Father of Eight Finds Dignity and Hope Through Employment with IMC

By Jennifer Naiboka

Kampala, Uganda—Tony Oyat had a simple, peaceful existence as a peasant farmer in Northern Uganda before the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked his village in October 1998. “My life in Lagile village was happy,” he says. “I earned money by growing cotton to sell at the market, and I was able to feed my family with the ground nuts and cereal grains that I grew on my land.”

PHOTO: IMC Tony Oyat trimming the hedge around the guest house in Kampala. Finding employment is difficult for Uganda’s large displaced population, so Tony considers himself fortunate.

After the LRA invasion, however, providing for his family became a source of worry for Tony. He and his wife and children fled to a camp for internally displaced people, as did almost 270,000 other Ugandans seeking refuge from the LRA. With so many people clamoring for food at the camp, there often wasn’t enough to go around. Meanwhile, Tony suddenly had additional family members to care for: his brother was killed in the LRA attack, so Tony took in his three orphaned children.

In 2005, after seven years of anxiety over his family’s welfare, Tony joined International Medical Corps as a day guard for the guest house where IMC staff live in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. IMC makes it a practice to hire as many local people as possible in the countries where it works. Not only does it offer vulnerable people emerging from a war or natural disaster an opportunity to make a living, it also provides them with training so they develop a skill set that can be transferred to future jobs. “It is difficult to be living in the city, away from my wife and children,” says Tony, “but all the jobs are in Kampala, and I had to earn some money so I could sustain my big family.”

Although Tony is sometimes requested to perform duties that weren’t originally included in his job description—such as sweeping the courtyard of the compound and trimming the hedges—he says he enjoys all the work he does for IMC. “I feel lucky to be able to earn a living through this job.”

If the tentative peace that was established a year ago in Uganda continues to hold, Tony and his family will soon be reunited. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, for crimes against humanity, and the displaced are preparing to go home. Even though many people have begun to return to their villages, as the displaced population begins to reassemble their broken lives, the need for IMC programs that relieve suffering will persist—programs such as emergency nutrition, community-based nutritional therapy, reproductive health care, malaria control, and home-based health care for children.

PHOTO: IMC IMC relieves suffering at IDP camps in northern Uganda through a range of programs, which include emergency nutrition, reproductive health care, malaria control, and child psychosocial development. Here, Dr. Lynne Jones, IMC’s technical adviser on mental health, on a visit to one of the camps where she is developing a program that aims to improve mother-child interaction.

“I wish all that was involved in repatriation was carrying bags and getting home,” says Tony. “But the fact is, I don’t have a house, it was razed by the LRA; and I don’t have enough money or materials to build a new house.” Then, too, he fears that the notoriously volatile Kony might take out his anger at the International Criminal Court on Ugandan civilians.

“Even if peace talks are successful, unless the ICC withdraws the charges against Kony, we fear he will come back to Uganda and attack us,” says Tony. Despite the threat of violence, Tony insists that he would rather risk returning to his village than to have his family living in a camp in uncomfortable conditions. “I feel badly about the way things are now,” he says. “I used to be a happy farmer living with my family in my own home, and now my wife and children are living in a crowded camp.”

Tony also frets that his children—all of the young generation, in fact--are missing out on Ugandan culture because they’re being raised in an IDP camp. “My eldest son is 14 years old, but he has never held a hoe,” says Tony. “All he knows is that people line up for food. He doesn’t know that people work to earn a living. Yet if he were growing up back in the village, by this time he would be cultivating his own cotton garden.”

He worries about other things, too: that young people returning to their villages from the camps will find farming life too difficult, and that they’ll be lured away by the relative excitement of being a soldier in the LRA. But most of all he wonders how Ugandans will recuperate from the psychic trauma brought on by years of violence and death. “I would like people to forgive each other and put the past behind them,” he says. “But some children are total orphans and have no kinsman left. How will they come to terms with that?”