They came to the United States to tell people about the pain they have suffered, the trauma they have experienced, the friends, families and opportunities they have lost in northern Uganda. Five teenagers from that desolate region arrived in New York on September 8, looking forward to a two-week stay in which they would attempt to raise awareness of their plight among government officials and private citizens. They could also anticipate enjoying a brief respite from their difficult daily lives, with Broadway musicals and baseball games instead of refugee camps and vicious rebels.

Three days after the kids arrived, the World Trade Center towers came tumbling down and brought their plans down with them.

The Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, which sponsored four of the kids’ travel (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sponsored the fifth), was faced with a difficult decision. All of the nation’s attention was fixated on the terrorist attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon which claimed thousands of lives, and not on a war and humanitarian crisis on the other side of the globe which had devastated millions.

The children had been flown in to help launch a report by the Commission on the status of adolescents in northern Uganda on September 18. That day was chosen to coincide with the eve of the UN Special Session on Children, a second-time-ever, three-day meeting of thousands from around the world, including 75 heads of state. Now that meeting had to be scrapped, postponed for at least months, maybe a year, because many people did not want to fly into New York and because New York could not provide the requisite security for all the expected visiting dignitaries. Too many cops were needed at Ground Zero.

Jane Lowicki, Senior Coordinator of the Children and Adolescents Project at the Commission, realized all this, but she also knew that bringing the teenagers and their adult chaperone to the U.S. had cost a lot of money and probably could not happen again. This was a unique opportunity. She also knew the report, "Against All Odds: Surviving the War On Adolescents," had taken months for her, other adults, and dozens of Northern Ugandan adolescent researchers to compile, and that the report was ready for the scheduled launch. "We weren’t sure how receptive audiences would be because they would be so preoccupied," Lowicki acknowledged.

But she went ahead, despite misgivings, because this visit was really the only chance the adolescents would have to tell their story alongside the more general story chronicled in the 87-page report. Despite the terrorist attacks and New York’s subsequent near-standstill state, the children were able to attend a number of meetings. They launched the report at New York University; briefed NGOs; visited Canada’s mission to the UN; met with UNICEF staff and Olara Otunnu, who is Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict; and were interviewed by members of the media (meetings scheduled in Washington, DC were cancelled). And when given a chance, the five children told stories of great tragedy and power, speaking with eloquence.

Listening to Children

The value of listening to adolescents speak about their lives is the premise behind the Women’s Commision’s novel methodology used in this report. Previous studies have detailed the problems in northern Uganda brought on by 15 years of civil war, halted economic development, disease, and corrupt government practices. But this study is the first of the region to enlist adolescent volunteers to aid in the research. It is the second in a series of four such studies conducted by the Commission. The first was in Kosovo, the third will be in Sierra Leone, and the fourth will be in an Asian country to be determined. "The studies will provide a comparative look at the experiences of adolescents affected by war and persecution and the international and local responses to their situation," according to the report. The results of the studies are to be used for advocacy and decision-making in the regions and globally.

Fifty-four Ugandan and Sudanese adolescents from Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader districts led the research, conducted this May-July, filling up notebooks with thousands of interviews with adolescents. Eighteen adults worked with the adolescents, taking care to let the children take the lead. Lowicki and Allison A. Pillsbury, Project Manger of the Children and Adolescents Project, facilitated the work.

The overall numbers in northern Uganda are staggering: more than half a million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in camps. More than 200,000 Sudanese refugees living in camps in Uganda, many of them in the north. More than 11,000 Ugandan and Sudanese adolescents abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the last 15 years. More than 300,000 Ugandan children in IDP camps; the vast majority are currently out of school because of LRA activities.

International donor money targeted to the region has totaled US$100 million between 1996 and 2000, according to the report. This is a small percentage of the more than US$1 billion in total aid and loans given to the Ugandan government last year alone. Local corruption and donors’ tendency to avoid insecure regions has led to the insufficiency of funds.

Amid the widespread misery, adolescents in northern Uganda, and indeed in many war-torn regions, face a unique set of obstacles. "They have to deal with sexual abuse, missing out on school, and lots of responsibilities," Lowicki said. At the same time, humanitarian responses for younger children are much more standardized.

Uganda has pledged to provide free primary education to up to two boys and two girls in each family, but no such program exist for secondary-school students. So Edward Ojiok, 17, who lives in the Achol Pii refugee camp in Pader, had to leave Kitgum Secondary School after studying there last year.

Ojiok was in nursery school in Torit District, Sudan, when the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) captured the district. Ojiok fled in one direction with his brothers; his parents fled the other way. He hasn’t seen them since. After arriving in northern Uganda in 1994, he enrolled in P-3. In 1999, he completed P-7 as the top student in Kitgum district. However, he says the Ugandan government did not pay for his secondary-school fees, as it normally does for the top five primary-school graduates in each district, because he is a Sudanese refugee. An expatriate helped pay for Ojiok’s first year at Kitgum SS; now the expat is gone, and so is Ojiok’s schooling.

Ojiok had hoped to become a doctor someday. "I can go back to school, I can sit for any exam, I am sure I can do it," he said. "The problem is to pay."

All the children were encouraged by the meetings they attended in New York, and the positive response they got from the adults who, through the money they control, can shape the future of northern Uganda. But Ojiok found one thing about the meetings disquieting: many who were considering giving money to ease the humanitarian crisis in the region said they would donate to the government of Uganda, the same government that refused to pay for his schooling.

Corruption is also a concern when donors consider giving to Uganda; Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index rated Uganda the third-most corrupt in the world this year.

Sudanese refugees are strangers in a strange and sometimes unfriendly land, but they enjoy certain privileges the Ugandan IDPs do not. UNHCR coordinates all relief efforts for refugees around the world, but the agency’s mandate does not cover IDPs, and so a jumble of organizations help -- or don’t. According to the report, the percentage of primary-school-aged children registered in school is 93 in all of Uganda, 77 in Achol Pii, Ojiok’s home, but less than 30 in the IDP camps.

To Samuel Alimadi Otema, 16, of Gulu town, schooling was a secondary concern. The LRA abducted Otema in his sleep in 1998, and he was forced to fight the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) for two years before escaping from the rebels in 2000. He is now an articulate young man, who on a recent day sat in the Women’s Commission office in a New York Mets baseball jersey and calmly stated that the UPDF is not doing enough. "These people are not doing anything at all," he said. "Almost all the camps are not being protected."

His observations were echoed by the Commission’s report, which described "little vigilant or even visible presence of the UPDF around the periphery of the camps." Fear of murder or the LRA is the top concern cited by adolescents, but distrust of the UPDF also runs high. The researchers found that some UPDF soldiers have restricted people’s movement, raped adolescent girls, or even executed boys of military age who have fled from questioning.

The halt to economic development in the north because of deaths and confinement to IDP camps has devastated the region as much as any other effect of the war. Betty Akello Openy, 17, of Gulu town, had to leave school while in S-6 because her sickly mother had an operation on a swollen leg and now she can not earn money. She used to make lujutu, a local brew. "Also my father was abducted, and when he came back he was very weak," Openy said. "He couldn’t do much for us. There is no job for him now." Openy is the youngest of eight children.

She expresses disappointment in the Amnesty Act, which Parliament enacted at the end of 1999 to encourage rebels to surrender. "If that thing was effective, by now we would expect more people back home, and not doing more atrocities to the community," Openy said.

Christine Lamunu, 16, of Kitgum town also had to leave school this year. She was enrolled in a boarding school, S-2 level, when her mother died of AIDS in March. Her father succumbed to the same disease in 1996. Now Lamunu is living in the center of town and brewing arege, a local brew made of cassava and millet. It helps her earn a little money. "It is not enough, but we can bear the situation, because we have no where to get money at all," Lamunu said. If she could afford to return to school, Lamunu would study math and physics and become an accountant or an electrician.

HIV/AIDS has devastated all of Uganda, but northern Uganda, with its overcrowded camps and inadequate health facilities, has been hardest hit in recent years. In addition, as children are kept from school and parents from working, social controls that may previously have prevented promiscuity have broken down.

Joska Atto, 13, of Achol Pii camp, is in her last year of primary school. She fled southern Sudan in 1994, a year after her father was killed. Her mother was supporting Atto and her three brothers by brewing alcohol. Then the LRA raided the camp in 1996 and killed over 100 people, including Atto’s mother. That same year, one of her brothers was returning from Kitgum SS for a holiday when he was killed in an LRA ambush.

Atto would like to continue her studies, maybe someday to become an accountant. But she knows she lacks the money to attend secondary school.

What now?

The children’s stories make vivid the problems facing adolescents in northern Uganda and the failures of governments and institutions described in the report. And that is the very reason the Women’s Commission paid for the children, selected from among the researchers by their peers, to come to New York. As they met with busy diplomats and UN leaders, some of whom don’t have the time to read 87-page reports, they told stories that may lodge in decisionmakers’ minds when important decisions need to be made after the adolescents flew home Sunday, September 23.

The question now is: what next? The children all felt the visit was a success, however unlikely that may have seemed amid the confusion of September 11. But other children from northern Uganda have told their stories, other reports have detailed the blight on the region. And yet is difficult to say that the situation in the region has improved much in the 15 years since Yoweri Museveni became president of Uganda.

The Women’s Commission report ends with a five-page list of recommendations to the Ugandan and Sudanese governments, the UN, the international community, the LRA, the SPLA, and adolescents. The list calls for peace in northern Uganda, the release of abducted children, improved security, the disbanding of the IDP camps, and many other long-sought, long-elusive goals.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 may have damaged the adolescents’ project more deeply than the cancellation of a few meetings. With the U.S. and most of the world focused on the approaching war on terrorism, donor countries’ attention and aid to Africa may diminish.

"It’s a worry in the sense that all of us have to be really vigilant in making sure the things we all built don’t come to a halt," Lowicki said. "It makes the hard work even harder, with a lot of distractions."

Still, Lowicki believes the adolescent researchers have made, and can continue to make, a difference. "The kids need to form more relationships with people who are decisionmakers so they have people to talk to about the issue," she said. This was an important goal of their visit. She added, "The kids in general in northern Uganda have not had much access to decision-making processes locally, nationally, or internationally.

"Hopefully they will be able to get involved in how projects are designed and implemented. This is the first step in a process that can lead to other things."

Joska Atto, just 13, is committed to continuing that process. On one of her last nights in New York -- which remained a refuge from the reality facing her at home, despite the World Trade Center collapse -- Atto spoke to this reporter for almost an hour about her terrible past, her doubts, and yet her enduring hope for the future. "Our family has broken now, I am still at a lower level, and I cannot suggest anything," she said. "Maybe if god helps me, I have to rebuild it, so that it will renew as a new family. And also the nation in the future."