Once were night commuting now are…

By Erin Hunt

(post #4 of Looking back into northern Uganda with OA).

We’ve been talking about the changes I saw in northern Uganda between when I first visited in 2006 and when I went as part of OA’s team last spring. One thing that the conflict was known for were the night commuters. During the height of conflict, the Lord’s Resistance Army was abducting children so frequently that many children would walk each night into the major towns to sleep on the street because it was relatively safer than sleeping at home.

Oddly enough this is not something I knew that much about when I first arrived in Gulu in August 2006. I had heard vaguely about night commuters but hadn’t given it a second thought. I noticed that every evening a steady stream of children walked up the road in front of the compound and a lot of covered up people sleeping on the street (it took me a week or so to realize that all the people sleeping on the street were children). I slowly learned that the children were night commuters and there was a shelter for them across the street from where I was living.

Every trip up north after that I was conscious of the children sleeping on the street, in the shelters and everywhere else. Being conscious of that meant I noticed that as the ceasefire took hold and the security situation improved fewer and fewer children were sleeping on the street. By the time I left in 2007, there was only a trickle of night commuters – mainly children who were fleeing violence at home not the possibility of abduction.

Flash forward to this spring. The security situation has improved even more and OA and the Youth Coalition for Peace have selected the field at Laliya Primary School, which is a few minutes north of Gulu Town for rehabilitation. I don’t know if the rest of the OA team realized at that time but they had selected a school where most of the students would have been night commuters. Three years ago they would have been hurrying into town after school to find some shelter and hopefully some safety instead of playing soccer with their friends on a rehabilitated field.

I think that is part of why I love what I do with OA – I’m constantly shown that children, youth and communities are unbelievably resilient.