Nightmares spoil the dreams of returnees

The nightmares have begun again for Viola Lakwac. Ever since she left a camp for displaced people to move closer to her land in northern Uganda, she has found her sleep haunted by memories of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“I have these dreams and I always find a light flickering on my eyes and then someone comes and sets light to my hut and if I try and get up I can’t - I’m powerless,” she says, sitting in the shade of the trees near her new hut at Paibona, a resettlement site in eastern Gulu district. “This never happened in the camp.”

The 67-year-old is not alone in her distress. As more people start moving back to their villages from the camps, there are increasing reports of hallucinations, depression and psycho-social difficulties.  

Return to the homestead – the light at the end of this dark period of Ugandan history – may not be the panacea so many had hoped. Some mental health professionals say they fear an increase in psychological trauma as painful memories are stirred up when people return to the site of atrocities deep in the bush without proper help.

Those now housed in Paibona started moving from Awach camp in the first half of 2007. While not yet home, the new village is far more spacious than the old camp. Their farmlands are not far away and villagers are no longer reliant on food aid.

But Paibona has its own troubles. Many newcomers say they are plagued by ghosts and hallucinations. Some have even returned to Awach. “It’s very difficult to stay here,” confides Lakwac, talking about her flashbacks to the LRA attack on her home nearby. “During those days they would come at night, killing and torturing people.  They would burn the huts - they burnt my hut but thank God I managed to run. But my child died there.

“I remember the bright flames and they come back to me in my sleep.”

Sometimes Lakwac visits what’s left of her old house, 4km away, and the memories come flooding back. “I felt so sick and feverish.”

There is a mass grave in the area, which makes her even more reluctant to return home as a widow. “I’ll go back if other people do but not on my own - I’d really prefer to stay here.”

She is surrounded by friends: “We talk about our problems freely. I think the majority of people here have problems with it because we all have memories of this war. This has become our sickness,” she says to nods of agreement.

Not quite home

Paibona is far from unique in northern Uganda. People are leaving over-crowded camps and heading back to their original parishes but in the absence of a final peace agreement between the government and the LRA, most are staying in “resettlement sites” – smaller, more spacious camps from where they can access their land.

People are back in the fields, tilling the soil, and in so doing, peeling back the layers of this brutal conflict, disturbing bones, bodies and memories.

Thomas Oyok, chief clinical psychiatrist at Gulu General Hospital, says he fears he has only seen the tip of the iceberg because so many traumatised returnees are beyond the reach of institutions such as his. “We are getting more and more post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and depression. Suicide is on the increase with people going home. But we are not quite sure why this is the case.”

He thinks isolation may be a factor. “When they are together they try to support each other but on their own there is fear - and PTSD is very much related to fear and emotions. That fear comes back and you again recall the things that happened when you were forced to leave your homestead.”

Oyok says that while a return home is welcome for most people it is nonetheless a disruption which can trigger “adjustment disorders”. “There has been a great deal of family dislocation,” Oyok says. “When you go home you find your relatives no longer there.”

Loneliness and isolation

The loneliness of the fields is what eats at Patrick Acelam, 30. He has been in Paibona for three months. “In the camp there were many people together but here I can be alone for a long time and that is when the ghosts come to attack me.” His ghosts are the people he killed during the war.

The memories that haunt former soldiers the most are of friends or family they were forced to betray: the neighbour they toiled alongside in the fields; the boy they played under the mango tree; or the girl they chatted up collecting water.

Acelam remembers how he was forced to kill one of his closest friends in the LRA – a man with whom he shared his food. “He was tied to a tree and beaten with a stick until he died. In the daytime I can just get a vision of him coming back to kill me.

“At night my wife tells me I talk to myself and start crying. When I was in the main camp it didn’t disturb me. But here it can disturb me anywhere even when I’m digging in the field.

“It always happens when I’m alone but sometimes I find it happens when my eyes start closing and I have to go somewhere else.”

Bosco Oyo has similar flashbacks from his three years in the bush. He talks of the friend he was abducted with, who he then tied to a stake and beat to death. “He calls out my name. I went to rehabilitation but each time he comes back to me and the others come back and I wake up screaming.”

For Oyo, the quieter life of the resettlement site has brought some respite. The soldiers are not around any more to trigger memories of the firefights in the bush; there is less noise; but he worries about going home.

“Here I have friends and they keep me well. But I was abducted from near my home and if I went back there on my own the memories would come back. I can go back some time but I’m not ready yet.”

Ben Porter, technical adviser on psycho-social support to the Concerned Parents’ Association, a local NGO set up by parents of abducted children, says mental health facilities in the north cannot begin to meet the needs of those now readying to return there, estimated to number more than a million.

“There are no formal training institutions in the north right now [dealing with psycho-social support]. We have only two counsellors in the north with Master's degrees in counselling,” he says, arguing that returned rebels need their “minds disarmed” as well as their weapons.

“For 95 percent, being given a hoe and school fees will be enough,” he says. “But there is the 5 percent who are really struggling - who use their pangas against their neighbours rather than cutting their grass.”

Porter is training local volunteers from parent support groups in several basic support methods from counselling to traditional healing and is putting together a regional group to see how psycho-social support can be made to work better in the north.

Oyok insists that sometimes drug treatment will be necessary but says with so many people affected and unable to access formal healthcare, any policy solution must involve “trans-cultural psycho-social organisations, opinion leaders and community workers”.

He says some of the increase in depression may be caused not only by war experiences but by the inability to adjust to new circumstances and live up to the cultural expectations of responsibility. “People have developed a dependency in the camps and now some can’t manage on their own,” he says. “There are 24-year-olds who haven’t ever held a hoe – there are expectations that some will find difficult to live up to.”

Bad spirits?

Oyo is clear about what causes his flashbacks: “I don’t think this is supernatural,” he says. “This is a mental problem. And I think most people here understand that.”

Most people might. But ask the villagers of Paibona what needs to be done to remedy the situation and top of the list is ritual cleansing. “This is part of our culture and it works,” says Anthony Opwa, whose brother went through the process after killing friends in the LRA. “He did the cleansing and he was fine, he went back to the school and became a good man.”

In Acholi cultures, cleansing is called for after the commission of a crime or contact with the dead, whose “cen” or spirit is said to haunt.

But a cleansing ceremony can only be performed if a body can be identified and relatives contacted. Paibona villagers say that fear of finding untraceable bodies in the bush is keeping people from returning to some areas where it is known that many people were killed.

Thirty-year-old Samuel Oketa tells of how he has seen his younger brother suffer from symptoms very similar to PTSD since returning from the bush, becoming increasingly isolated and troubled. But he puts the difficulties down not to the killings he committed but to the unknown remains he found before he was abducted.

“He can start fighting for no reason or he can just be sitting there and start crying. Now he has turned to drink, which only makes his problem worse. It’s getting worse here in the village because there aren’t many people so he is becoming more isolated - he stays alone and he isn’t speaking to anyone. 

“When a ritual has to be done the relatives of the deceased must be known. But the bodies he found were of rebels killed during an ambush - the bones are still there. We need to do a ritual cleansing for the bush. We would give him raw intestines to eat but we need to know whose body it is first.”

For Opwa, it is the cultural leaders who have to take a lead: “The most important thing is for the Rwots [tradional leaders] to come together and organise rituals for these people.”

ed/mw/am