Face to Face With the Ugandan Crisis

March 7, 2006 — -- As the focus of world leaders at the Group of Eight meeting, the Live 8 worldwide series of rock concerts and President Bush's Africa initiative, 2005 was the year that the world's spotlight shone on Africa. The attention was welcomed by relief workers such as Joyce LeMelle, the Save the Children U.S. field director in Uganda.

LeMelle deals every day with the humanitarian disasters caused by war, the AIDS pandemic and extreme poverty that all aid organizations face in their work on the continent.

"You are dealing with people who are really very poor. We're working to try to alleviate poverty and so sometimes that can be kind of painful but it also makes you realize how much work needs to get done," LeMelle said.

A relatively young and tentative democracy, Uganda emerged from the violent dictatorship of Idi Amin and the devastation of civil war during the 1970s and 1980s.

The brutality, however, has not stopped. The ongoing conflict in the north of the country between the fundamentalist Christian Lord's Resistance Army and the civilian population has displaced more than 1.6 million people and left a multitude of massacres and mutilations in its wake.

Away from the horrors of the north, other problems continue to threaten the country. More than 1.5 million people in Uganda are HIV positive, with the virus affecting mostly those adults between the ages of 20 and 49 -- in other words, the most productive members of Ugandan society. Along with the economic devastation caused by HIV-AIDS, the virus has left 1.7 million orphans in its wake and continues to remain a serious threat to the population as extended families and communities strain to cope with the fallout.

Among the various nongovernmental organizations with a presence in the country, Save the Children U.S. has worked with disadvantaged communities in the Nakasongola district since 1999. Nakasongola has a population of approximately 126,000 people, around half of whom are under the age of 15. The organization's development work has focused on aiding the communities by providing food and health, security and learning opportunities for both children and adults.