Pader and Agago Districts

I spent Monday through Wednesday driving around Pader and Agago districts for work with Human Rights Focus (HURIFO). We were delivering bikes to about 15 of HURIFO's 604 human rights volunteers. They use the bikes as transport as they carry out monitoring and reporting on human rights violations. 

We also conducted interviews with district officials and people still living in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. The camps are officially closed, but many remain for various reasons. Some of these reasons include: a lack of water in their home village, a lack of money, materials, and/or labor to construct new huts in their home village, conflicts over land ownership, lack of access to schools and health care in the their home villages, and some of the elderly, widows, and disabled do not have family members to help them financially or physically with the return process.

We woke up the first morning to this view.

People form a line of jerrycans early in the morning to collect water from the tank. This line was just across from where we ate breakfast (I had a rolex (rolled eggs)- chapati and an omelet rolled together).

We spent three days (between 10 and 12 hours) in the pick-up driving hundreds of kilometers on bumpy, dusty roads. We crisscrossed two districts to the north east of Gulu, traveling to the corners of each district.

Storm clouds seem to gather every afternoon.

A lightning storm passed through Pader. I was leaning up against a truck, trying to steady my camera enough to capture the random flashes of lightning. A boda passed through this photo.