of the Save the Children Foundation in Kampala, “is that you don’t move a child out of the community unless it’s a matter of life or death.”

The resettlement effort that has followed has been genuinely heroic. There are tales of bush detective work of amazing subtlety.

“Sometimes you can tell by their names their general area,” said Marjorie Kiboka, a social worker assisting Save the Children. Periodically, a couple of Save the Children workers take a group of children out to a district and visit the marketplaces, and by some mysterious process, people seem to identify the children’s tribes, families, villages.

“Someone will say, maybe it’s this person’s relative, or wasn’t your mother so-and-so’s sister,” one worker said. “Gradually it unravels.”

Never-Ending Task

Still, the process of resettling these children often resembles bailing out a rapidly leaking boat.

“Because the orphanages are there, they’re used,” Dunn said. “Despite the fact that the war has moved off to the north of the country, they’re still full. We’ve resettled 400 children but their spaces are already filled.”

In 1961, the year before Uganda attained full independence from Britain, there were six children’s homes in Uganda, according to Save the Children. By 1978 there were 30, and today at least 67.

Aside from the impossibility of caring adequately for children in an institutionalized setting, there are many reasons that agencies would like to see the end of the orphanages.

For one thing, they are alien to the African tradition of caring for children, the ailing and the elderly through the extended family, or even the village at large. “In Ugandan society, it’s not that unusual to be brought up by your mother’s friend, or a relative,” Kiboka said.

Because Uganda has scarcely made the transition to a Western system of social welfare, Dunn said, “the government has no criteria or laws about what’s expected from children’s homes.”

Although social workers say that most are adequate under the circumstances, there have been cases of neglect and manipulation. Orphanages financed by Saudi Arabia instruct the children in Islam, to which only 10% of Ugandans adhere. Also, the Muslim orphanages take only boys. A few orphanages accept aid money for food and clothing and keep the children in squalor. One of these has been shut down by the government following complaints from UWESO.

Yet the economics of children’s relief militate against breaking down the orphanage system.

“Everyone wants to set up homes,” Dunn said. “People have learned that if you have 30 or 40 pathetic-looking children, you can attract finance. Its easier than if you have 30 to 40 children dispersed throughout the countryside.”

Save the Children would prefer to place children in foster homes but, Dunn said, “I just don’t see how you can get into the resettling game in a big way without any money. People are willing to take foster children, but they just don’t have the money for another mouth, clothes, school fees, and so on.”

The orphanages also concentrate children in the cities--23 of Uganda’s 67 orphanages are in Kampala--where social workers fear that urban pressures contribute to a breakdown of the largely agrarian social fabric of the country.

In part for that reason, UWESO in March broke ground for a model farm village at Masulita, a rural community outside Kampala. There, the organization hopes to house 120 orphans in 10 houses of 12 children, each one supervised by a mother.