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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

Limbo in the North

http://sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/limbo_in_the_north/7301/

Excerpt:

During the war, aid workers and camp residents say, women’s and men’s roles changed dramatically across Northern Uganda. The women of the camp took over all of the family responsibilities. Meanwhile, many men drank away their trauma, shame and wounded pride—and cases of rape and domestic violence skyrocketed.

Today, aid workers and camp residents say, it’s still a huge problem. During last summer’s visit to Acet camp, Louisa Seferis, AVSI’s program director, planned to meet Odek Subcounty’s local counselor. She had to cut the meeting short—because he was drunk.

Ana Apio, 25, a stunning young woman with high cheekbones and smooth skin who has spent most of her life in a wheelchair fashioned out of bike tires and scrap metal, has lived in Acet since she was 9 and has resigned herself to staying there. Her boyfriend abandoned her before she gave birth, and now she raises her child alone.

Perhaps, she mused one day under the meager shade of a hut in Acet, she is better off without a man. Rather than help out with the family chores, she said, the men in Acet have made a habit of beating their wives.

“Very few men are good or responsible here,” she said. “Most are violent. Most men go drink and come home and beat their wives.”

“Even though the women do the digging, the men will take the harvest and go sell it,” she added. “They don’t care.”
Franca Bella, a counselor for Caritas’ psychosocial support program, said cultural prejudices, combined with the hardships of camp life, lie at the root of the domestic violence. “Women are the ones who are supposed to take care of the children, look for food and do everything,” she said. “It is a big problem, and drinking compounds the problem.”

The IDP camps were supposed to be temporary, but the war dragged on, the years passed and the people still couldn’t go home. Today, there is no indication that many ever will.